Tag Archive: LavScam

#LavScam lesson

— 04.11.2019 06:43 AM

I teach crisis communications to lawyers-to-be at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law, my alma mater.

My students, as always, are terrific. And, for the whole term, we’ve been focussing on just one topic: LavScam.

It makes sense. LavScam is the perfect fusion of a communications crisis and the law. It has all the requisite elements. Possible obstruction of justice, possible breach of trust – and, indisputably, a raging dumpster fire of a comms crisis.

In every class, we’ve analyzed the latest LavScam controversies. We’ve watched, and re-watched, Justin Trudeau’s now-infamous press conference. “Why didn’t he apologize?” asked several of my students, bewildered. (Good question.)

We analyzed Jody Wilson-Raybould’s evidence as she testified at the clown show that masquerades as a Justice Committee. “She should be Prime Minister,” several of my students said of her, with something approaching reverence. (Agreed.)

We developed communication strategies, early on, to extricate the Liberal Party from the ethical quagmire that – pollsters say – is rendering them a one-term government.

Those strategies, with minor variations, all involved sincere and public apologies to Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott; an admission that SNC-Lavalin is not, and never was, entitled to a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA); a dismissal of every staff person who was attempting to pervert the course of justice; and – as Jean Chretien did in the sponsorship scandal – calling in the RCMP to investigate.

Like I say: I have smart students.

Now, Professor Kinsella is writing this before the final class of the term, which was on Friday. At that one, we will almost certainly discuss the big news of the week – which, as the civilized world knows, was Justin Trudeau’s corrupt, cowardly, craven decision to expel Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus. Because, you know, they objected when Trudeau and his senior staff tried to interfere in a criminal case to help out a donor.

Still in Trudeau’s caucus, however, is Kent Hehr – the Calgary Liberal MP who was found guilty of sexually harassing women. I don’t know if one of my students will raise that unequal application of justice, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s an interesting legal distinction, after all: two women who gave up everything to uphold the Rule of Law, and who were defamed, demeaned and destroyed for their efforts.

And, a man who sexually harassed two other women, kept in the family. Kept as a Liberal candidate.

“Not the actions of a feminist,” one of my students might say. And they’d be right, of course.

Also newsworthy, at that final class of Law 599: Gerald Butts’ saturnalian decision to submit text messages and emails and notes to the aforementioned clown show.

A January conversation between Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould, provided by Butts as a verbatim transcript, stood out.

Wilson-Raybould: “I love being Minister of Justice and Attorney General. I’m not going to lie. Indigenous Services is not my dream job. I’m not going to lie about that.”

Trudeau: “I know it is not your dream job, but it is core to this government, to maintain a legacy. And, to be crass about it, our political legacy.”

Wilson-Raybould: “I feel I’m being shifted out of Justice for other reasons.”

Trudeau: “We would not be doing this if it weren’t for Scott [Brison]’s decision.”

Wilson-Raybould: “I don’t agree. This is not how we change peoples lives.”

Trudeau: “After an election, everything is fresh again.”

Now, my students, who are exceptionally bright, will likely know that Gerald Butts and Justin Trudeau made three critical errors in submitting that transcript.

One, it’s a transcript. Unless Gerald Butts has enhanced shorthand skills no one knew about, it is highly likely that someone taped that conversation. Which, as any sharp-eyed law student will know, is the very pretext Trudeau used to expel Wilson-Raybould from the Liberal caucus: a secret taping.

Two, Wilson-Raybould was not aware Butts was listening in. That’s not breaking a law, per se, but it’s certainly not ethical sunny ways, either.

Thirdly – and most ominously, because my students all know who Marie Heinen is – Gerald Butts submitted many notes. When, in the pre-trial manoeuvrings in the trial Heinen’s client, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, PMO and PCO solemnly swore that those sorts of notes simply don’t exist. Uh-oh.

If Messrs. Trudeau and Butts don’t think Canada’s best criminal lawyer didn’t spot that error, they’re dumber than dirt found at an SNC-Lavalin job site. She did. And she will be cross-examining them about it starting in August, mere weeks before the election is scheduled to kick off.

There’s a lot more of that sort of thing, but you get the point. In the final minutes of my final lecture, I therefore intend to tell my amazing students this: “In your future legal practice, remember what Justin Trudeau’s party did in LavScam in the year 2019,” I’ll say. “And, if you want to win, always just do this:

“The opposite.”


Comments (23)

Five things about Scheer’s #LavScam press conference today

— 04.07.2019 01:00 PM

1. He looked and sounded Prime Ministerial. Moreover, most Canadians want Trudeau gone; the election is therefore now a referendum on whether Andrew Scheer is up to the job.  Moments like these suggest he is.

2. Justin Trudeau is clearly attempting to libel chill any public discussion of Lavscam.  It won’t work.  With this SLAPP suit, the Liberal leader looks scared.

3. Trudeau has given Scheer an opportunity to re-state, and re-affirm, the criticisms that pretty much everyone has: namely, that Trudeau and his senior staff pushed for a sweetheart deal for a sleazy donor to the Liberal Party. In my opinion, they broke the law. I dare them to sue me, too.

4. Scheer’s press conference also reminds Canadians that Lavscam is about something else that is important: Justin Trudeau brutalized three amazing and accomplished women, two of whom are minorities, simply because they were whistleblowers.  He claimed to be a feminist; he claimed to be ethical; he claimed he would reconcile with indigenous people.  The principled actions of Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott and Celina Caesar-Chavannes have shown everyone what Justin Trudeau really is, which is a hypocrite and a fucking liar.

5. Julian Porter should stick to writing coffee table books about art and wine.


Comments (75)

Your #LavScam weekly roundup (and this is just a sample of a few papers, folks)

— 04.06.2019 08:51 AM

  • Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “THE LIBERALS HAVE ABANDONED THEIR MORAL PRINCIPLES…and it’s Justin Trudeau’s fault…It is dismaying to me, a political agnostic, that thuggery is now attached to the federal Liberal party. It is appalling to me, a feminist, that so many who claim to respect women, who call themselves feminists — most especially the piously feminist prime minister but all his acolytes in the partisan media — have turned themselves inside-out to rationalize the bullying of female Liberal ministers. Because, readily admitted even, the existential threat of Andrew Scheer at 24 Sussex Drive looms as such a calamity, come the October election, that anything, anything, would be preferable, up to and including the abandonment of all moral principles.”
  • Andrew Coyne, National Post: “It’s hard to see what is accomplished by this latest bout of thuggery — not only expelling Wilson-Raybould and Philpott, but revoking their nominations. It seems to be motivated by little more than sheer delight in retribution: vindictiveness for vindictiveness’s sake. And yet they are not one whit diminished by it; only the prime minister is. “
  •  Christie Blatchford, National Post: “They’re thugs — the senior people in the office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the clerk of the privy council and the nation’s top bureaucrat, the people in the office of Finance Minister Bill Morneau — or so close as to be indistinguishable from them. I refer to their collective behaviour around the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio, in particular their relentless effort to strong-arm the deposed attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould…The day after Justin Trudeau pointed to her ongoing presence in cabinet as evidence that should allay any concerns about the propriety of government conduct in relation to SNC and said her presence “spoke for itself,” she quit. “I trust my resignation also speaks for itself,” she said. What a pistol she is.”
  • Andrew Coyne, National Post: “[Liberal MPs] knew what kind of party they wanted to be a part of from the moment they accepted their nominations; indeed, were they not the type of person that party attracts they would not have been recruited for it. It is the kind of party, and person, that unquestioningly puts loyalty to party before principle — and mercilessly punishes those who do not…What has agitated Liberal MPs is not the former attorney general’s recording of a conversation she correctly anticipated would be improper and could have guessed would be denied, or her failure to alert the prime minister at whose behest it had taken place (and who could not fail to have been informed of its contents), but rather that she has contradicted and embarrassed the leader. Or rather no: I suspect what truly outrages them is the sight of a person of conscience, unwilling to sacrifice her principles so readily on the altar of partisanship. For those who can still remember what that was like, it must be deeply shaming. For the rest, there is only one principle — blind loyalty to the leader — in which cause they are prepared to sacrifice any number of colleagues.”
  • Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail: “Mr. Trudeau, owing to his own inattention to details and sheer arrogance, has created a royal mess. By ousting Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Ms. Philpott, he looks more interested in preserving power than upholding the principles he was elected on. It’s not “because it’s 2015” any more: Instead, it’s because it’s 2019, and there’s an election, the Liberals were born to win. Trying, however, to paint Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Ms. Philpott as the villains of this story just doesn’t wash. Canadians are smarter, and more principled, than that.”
  • Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “It is grotesque, to me, how small and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had become — lifted on the shoulders of his party disciples — trying to make a virtue out of the jettisoning of two women who dared to vouchsafe integrity, falling afoul of the caucus cabal…There was nothing remotely illegal about Wilson-Raybould “covertly” recording her telephone conversation with Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick — what Trudeau classified as “unconscionable.” It’s perfectly licit to record an exchange as long as one person knows it’s happening. Journalists do it all the time, to back up their notes, particularly when the other person on the line might later challenge the veracity of the content.”
  • Campbell Clark, Globe and Mail: “It’s not hard to see why most Liberal MPs felt Jody Wilson-Raybould should be booted out of the caucus. There’s no “I” in “team,” but in the Liberal team, there’s a capital “T” for Justin Trudeau. There really wasn’t much more of an explanation than that from Mr. Trudeau, when you get right down to it, for why Ms. Wilson-Raybould and another former minister, Jane Philpott, were kicked out.”
  • Tanya Talaga, Toronto Star: “It seems to me that if someone you work with is pressuring you into doing something you don’t want to do —if you think it is potentially illegal or wildly unethical — secretly taping them isn’t “unconscionable.”Especially if you’ve repeatedly said, to a variety of different people, that you did not feel comfortable with what was being asked of you. And when you tried to tell people, nobody seemed to be listening. No, instead they were telling you, explicitly and implicitly, that you were the one with the problem, that you just don’t seem to “get” how the whole system works. That this is how it’s always been done and you are an outsider if you don’t play by our rules.”
  • Andrew MacDougall, Globe and Mail: “For a prime minister positioned as the leader that the West’s liberal world order needs, doesn’t it feel just a little bit Trump-like? If you find that comparison a little tart, think again. Mr. Trudeau and the Liberal caucus have been channelling Donald Trump and the Republican Party, with Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Ms. Philpott jointly playing the role of former FBI director James Comey, ejected from the President’s orbit for refusing to play ball on the Russia investigation.”
  • Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “How very patronizing the prime minister was — has been throughout, actually, from his diminishment of Wilson-Raybould as “Jody” to his pained forbearance of this wilful woman — in the House on Tuesday, asserting he’d tried to show “patience and understanding,” as one would with an incorrigible child, but heavens, his sufferance had been wasted on so recalcitrant and defiant a Liberal liege, to the point that banishment was the only option to avoid a “civil war.”
  • Tanya Talaga, Toronto Star: “Given what was at stake and what Wilson-Raybould has experienced, none of what she asked for was unreasonable. As she has said from day one, she stood up for the truth. So did Philpott, a medical doctor who held the top portfolios in Trudeau’s government. She told CBC Radio’s The Current she had to resign from cabinet because if a member of the media asked her what she thought, she could not lie, she could not forsake the truth and toe the party line. If she did, how could she face her children, her family? “I chose the truth,” Philpott said. “I chose to act on principles that are so important to the future of our country. That is more important than my political career.”
  • Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail: “When the Prime Minister is nonchalant about intervening in the judicial process because, you know, he’s used to getting what he wants, then someone needs to take him aside and explain the facts of life, not to mention constitutional democracy. He may very well have good reasons to think the DPP made the wrong call on SNC-Lavalin. But tough: There is a greater principle at play – the independence of prosecutors to act free of political interference – that cannot be sacrificed simply because, as PMO aide Mathieu Bouchard reportedly told Ms. Wilson-Raybould, “we can have the best policy in the world, but we need to get re-elected.”
  • Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star: “Politics is a dirty rough-and-tumbled business not intended for the faint of heart. Or, apparently, those in possession of a moral compass. There is no redeeming dimension to Trudeau’s brutality. He has dissembled and shammed his way through nearly two months of tortuous squabble. If the Liberal party is in crisis, the seeds were sown in the PMO and a PM of towering hauteur. A phoney feminist to boot.”
  • Anthony Furey, Sun: “In recent weeks there have been several stories floated to attempt to smear Wilson-Raybould’s character and suggest she’d made previous errors in judgments. Anyone who has been peddling these smears should now feel deeply ashamed of themselves after this tape has come out.”
  • Tanya Talaga, Toronto Star: “On Wednesday, the Daughters of the Vote filled each seat in the House of Commons as part of the Equal Voice program that was created to attract more women into politics. Trudeau dumped Philpott and Wilson-Raybould the night before the Daughters’ arrival. But as Trudeau stood to address the Daughters, about 40 women stood up and turned their backs on the prime minister. The silent demonstration spoke volumes. If Trudeau was going to exclude Philpott and Wilson-Raybould, they would not listen to his words. They understood exactly what Trudeau’s actions against Philpott and Wilson-Raybould meant. He shut them out. I’m willing to bet a majority of Canadians understood as well.”
  • Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star: “For the opposition parties, all of this is a gift. The New Democrats can cite Wilson-Raybould and Philpott as proof that Trudeau is not as progressive as he claims. This should help them in the fall election. By splitting the left-liberal vote, it may in some ridings also inadvertently help Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives. The Conservatives have long made Trudeau himself, as opposed to his often popular policies, the focus of their attack. They must be grabbing themselves with glee. This story will not easily die. It is in the interest of too many to keep it going.”
  • Mitch Potter, Toronto Star: “Hold it up to the light at a certain angle and the mess our prime minister finds himself in today seems like the most Canadian of scandals — a terrible, perhaps even politically lethal outcome borne of ridiculously benign intentions all around. Justin Trudeau, his handlers will assure you, was thinking only to protect Canadian jobs. And his now ostracized former attorney general and justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, was thinking only of prosecutorial independence…And if trust broke down in the admittedly grey area between jobs and justice, well, that’s really just a formatting error, many would argue. Once the dust settles on the slow-motion SNC-Lavalin affair, the lesson here involves fixing the format — break apart the two-hatted position of AG and JM into separate jobs and voila, no more grey area. But that rose-coloured version of the Liberal government’s slow-motion winter of discontent is finding few buyers. Instead, a bigger problem now is taking hold — the weakening of the prime minister’s personal political brand, a fact sealed this week.”
  • Alicia Elliott, Globe and Mail: “Not long after the SNC-Lavalin scandal broke in February, Mr. Trudeau and much of the Liberal Party, which once held Ms. Wilson-Raybould up as a star MP, turned on her. On Tuesday, she was turfed from the Liberal caucus, along with another former cabinet minister, her friend Jane Philpott, one of the few Liberals willing to back Ms. Wilson-Raybould. If a woman who was considered by many to be a “Good Indian” can be used and disregarded this way, what does it mean for those of us who are considered “Bad Indians”? Those of us who have suffered tremendous trauma and loss, such as Tina Fontaine?”
  • Amos Barshad, Globe and Mail: “Rasputins [like Gerald Butts] don’t act – they make a powerful few others act. The actions of those powerful few then reverberate. Why don’t they act? Because they lack the abilities to do so. The manipulative pop producer can’t sing or dance. Those grandiose fiction editors can’t write a line of decent stuff themselves. That’s the heartbreak: The dark control always stems from a place of deep and profound longing…The definitive trait of a Rasputin is control over one, or a few, prominent others. And that control must be controversial. Rasputins must have enemies. If their manipulations haven’t won them enemies, well, then their control is not quite untoward enough for the status of true Rasputin.”

Comments (29)

Justice and Justin

— 04.02.2019 11:36 AM

There was a moment, during Justin Trudeau’s saturnalian March 7 LavScam press conference, where the Prime Minister waxed poetic.

He grew misty-eyed. He looked up from his notes. He sounded wistful.

He loved Justice, he said. He really did. He and his Dad both did. “The files that were closest to his heart are also for me. And one is the justice file.”

Justice – which Justin Trudeau hadn’t mentioned all that often during his three-and-a-half-years in the big chair – was now super-duper important. It was everything. It was a “file” that “has always been one of particular importance and interest to me. It’s always been very close to my heart.”

His heart! The mind reels, at such times. Our souls swoon.

So, stay with me, here. Just for a minute.

At that moment, justice was a baseball, kind of, but in a good way. In an instant, we were collectively whisked back to the Nineties, to that iconic scene in Field of Dreams – the one where Kevin Costner asks his deceased Dad if he wants to play catch, and every grown man in the theatre starts to sniffle. Except, in Justin’s case, the baseball was justice – stamped Rule of Law, so we don’t miss the point – and he and Pierre were lobbing it back and forth, so great was their love of justice.

That’s what the young Trudeau was after, anyway. That’s what he wanted to evoke. Justice, Dad, better times.

Except, you know: nobody believes it. Nobody believes him, either. Two-thirds of Canadians, say the pollsters, are like those folks in Field of Dreams who keep showing up at Kevin Costner’s farm and they don’t see a damn thing. They don’t see anything magical or wonderful or poetic. They just see what is really there.

Which, in the LavScam case, is a seething, stinking dumpster overflowing with lies, and cover-ups, and smears. And, standing beside it all, is a Prime Minister who doesn’t seem so cool and hip anymore. He just looks like another grasping, grimy politician, one who will say and do anything to save his hide.

Because he’s losing. An Angus Reid poll, released Thursday, suggested he now may be as many as ten percentage points behind Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives nationally. And, as my smart NDP pal Karl Belanger reminded me, Trudeau’s personal approval numbers now lag behind another politician: Donald Trump.

And it is all because of justice.

Distilled down to its base elements, you see, LavScam is about justice. Not 9,000 jobs that SNC-Lavalin’s CEO says were never in jeopardy. Not Article Five of the OECD anti-bribery convention, which Trudeau’s government has violated. Not anything else: justice.

In our system of justice, no one – not even a Prime Minister – is allowed to ring up a judge or prosecutor and tell them what to do. That is against the law. It is obstruction of justice. It is the absence of justice.

Also unjust: the decision of someone on Team Trudeau to violate the sacrosanct judicial nomination process, simply to get back at former Attorney-General Jody Wilson Raybould. To do this, one of Trudeau’s faceless factotums leaked secret information about a Supreme Court of Canada nominee to compliant reporters at the Canadian Press and CTV News.

The nominee, who Wilson-Raybould reportedly preferred, was a social conservative, the leaker hissed. And Jody Wilson-Raybould favoured him – and Justin Trudeau opposed him, because he was insufficiently progressive, said the leaker.

Except: it wasn’t true. It was a lie. The judge was a moderate. And he wasn’t dropped from Justin Trudeau’s list – he removed himself from it, to care for a wife suffering from breast cancer.

So, is that justice? Is that just? Is it acceptable to further wound a family battling cancer – just to defame an indigenous woman who got a little too uppity?

But Jody Wilson-Raybould isn’t the only indigenous woman Justin Trudeau holds in contempt. No, there are others, as it turns out.

This week, the mask slipped yet again, and we saw Justin Trudeau mocking a young indigenous woman at a Liberal Party event in Toronto.

As his audience of well-to-do white men laughed, Justin Trudeau jeered an indigenous female protestor, saying “thanks for your donation” as she was hustled away by his hulking bodyguards.

She was there to protest the mercury poisoning of her people at Grassy Narrows, which Justin Trudeau had solemnly promised to remedy. And about which he has done precious little.

“Thanks for your donation.” Is that the “real change” Justin Trudeau said he’d give Canadians in 2015? Is that his promised reconciliation with indigenous people? Is that in any way just, or justice?

You know the answer already.

And you also know that Justin Trudeau wouldn’t know “justice” if it bit him on his privileged white ass.


Comments (13)

A reminder of what #LavScam is all about

— 03.31.2019 09:10 AM

This.



As we enter the week in which Justin Trudeau will almost certainly expel two women who stood up for the principle of prosecutorial independence, here is what the prosecutors themselves had to say about that – and on the very day Trudeau refused to apologize for #LavScam.

They did not issue that tweet by accident. They were not unaware of the impact it would have, coming – as it did – a couple hours after Justin Trudeau angrily refused to apologize for possibly obstructing justice.

It was Canada’s Public Prosecution Service sending up a flare. It was a warning, from those who would know, that something critically important is at risk.

And that is this: the constitutional principle that our criminal justice system needs to be free and fair. The notion that serious cases of corporate corruption, as SNC-Lavalin is, needs to be fought in open court, with lawyers – not in backrooms, with lobbyists.

“Free from political influence.” That is what motivated Jody Wilson-Raybould to do what she did – and, later, for Jane Philpott and Celina Caesar-Chavannes, to do what they did. They lost their careers to that. They have been defamed and demeaned for that.

We must have a criminal justice system that is free from political influence. We must ensure that justice is free and fair, and not for sale to the wealthy.

That is what this scandal is all about. And that is how history will tell it, too.


Comments (23)

Bar Associations: Justin Trudeau’s office “demeaned” the judicial process – and acted in a manner that was “false, improper and appalling”

— 03.26.2019 08:37 PM

Justin Trudeau’s PMO has made history: so intent were they on smearing Jody Wilson-Raybould, the Liberal leader and his apparatchiks violated the confidentiality of the judicial appointment process – and they smeared a respected jurist who was tending to his wife. Who had breast cancer.

It got a reaction. One that none of his predecessors ever did.

Here’s the Canadian Bar Association’s reaction:

“There is a process to get informed input about the merits of the applicants. It rightly goes on behind closed doors. Keeping the deliberations confidential respects the privacy of applicants and guards against interference. Breaching confidentiality by releasing the names and commenting on the suitability of the other applicants after the appointment demeans the selection process and ultimately all those who hold the office of judge.”

And here is the Manitoba Bar Association:

“It is vital any deliberations leading up to any appointment remain confidential. The recent breaches of confidentiality…[are] highly disconcerting. It demeans the entire selection process…The Manitoba Bar Association is also deeply concerned about comments made about Chief Justice Joyal…[which were] entirely improper and indeed false…It is appalling.”

Justin Trudeau is uniting people, alright.

Against him.


Comments (17)

#LavScam latest: did PMO have direct contact with prosecutors in the SNC-Lavalin trial?

— 03.25.2019 09:57 AM

That’s what the Globe and Mail is suggesting in another shocker this morning. I have wondered the same thing.

Huge reporting by Fife and Team. And, if true, this moves things closer to obstruction of justice. Big time.

The Prime Minister’s Office will neither confirm nor deny the assertion by former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould that senior advisers to Justin Trudeau had inside knowledge of discussions within the independent Public Prosecution Service about the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould has alleged that the Prime Minister’s Office [PMO] told her chief of staff about an apparent internal dispute between director of public prosecutions Kathleen Roussel and one of the federal prosecutors handling the SNC-Lavalin bribery and fraud prosecution.

In testimony before the Commons justice committee last month, Ms. Wilson-Raybould described a Sept. 16, 2018, conversation between her then-chief of staff, Jessica Prince, and the Prime Minister’s Quebec adviser, Mathieu Bouchard, and senior adviser Elder Marques about negotiating an out-of-court settlement with SNC-Lavalin.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould says she plans to provide follow-up written testimony this week to the committee to show there was high-level political interference in the SNC-Lavalin matter.


Comments (8)

The Jane Philpott interview: this is extraordinary

— 03.21.2019 08:54 AM

Paul Wells and Maclean’s have got the first interview with Jane Philpott – former Minister of Health, former Treasury Board President, former Minister of Indigenous Services – and it is incredible.

From the very first time I met Jane, and spoke at her riding association many years ago, I believed her to be principled and brilliant.  And the kind of person we need in public life.

Reading some of the snippets below, I am reminded of how principled and brilliant she truly is.  And I convinced, more than ever, that the true is like water.

It will find a way out.

**

Q: When you left cabinet, did you have a strategic goal in mind? What was the point of resigning?

A: I resigned because I could not maintain solidarity with cabinet on the specific issue of the management of the SNC-Lavalin issue. I felt that there was evidence of an attempt to politically interfere with the justice system in its work on the criminal trial that has been described by some as the most important and serious prosecution of corporate corruption in modern Canadian history.

A: No. There’s much more to the story that should be told.

Q: What sort of stuff?

A: I believe the former attorney general has further points to make. I believe that I have further issues of concern that I’m not free to share. There was a reference by Gerry Butts in his testimony of the fact that I spoke to the Prime Minister on January the 6th about SNC-Lavalin’s desire to have a DPA [deferred prosecution agreement]. This was more than a month before the story became public. And I ordinarily would have not been allowed to share that information. But of course it’s already on the public record from the Justice Committee. I think Canadians might want to know why I would have raised that with the Prime Minister a month before the public knew about it. Why would I have felt that there was a reason why former Minister Wilson-Raybould should not be shuffled?

Q: In what forum would you like to discuss all of this?

A: My sense is that Canadians would like to know the whole story. I believe we actually owe it to Canadians as politicians to ensure that they have the truth. They need to have confidence in the very basic constitutional principle of the independence of the justice system.

Q: Mr. Butts said, essentially, ‘Come on, this doesn’t rise to the level of harassment, or bugging, or even sustained engagement. It’s 20 interactions over four months. It’s two phone calls and two meetings per month.’

A: The constitutional principle of the independence of the justice system is such that the attorney general of our country should not be subjected to political interference in any way. Whether there is one attempt to interfere or whether there are 20 attempts to interfere, that crosses ethical and constitutional lines.

Q: Now there’s an Ethics Commissioner investigation. Michael Wernick seemed to have a lot of confidence in the Ethics Commissioner. Do you think that can capture everything that needs capturing?

A: My sense is that they will not have the appropriate tools to be able to get at all of this.

Q: What’s missing?

A: If nothing wrong took place, then why don’t we waive privilege on the whole issue and let those who have something to say on it speak their minds and share their stories?

Q: The Finance Minister [Bill Morneau] said your resignation from cabinet was an expression of personal friendship with Jody Wilson-Raybould. What do you make of that?

A: I think that’s an insult.

Q: How so?

A: I don’t make decisions on any policy — and definitely not on a matter of principle — based on friendship. I made the very difficult decision to step down because my conscience demanded it.

 


Comments (39)

#LavScam legal: what it means now that PMO has lawyered up

— 03.16.2019 09:51 AM

The Globe and Mail has reported that Justin Trudeau and senior PMO staff have now retained independent legal counsel in #LavScam. I’ve helped organizations through legal/comms crises many times. 

I can tell you this is what this latest revelation means:

• their ability to communicate openly about the file comes to an abrupt end

• they now can’t take notes, send or receive email, etc. without disclosing them to the police, Ethics Commissioner, et al. 

• they can’t delete past records without attracting more legal peril

• their lawyers are telling them, over and over, that they should not discuss the case with anyone, including their bosses

• their lawyers are reviewing, in advance, everything they hope to say about #LavScam – which necessarily slows down their responses in what is a fast-moving scandal 

• the Opposition and the media are going to be watching the legal bills like hawks – and publicizing every penny (which the relevant law firms don’t ever like, and which sometimes leads to withdrawal)

• they are getting their legal bills paid by the taxpayer – but there’s usually a dollar limit, and the representation won’t cover wrongdoing done outside their government roles (ie., LPC)

• their legal bills will get very big very fast – which will inevitably create a whole new layer of scandal 

• they may need to hire non-legal representation – comms counsel, for instance – and that inevitably means yet more costs which leads to yet more scandal 

• they may need to start paying for additional legal representation out of their own pockets – which inevitably leads to them going home and their spouse saying: “We didn’t sign on for this. This is bankrupting us. You need to quit.”

And so on, and so on. 

None of this would have happened if any of them had paid heed to the law – for instance, using “jobs” as an excuse to enter into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement is expressly prohibited in bribery cases (as this is) and Article Five of the OECD Anti-Bribery Working Group Convention (which Canada has signed). 

They didn’t talk to any lawyers at the start. Because of that, they’re now going to be talking to lawyers all the time. 

To, you know, keep themselves out of jail. 


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