https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-the-jody-wilson-raybould-solution
Christie Blatchford: The Jody Wilson-Raybould solution - 30 Mar 19
The day after 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, she quit
OTTAWA — 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 into finding a way (a “solution” they called it) to give the big Quebec-based engineering and construction giant what’s called a DPA, or deferred prosecution agreement.
SNC-Lavalin is facing charges of fraud and bribery for its alleged conduct in Libya between 2001 and 2011. Assuming the case goes to trial (a decision from the preliminary hearing judge is expected soon), a DPA would spare the company the pain of a criminal conviction and the resulting potential 10-year ban on bidding on government contracts. Kathleen Roussel, JWR’s Director of Public Prosecutions, had decided by early September a DPA wasn’t appropriate in the case; by mid-September, Wilson-Raybould had decided she wouldn’t interfere.
As is now clear, both from the written submissions, including text messages and a surreptitiously recorded phone conversation with the aforementioned privy council clerk Michael Wernick, that JWR sent the Parliamentary justice committee this week, some of those people threatened the former AG herself.
Some of them threatened her staff, notably Jessica Prince, also an accomplished lawyer. When, for instance, Prince’s briefing on what Morneau’s chief of staff Ben Chin told her led to JWR telling Morneau in the House of Commons, in effect, to call off his dogs, Chin told Prince, “your boss spoke to Bill yesterday and said that me and Elder [Marques, a lawyer and senior advisor in the PMO] were ‘mucking around’ on this file. “Be careful when using my name Jess,” Chin said.
Collectively, these people bandied about the name of former Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin as though she were just another legal gun-for-hire, an ambulance chaser who would, you know wink-wink, just do the bidding of her client and supply the desired opinion upon request.
One of them, the former Trudeau principal secretary Gerry Butts, when asked by Prince what questions an “external counsel” (McLachlin had been mentioned by name already by Butts and Wernick and, according to Wernick, by Trudeau) might be asked, replied, “Whether the AG can review the DPP’s decision here?” and “whether she should in this case?”
Prince asked a hypothetical. “What,” she asked, “if the opinion comes saying ‘She can review it, but she shouldn’t’ or simply, ‘She can’t review it’?” “Mr. Butts stated, ‘it wouldn’t say that,’” Prince told JWR. Prince remembered this very clearly, JWR said in her written submission to the justice committee, “because this response made her nervous.” I bet it did: It’s not every day that high-ranking government officials talk about a former chief justice with such overt familiarity and with such a casual sense of ownership.
Justin To, another PMO advisor (he was identified as one of Morneau’s, perhaps because his bailiwick was economics, or perhaps he’s switched jobs), called Prince the same day. He steered the conversation to SNC and whinged, “why can’t SNC just go through the process?” Prince replied that it was the DPP who controls the process. To said, “It’s just a bit ironic that she [JWR] wants an alternative justice [a reference to restorative justice] to be available in one sense, but not for SNC.
”This of course appears to have been a sly shot at Wilson-Raybould’s Aboriginal roots; true restorative justice, with the notion that offender and victim can sometimes meet in a healing circle and speak more truthfully and to a better end for both of them than might be achieved in a more adversarial court process, started with Canada’s Indigenous people. (To his credit, To later the same day emailed Prince to apologize if there was any misunderstanding. Prince replied politely, but she and JWR had understood very well what he’d meant.)
And then there was that astonishing phone call with Wernick on Dec. 18, wherein she repeatedly told him in the firmest terms that even the call they were having was inappropriate — that the constitutional principle of prosecutorial independence was at risk with their conversation and all the ones that had gone before it — and he simply would not quit. Wernick was merely doing the PM’s bidding, of course, and was reporting back to him that very night, he said. (see article "Michael Wernick never briefed Trudeau that he spoke with Wilson-Raybould: PMO" and see Oldgateboatdriver's comment above)
The PM was very concerned, he told Wilson-Raybould, about this “signature firm”, SNC, and “job loss and all that coming after the Oshawa thing [the shutdown of the GM plant] and what is going on in Calgary and what-not.” If ever Alberta wanted a glimpse of the hive mind in Justin Trudeau’s office, it came here: The job losses in the oil sands, the stalled pipelines, the vacant office space, that was “Calgary and what-not”.
But SNC was a “signature” firm for which all the stops must be pulled out. Wernick told her he was worried about a “collision” between her and the PM. Trudeau was very firm. “I think he is gonna find a way to get it done one way or another.”
The next time she heard from the PM or anyone in the PMO was on Jan. 7, when Trudeau told her she was being shuffled out of justice and the AG. She told him, and Butts, that she believed it was “because of a decision I would not take in the SNC-Lavalin DPA matter, which they denied.”
She turned down Indigenous affairs, and was aghast she’d even been offered it, given her well-known views of getting beyond the Indian Act. But after some deliberation, she decided she would take the PM at his word and accepted veterans affairs. She also made another decision, in private, “that I would immediately resign if the new attorney-general decided” to do what she had refused to do because she knew it was so wrong. 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.
(And by the way, I love that while she liked being the AG, she never described it as her “dream job”; that, she said, was Gerry Butts’ description. “I’m not sure I’d refer to any job as a dream job,” she said. That’s because she’s a proper adult; I bet she similarly has no “dream house”. And I love how Jess Prince once told her, of the condescending PMO gang, “I hate that they call you Jody.”)
She is writing their epitaph.
