SNC-Lavalin Scandal

This Lady should be Prime Minister of Canada!

Trudeau ‘asked me to help out, to find a solution to SNC’: Wilson-Raybould

ROBERT FIFE OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF
STEVEN CHASE
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Jody Wilson-Raybould says she was subjected to sustained and coordinated political pressure including “veiled threats” to intervene and shelve the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.

In dramatic televised testimony before the House of Commons Justice committee on Wednesday, the former justice minister and attorney-general said there were 10 phone calls and 10 meetings in which she was inappropriately pressured.

“For a period of approximately four months, between September and December of 2018, I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the attorney-general of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin,” Ms. Wilson-Rayould told MPs.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould said the lobby campaign involved 11 people from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office and the Office of the Minister of Finance.

“Within these conversations, there were express statements regarding the necessity of interference in the SNC-Lavalin matter, the potential of consequences and veiled threats if a DPA (deferred prosecution agreement) was not made available to SNC,” she said.

Ms. Wilson-Rabyould said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other senior officials including Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s chief of staff, Ben Chin, made the point that an out-of-court settlement with the Montreal engineering and construction company would help the Quebec Liberal party electorally in last fall’s provincial election.

In a key meeting involving Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick, the Prime Minister said he wanted a solution to SNC-Lavalin’s legal difficulties.

“The Prime Minister asked me to help out, to find a solution to SNC, citing if there is no DPA, there may be jobs lost and SNC would move from Montreal,” she said. “I told him I had done my due diligence and made up my mind on SNC that I was not going to interfere in the decision of the director [of Public Prosecutions Service Canada.]”

Ms. Wilson-Raybould said the Prime Minister once again cited the potential loss of jobs and then “to my surprise the clerk started to make the case for DPA” in which he noted SNC had a planned board meeting on Sept. 20 and might move to London.

“At that point the Prime Minister jumped in stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that “I am an MP in Quebec, the member for Papineau,” she said. “I was quite taken aback. My response was to ask the Prime Minister a direct question while looking him in the eye, and asked ‘are you politically interfering with my role and decision as attorney-general? I would strongly advise against it.' The Prime Minister said ‘no, no, no, we just need to find a solution.’”

Ms. Wilson-Raybould said she believed she was demoted to veterans affairs in a cabinet shuffle because she would not bend to the sustained pressure on SNC-Lavalin.

The Prime Minister called her on Jan. 7 to tell her she was being moved out of the Justice portfolio.

“I will not go into details on this call, or subsequent communications with the shuffle, but I will state I believed the reason was because of the SNC matter. They denied the matter,” she said.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould said she would have “resigned immediately” from cabinet if new Justice Minister David Lametti overruled Kathleen Roussel, the director of the Public Prosecution Service, and ordered a negotiated settlement with SNC-Lavalin.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould reviewed the meeting and conversations that took place last fall with the Prime Minister including his chief of staff Katie Telford and principal secretary Gerald Butts, who has stepped down.

“The consistent and enduring efforts, even in the face of judicial proceedings on the same matter, and in the face of a clear decision of the director of public prosecutions and the attorney-general, to continue and even intensify such efforts raises serious red flags in my view, yet this is what continued to happen,” she said. “In my view the communications and efforts to change my mind should have stopped.”

Deputy Conservative Leader Lisa Raitt and NDP MP Murray Rankin told Ms. Wilson-Raybould that they believed every word she said and praised her courage for speaking out.

“What I heard today, should make all Canadians extremely upset. There is no other conclusion that one can reasonably draw but there was a sustained, consistent effort to interfere politically with the critical role that an attorney-general must play in our legal system,” Mr. Rankin said.

After Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, Ms. Raitt asked the former minister whether she felt she was removed from her position as attorney-general because she refused to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin matter.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould responded that Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Butts denied to her that was the case, but she said she still felt her demotion was related to the confrontation over a DPA.

“I was concerned the reason I was being shuffled out of the minister of justice and attorney-general, possibly, was because of a decision I would not take on SNC and the DPA,” she said.

As minister of veterans affairs, she added that she braced for the possibility that her successor could adopt a new position on SNC-Lavalin.

“I knew that in my new role, still sitting around the cabinet table, if there had been a directive that was placed into the Gazette, I would have resigned immediately from cabinet,” she said, referring to the Canada Gazette, the official newspaper of the government of Canada.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould repeated that she was still not at liberty to reveal the nature of conversations with the Prime Minister after she was shuffled to Veterans Affairs in January, adding she feels there is relevant information that she is still unable to share with Canadians.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-wilson-raybould-said-she-was-subjected-to-veiled-threats-in-snc/?fbclid=IwAR3ZhdD9AMUIEDlGZuFaUcEPnPDltEt1_tiPW5_rm7syEd9AfsSa_hY0sZo

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