It seems this story has been brewing for years but I hadn’t heard anything about it until last week. The recent news stories tend to gloss over the background, so I’m not quite sure I understand what it’s all about. I’m having trouble finding a good overview anywhere online. This is my understanding; please correct me if I’m wrong:
SNC-Lavalin is a construction and engineering company based in Montreal. Apparently they’ve been accused of paying a lot bribes to a lot of people over the years, but the current brouhaha is about bribes paid to members of the Gaddafi family and other powerful people in Libya when Muammar was still in power there. Canada, like a lot of countries, makes it illegal to pay bribes even overseas. So the company was facing criminal (?) prosecution in Canadian courts. If convicted they would be barred from bidding on federal construction contracts for ten years.
The Attorney General of Canada, who is a member of PM Trudeau’s cabinet, has oversight of the prosecution. Until about a month ago that was Jody Wilson-Raybould. Supposedly she came under pressure from somebody in the Prime Minister’s office to offer SNC-Lavalin something called “deferred prosecution.” As far as I can make out, that means the company would have paid a fine in return for dropping the criminal prosecution, and that would have allowed them to continue bidding on federal contracts. Trudeau has (as far as I can tell) made no secret that he supported the deferred prosecution for SNC-Lavalin, but left the final decision to the AG.
This deferred prosecution option is apparently something new under Canadian law, passed just last year. Was it passed just to help SNC-Lavalin? Was the bill supported by the other parties in parliament or just the Liberals?
About a month ago Wilson-Raybould resigned as AG to become Minister of Veterans Affairs, without having approved the deferred prosecution. Her successor hasn’t approved it yet either. It seems likely she was forced out of the AG position against her will, but I can’t confirm that. Last week she resigned from the cabinet altogether, but she’s still an MP.
Today Gerald Butts, the “principal secretary” of the Prime Minister’s Office, resigned. I’m not sure what the principal secretary does but he ranks somewhere below the chief of staff. Apparently he was being accused of something, but I can’t tell whether he is accused of being the person (or one of the people) who inappropriately pressured Wilson-Raybould.
That’s actually pretty much it. There’s two minor points I would expand.
Prosecutions by the federal government are under the AG’s supervision, but the actual prosecution service is the federal Prosecutions Service, which was set up during the Harper period to create more institutional independence between the AG and prosecutions decisions. So that’s another layer designed to prevent political independence.
The second point is that Minister Raybould-Wilson didn’t resign as Minister of Justice and AG. One of Trudeau’s other senior Cabinet ministers, Scott Brison, resigned from Cabinet and the House, allegedly to spend more time with his husband and their daughters. (That’s another murky issue, with allegations that Brison’s resignation had something to do with an ongoing trial of Canada’s former #2 at National Defence).
In any event, Brison’s resignation triggered a Cabinet shuffle by Trudeau, in which he moved Wilson-Raybould to Veterans Affairs, which was generally seen as a demotion. That in itself created a big stink, because Wilson-Raybould was the only indigenous person in Cabinet, and it caused people to question why Trudeau would do that? It now is suspected by some that it was because she didn’t agree to the proposed settlement.
As to the settlement provisions, they are a very recent addition to the Criminal Code. I only heard of them when this whole thing blew up. Don’t know if any of the other parties voted for the provisions in the Commons. But not really relevant - in our system, opposition parties generally vote against government measures. We don’t have the chatter of bipartisanship that comes up in US debates on the SDMB.
However, after the events of the past 10 days, Wilson-Raybould has resigned from Cabinet and is no longer Minister of Veterans Affairs. She has declined to comment on her communications with the PM, citing solicitor-client privilege : as a lawyer, she has to be careful not to breach privilege. She has retained a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Thomas Cromwell, to advise her on the privilege issue.
Trudeau has more than solidified his hold on what used to be called the left, that’s now centre, with legalization of cannabis and acting as a beacon of human rights and dignity (the latter actions attaining huge importance in the public’s eye since Trump et al).
So what happens next? Will the new AG approve the deferred prosecution agreement or is that option politically impossible now that it’s turned into a scandal? Or does the criminal case against the company proceed?
Is there any suspicion that the company has been bribing Canadian officials? Here in the States companies don’t often have to resort to outright illegal bribery to get their way. They can often get their way through legal but morally suspect means like campaign donations and the possibility of lucrative jobs after a politician has left office. As long as there’s no explicit quid-pro-quo that sort of thing is generally legal here. I don’t know how it works in the Great White North.
There has always been strong institutional principles to keep prosecutions non-partisan. The Harper government wanted to strengthen that separation by creating a new statutory agency for prosecutions, carved out of the Department of Justice. Hence, creating more statutory protections for prosecutorial independence, in addition to what had already existed.
There have also been (anonymous) allegations that Wilson-Raybould was “demoted” because she was difficult to work with, and then counter-allegations that strong-minded women unfairly get labelled as “difficult” more often than similarly strong-minded men.
From the article it looks like SNC has been working hard behind the scenes to have the remediation framework put into place for this specific problem they’re facing with the corruption charges. The scandal almost seems tied to the fact we’ve now actually seen some of the “sausage” been made. This is the “pink slime” of Canadian politics - likely legal, possibly necessary but gross as all get out.
Well, yeah, of course they’ll care. Every government solidifies their hold on their core supporters… until they don’t. Every Prime Minister who ever won a majority looked had to beat until the voters told them to go to hell (or their own party did.)
Legalizing cannabis is something everyone will stop caring about my, oh, next week, and “Acting a beacon of human rights” isn’t an important issue to most people. The stink of corruption unquestionably hurts governments. It can take awhile, but it’s incredibly hard to shake.
In a multiparty system, you don’t need to lose many votes to lose your job. The difference between Liberals and Conservatives in 2015 was one vote out of every thirteen. It doesn’t take a lot of switching, or a lack of enthusiasm in your base, to reverse that.
It looks like SNC-Lavallin used corruption to change the law to decrease the penalty it was going to get for engaging in corruption. The Liberals went into exile from power for a decade because of corruption and it gives the impression they’re at it again. Part of the reason for picking Trudeau as a leader was to call back to the idea of an earlier golden era of the Liberal party and Canada.
The Liberals are running neck and neck with the Tories in the polls right now while his party suffered stinging defeats in both Ontario and Quebec. Non-Americans aren’t going to vote on who signals in favour of or against Trump as opposed to pressing issues in their respective countries.
Still, I think you are underestimating how Trudeau will be portrayed, and more importantly, seen, as a counter to Trump, ‘Trumpism/Tribalism’, and the decay of liberal democracy.
Canada is a nation of immigrants, and its people are far more tolerant ethnically/racially than is the case in the Red-US and much of Europe, and value socialized healthcare above all. They are also already seeing the threats from China, Russia, and the US, not militarily of course, but by the danger they pose to our national ideals.
Trudeau is perfectly placed/bred to wear this crown.
Provincial election outcomes tell you almost nothing relevant about federal politics. In many cases the provincial parties aren’t even the same as the federal parties. For example, 75% of Quebec voters in their recent provincial election voted for parties that don’t even exist at the federal level. Actually, that’s arguably the case for 98% of Quebec voters, as the Liberal Party of Quebec and the Liberal Party of Canada are independent of each other and aren’t even always ideologically aligned, leaving just NDP and Greens as unambiguously the same parties at both levels. Trying to read any federal implications from the Quebec election is like predicting that prospective car buyers are more likely to buy Fords because they recently saw a movie starring Harrison Ford.