Hey, I’m a USian, and I have read a pretty fair amount about this scandal…in US sources. I don’t believe I have ever read anything that appeared in the National Post, com- or otherwise (about Trudeau or indeed about any subject). It seems quite peculiar, from where I sit, to ascribe what’s going on to journalistic bias.
Would like to see the articles blaming Trudeau for cats stuck in trees, though. Would somebody like to point me in the proper direction? TIA.
One day in the Globe and Mail, every article and the editorial in the A section was essentially about this issue. I don’t see bias — The Star and National Post have done this as well. Conrad Black came out more positively for Trudeau than average calling it normal politics and blaming the executive rather than the SNC company.
That said, for better or worse, a certain amount of advocacy is unsurprising. Yes, it should have stopped after the first no. It should have been reported. It is of moderate concern since the judiciary requires political independence. Nothing criminal occurred - a low bar, perhaps, but still relevant. I would argue that the politicians involved are generally decent people. I do not think this issue deserves the coverage received, and I do think the coverage takes away from more important business. Still a very Canadian scandal. The only country I can think of where the government would be similarly threatened by a teacup storm might be Sweden.
Trudeau now has a lower approval rating than Trump
And the Tories have a 10 point lead over the Grits, particularly in Ontario and BC, two key provinces for Trudeau. That’s majority government territory.
Trudeau’s also lost ground among young voters and women, which were two of his key constituencies.
And, on Friday, the former Justice Minister and Attorney General released an audio recording of a phone call she received from the Clerk of the Privy Council, who tells her at least 5 times that “the PM” wants her to give SNC-Lavalin the deal; expresses his frustration that she isn’t using the legal tools they gave her in enacting the remediation agreement provision; reminds her that she’s a Cabinet minister, expected to take direction from the PM; and says something to the effect that if it doesn’t happen, the PM will find a way to make it happen.
Wilsn-Raybould keeps repeating that it’s not appropriate for there to be political pressure in prosecution decisions; that non-partisan prosecutions are a basic constitutional principle; and that he is being inappropriate.
Now, she knew it was being recorded and he didn’t, which is a factor to assess in credibility.
It’s 17 minutes long, but worth listening to; embedded in this CBC article:
Someone set me straight if I’m totally off base here, but I am frankly getting sick of hearing about Wilson-Reybould. It seems that every time I turn to the CBC News website, there she is again, and lately looking rather disturbingly smug. The recording that she made may be legal under federal law under the “one party consent” rule, but it strikes me as highly unethical and done with malicious intent, and tends to support the rumours about her past that suggest that she’s manipulative and self-serving. It seems that her sole objective here is to take down Trudeau and bolster her own credentials as a fearless champion of … I’m not quite sure what. Throwing a major Canadian company under the bus for doing what is pragmatically necessary to win contracts in corrupt third-world countries?
Yeah, I’m basically just reacting emotionally here, but this woman is beginning to piss me off. In return for being elevated to a Cabinet post, she knifes the PM in the back to elevate her own stature. Whatever Trudeau may be, he isn’t a corrupt law-breaking tyrant, and he’s being persecuted for what was, at worst, a well-intentioned miscalibration genuinely intended to preserve jobs.
Blame the photographers then. It’s easy to take many photos and then pick the one that captures the expression you are looking for. It’s not Wilson-Reybould’s fault that photographers are trying to portray her as ‘smug’.
Or, instead of malicious intent it was the result of her already being pressured and trying to protect herself from the bus coming her way that she knew she would wind up under if she crossed very powerful people by doing her job.
As for the ‘rumors’, gee, I wonder who could be planting those. Another example of how she may have been trying to protect herself from the kind of politics of destruction everyone plays these days.
Yes, exactly that. We have laws against *precisely that, because Canada ISN’T a third world country. And if you think SNC-Lavalin doesn’t engage in the same tactics within Canada and other places, I would like to have some of that new legal stuff you are apparently smoking. Since that stuff affects short-term memory, I will remind you that just this February the now ex-CEO of SNC-Lavalin pleaded guilty in a bribery scandal involving a 1.3 billion dollar hospital contract in Montreal, which last time I checked was not in a third world country.
And just last November, SNC-Lavalin’s Vice President pleaded guilty to an election fraud scheme in which Lavalin got around campaign finance laws by getting employees to donate to Liberal Party candidates, then reimbursing them through bogus expense accounts and other schemes.
SNC-Lavalin has been doing this for a long, long time. They are at the nexus of dirty politics snd dirty money and the Liberal Party in Quebec. That’s why Trudeau was willing to risk everything to bail them out of their mess. And that’s WHY the ‘tool’ of remediation was created in the first place, and was expected to be used to bail out the company. When the AG didn’t play along, the knives came out.
I find it amazing that someone on the left, who would normally be reflexively opposed to exactly this kind of big business corruption and hold it up as an example of what’s wrong with Capitalism, suddenly finds it absolutely no big deal at all when that corruption threatens to ensnare a Liberal politician.
‘Knifing someone in the back’ is, I suppose, another way of saying ‘Trying to follow the law, rather than the needs of the Liberal Party and it’s man-child leader’.
Except that the evidence we have is that he is EXACTLY corrupt and law-breaking. There is no question whatsoever that the Trudeau government pulled out all the stops behind the scenes to compel an attorney general to violate her own judgement and independent status and save a corrupt company that doesn’t play by the same rules everyone else has to.
And I think you chose the wrong words when you said that this situation was ‘at worst’ a well-intentioned miscalibration. I would say that that is AT BEST what it was. At worst, it was a bought-and-paid for political party attempting to obstruct justice, and willing to destroy the career and reputation of an honorable woman to do it.
Sam Stone: Bravo.
And I’m getting tired of that “it’s only a Third world country so who cares if they’re bribing governments to get contracts?” line.
Corruption hurts, especially in Third world countries with less resources. It means things like when that country pays $20 million out of their public treasury, their public funds collected by taxes to benefit their own citizens, to pay a company like SNC, that a chunk of that public money, maybe $5 million, is going to corrupt public officials. It essentially is a hidden tax on the contract. They’re only getting $15 million worth of construction, but paying $20 million to that nice First world construction company. Everyone benefits, except the citizens of that Third world country, who are getting cheated by their own officials and that nice Canadian company.
That’s why the OECD has identified public corruption as one of the major obstacles to development in post-colonial countries: OECD
That’s why there is the 1997 OECD Convention on Combatting Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions: link
And that’s why “squeaky-clean” Canada signed the Convention over 20 years ago, in 1997.
And that’s why in 1998, to implement that international commitment, the Canadian Parliament made it a criminal offence for Canadian countries to bribe foreign public officials: Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act.
So SNC-Lavalin has had 20 years to adapt its business structures to comply with a Canadian law. They appear not to have got the meno, if the allegations are correct.
So this is way more than bribing foreign officials. It’s about a major Canadian company charged with committing a serious breach of Canada’s own criminal law.
So if you get into Cabinet and are Canada’s chief law enforcement officer, you should let politics take priority over your legal duty to ensure prosecutions are non-political? (And if she’s trying to elevate herself in the Liberal Party, she’s chosen an odd way to go about it.)
Wilson-Raybould is an experienced former Crown prosecutor. She understands the need for non-partisan prosecutions. And she also repeatedly warned the Cletk that he should listen to her, because she was tryng to protect the Prime Minister. She was right.
I agree with Sam Stone : your interpretation is “at best”. At worst, it’s political interference in a prosecution - a type of corruption. He’s not being “persecuted”. He’s being called to account for breaching a basic principle of our criminal law system.
“Wilson-Raybould is an experienced former Crown prosecutor”
Three years as a crown prosecutor is not what I would call ‘experieced’. But whatever, we all have our own definitions.
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Ah, yes, if she always looks smugly self-satisfied, it’s that mean old leftist Trudeau-loving media again! :rolleyes:
How was she “protecting herself”? She was a Cabinet minister, and now she isn’t, by her own volition. Instead, she’s a political hero to Trudeau opponents, of which there are many, and instead of being an unknown she’s now one of the most famous people in Canada. Wouldn’t “promoting herself” be a better term?
I’m wondering what you could possibly imagine the relevance of that little story could be. First of all if you were not aware that the construction business in Quebec has long been rife with corruption, well, now you know. And no, Trudeau didn’t cause it. Secondly, this was something done eight years ago by a former president of SNC who was fired by the board seven years ago. What the hell does that have to do with Trudeau and with anything happening today? Practice “guilt by association” much?
Never the facts get in the way of a good story! – this was at the same time as the above, also involves a former executive; it invokes exactly the same “guilt by association” fallacy, and you also forgot to mention it involved donations to both the Liberal and Conservative parties!
That’s a valid point about bribery and corruption. I’m not defending it, but describing it as a reality of business in some of these places. I’m not sure it’s something that one company or one outside country acting alone can unilaterally fix. I’m just saying it’s understandable to want to avoid an overreaction against such a company that would cost thousands of jobs, and that what now appears to be a takedown of a Prime Minister and a governing party over the issue seems like itself an overreaction. Of course conservatives think it’s just fine, not because of any intrinsic issues of justice, but because it means that Trudeau, whom they loathe because of his popularity and progressivism, has fallen so far in the public perception that not only his government but maybe even his party leadership is threatened. Conservatives love this because it paves the way for the useless dipshit Andrew Scheer to become the next PM.
Not at all. If she’s playing the long game, having your name in the paper every single day, week after week, as a supposed shining icon of Truth and Justice, is a pretty good start!
If I was trying to protect someone, you know what I would not do? ** I would not secretly tape conversations that directly incriminate them, and then go public with them! ** :rolleyes:
I think one of the most interesting comments was the Clerk, who said that it was like they were talking past each other.
They were. He was talking politics. She was talking about a key constitutional principle that limits politics. She was warning them that what they were doing could cause them more trouble than if SNC was fined. She was right.
One party consent while tape-recording a conversation may not be illegal, but it certainly is sleazy.
When one party is taping another secretly, the party doing the taping has all the power. They go into the conversation with an agenda; “Let’s see if I can get this person to say something compromising, so that I then have power over them.”
Here’s a hypothetical situation that is also legal:
I do not like one of my colleagues at work. No reason - I just dislike them. I want them gone. So I secretly record a conversation with them. I lead them to talk about the Director. “what do you think of him? No, what do you really think? What do you think of their leadership? No really, what do you think?”
They end up saying some unflattering stuff about the company directors, thanks to my leading them in that direction. I then send the tape to HR and the directors. My colleague is fired. I promote my buddy to take his place. Win-win for me and my buddy.
All nice and legal.
I’m curious about the role these deferred prosecution agreements are suppose to fill. It seems odd to me to have 2 kinds of of prosecution for similar acts. Which to choose and if both could be applied why not change the attack approach as you go?
Personally, first party that makes it a platform promise to scrap this kind of legal mechanism gets my vote, though I reserve the right to change my mind if I can better understand their intended use. 
The kind interpretation is that a Deferred Prosecution Agreement gives the Attorney General the option of a less-draconian punishment of a corporation if it seems like the crimes committed were either not known by the executive, or were minor, or the company had already shown corrective action by firing the guilty and amending its practices, etc. So for example, some company with no history of bad behavior gets caught making bribes, but it turns out that the briber was a sales manager going against company policy. Sales manager is fired, and company puts in oversight procedures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That company might not deserve to be barred from bidding in the future.
The more realistic reason for it, since it DPA was only brought in at the end of last year, was that it was a legislative trick to allow a major Quebec donor to liberals to escape punishment for something it has done repeatedly, and which was sanctioned at the highest levels of the company. The Attorney General has the sole right to determine if the DPA applies, and the Liberals expected that a loyal Liberal AG would do the ‘right’ thing and let politically-connected companies off the hook. They didn’t count on an AG who might not play ball.
As a reminder, just last year SNC-Lavalin was caught in a scandal where they were sliding money to Liberals in violation of campaign finance laws by getting employees to donate the individual maximum to Liberal politicians, then the company reimbursed them through bogus expense claims. Part of the plea deal the VP agreed to conveniently allowed them to seal away the names of the Liberal politicians involved in the kickback scheme.
And this year they were also caught in a bribery scandal in Montreal, for which the CEO had to resign. And the the current situation involves them buying off Libyan politicians. Previous to that they had been involved in another bribery scandal in Bangladesh, which cost them the ability to bid on new contracts in that country and their exclusion from projects financed by the World Bank. They’ve also been under investigation by various other international governing bodies for their shady practices. The OECD even took the extraordinary step of warning Canada that if it didn’t get a handle on SNC-Lavalin’s shenanigans the entire country could be flagged as supporting corruption, which could cost Canada overall a lot of standing in the world.
In no way would this company seem to fit the criterion for alternative prosecution under the DPA, which is what the Attorney General determined, and which kicked off the current scandal as other players in the party repeatedly attempted to strong-arm her into changing her mind.
I don’t dispute any of that, Sam, but if you could provide some links I’d be interested in reading them.
Here’s a decent overview: Deferred Prosecution Agreements Come into Force in Canada
Yes, that I’m familiar with.
I meant your comments about SNC-Lavalin’s history of corruption.
Well JWR and Pilpot are toast, the tribe has spoken
Is there something unfair about this, in your opinion? From the CBC article, “… trust with the two former cabinet ministers has been broken”. Yeah, when someone tapes a phone conversation with me and then makes sure it ends up with the media in a smear campaign, I’d say “trust has been broken”, wouldn’t you?
I’d say it was broken when the AG said the DPA didn’t apply, and Trudeau’s cronies didn’t accept her autonomy and kept pressuring her.
Northern Piper: Sorry, I forgot the other link. Here you go: A Closer Look at SNC-Lavalin’s Somewhat Murky Past.
The source is the CBC.