Thanks. Will take a look.
Lawyers say Jody Wilson-Raybould may not have broken the law but her decision to tape a conversation with the privy council clerk may have crossed ethical lines.
… Rebecca Bromwich, a lawyer and professor at Carleton University, says there is a certain expectation in any workplace that people will act ethically even if their behaviour doesn’t violate the law.
“Anytime a conversation is being recorded and then released publicly that becomes a really live issue of trust,” Bromwich says. “There is an ethics of collegiality versus the letter of the law. And, as a professional and as a lawyer, I expect you to abide by an ethics of collegiality.”
That’s nice and all, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but doesn’t change the fact that Trudeau attempted to violate a fundamental principle of our system of governance and refused to take no for an answer. That some of the evidence for this was obtained in a shady fashion does nothing to exonerate him. Also, blaming Wilson-Raybould for attempting to cover her own ass when she saw that she was about to be thrown under the bus for standing up for that principle seems rather petty. It is probably impossible for her to continue in the Liberal Party at this point, but it should never have got to this point and it’s the PMO to blame for that.
SNC-Lavalin whistleblower comes forward with new allegations
According to an insider from SNC-Lavalin who is now talking to authorities, the company has actually been borrowing money from the Export Development Bank to fund bribes, and bribing officials is standard operating procedure for the company.
And these are the guys who were supposed to be let off the hook by invoking a deferred prosecution agreement designed for companies who accidentally fall afoul of the rules and have no history of doing such things and who have implemented steps to prevent it from happening in the future. If Wilson-Reybould had used that tool, it would have been a dereliction of her office. She knew it, but Trudeau’s peole and Trudeau himself were too stupid to understand, or too beholden to special interests to let the issue be dealt with properly.
The companies that lost those bids because of dirty dealings are the ones really hurt. And, of course, the taxpayers. But hey, it kept those crooked dollars flowing into the right political hands, so let’s all look the other way, shall we?
You did notice that this whistle blowing is tied to activities in 2011? SNC’s argument for being a candidate for the DPP, such as it is, lies with new corporate governance, new leadership and board. All of which apparently has happened.
Now I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them but this revelation is new only as an addition to its previous bribery issues.
It does raise keys points about EDC’s auditing process back in the 2010-2012 time span. Luckily they’re an arms length crown corp so we wont have to worry about histrionics about the Harper government.
The resignations at the top of SNC-Lavalin were because those people actually pleaded guilty to crimes. I don’t consider it reasonable governance to only fire executives when they actually have to plead guilty to felonious behavior in a court of law.
The Deferred Prosecution Agreement actually says that it matters HOW the company changes the executive and its practices. It is supposed to apply to companies whose own self-policing and self-reporting detected and exposed the wrongdoers. For example, a company ombudsman gets a tip from a whistleblower that an executive bribed an official. The company fires the executive, implements new controllership, and reports the infraction to the government. Such a company does not deserve a 10 year ban on contracts. That’s the logic of the DPA.
SNC-Lavalin has been convicted of offenses many times, over many years, and perpetrated by many people. It had actual bogus expense classifications specifically put in place to hide bribe money. Its shenanigans didn’t stop in 2011-2012, but continue to this day. The last guilty plea from that company came down just two months ago.
I have worked for big companies. I worked for one that had a problem with a sales manager giving bribes. He was fired, the company used his case in new training materials to make sure everyone understood what he did wrong, and we had to take classes that specifically went through various scenarios and we had to identify the ethical failings in each one. Then they put in a new Ombudsman and made his phone number part of the training, and we were all told that there was zero tolerance for cheating or bribery, and that there would be no consequences for whistleblowing.
That’s the kind of thing companies are expected to do when they discover malfeasance in their ranks, and that’s how they protect themselves from corporate punishment. Those are the companies the DPA was designed for. Not a company that apparently treats the buying of politicians as formalized, standard procedure as is apparently the case at SNC-Lavalin. They do it in foreign countries, and they do it in Canada.
I would really love to see that list of the Canadian politicians who benefited from SNC-Lavalin’s little kickback scheme to violate campaign finance laws and hide corporate donations to Liberals behind individual donations. My guess is that we might find one or two people close to the current scandal.
I suspect you’re right.
Yes, that’s pretty shocking corruption alright. It’s all the more disturbing because Export Development Canada is a Crown corporation accountable to the federal government and reporting to the Minister for International Trade. The feds even appoint its board members. And SNC Lavalin was paying many of its bribes with EDC money!
And who was the Prime Minister responsible for federal oversight during this period when SNC Lavalin was not only bribing corrupt officials all over the world, but doing it in collaboration with EDC and with funds helpfully provided by EDC, a de facto agency of the federal government? Why, none other than your beloved upstanding former Conservative leader Stephen Harper! But it’s all Trudeau’s fault! :rolleyes:
Sorry, but you are just reaching now. No one blames Trudeau for what happened before he was Prime Minister, and Harper is long gone. Nice try at deflection, though.
No reaching, no deflection – you’re the one regaling us with all these stories about SNC Lavalin’s alleged corrupt practices over many years, and I’m just pointing out that those many years spanned both Liberal and Conservative governments. So one wonders about the relevance of these tales in a discussion about Trudeau. Are we to believe that no one in the Harper government had a clue about all the bribery that SNC Lavalin was involved in – over the span of nine years that they governed – despite all the public findings of guilt and their close working association with EDC? If Trudeau appears to have given them a pass for reasons of realpolitik, it appears he was hardly alone.
But it’s not about which governments were in power when the corruption happened. The point is that the company has established a very long history of corrupt practices which made it ineligible for the Deferred Prosecution agreement. You’re the one trying to flip this into an attack on Harper, who has absolutely nothing to do with whether the company should have been given a deferred prosecution.
Let’s put it this way - even if the CEO of SNC-Lavalin was giving Harper a daily BJ, it wouldn’t change the fact that SNC-Lavalin is corrupt, has a long history of corruption, and therefore shouldn’t be a candidate for the DPA. Which is what the attorney general concluded.
If you want to go after Harper for enabling corruption, then do it. Show us the evidence in another thread and we can debate it. But whether he did or not has NOTHING to do with the current debate. It’s a hijack.
Is that what this is all about? The DPA? I’m not aware of all the details of what was being suggested to Wilson-Reybould or what her legal options may have been with or without the DPA. And I think your unquestioning conclusion that the DPA absolutely would not apply is far from clear, as all or most of the individuals involved in the scandals you’ve been citing are long gone. Note that even before the DPA there was such a thing as “prosecutorial discretion”, and note also that other countries (like the US, for instance) have had their own versions of the same thing for longer than we have.
In disclaiming the applicability of the DPA you seem to be trying to imply that SNC Lavalin in its entirety is essentially a criminal organization, which is ridiculous. No, it’s a multi-billion dollar company with over 50,000 employees and operations in 160 countries. They need consideration, too, not just convicted former executives.
My Dad was a surety bondsman. Basically, he underwrote large construction projects. Dad’s projects included the Coquihalla Highway in BC, Calgary Airport, and Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. He guaranteed the completion of these projects. And they we completed, and Dad collected his fee. (He did kick himself once because he had the opportunity to underwrite the completion of Skydome in Toronto, but he turned it down, thinking, “That roof will never work.”)
Dad would absolutely not touch a project in Quebec. Why? “Because Quebec engineers and contractors are corrupt. They expect bribes.” Since he was not willing to bribe anybody, he simply did not do business in Quebec. He had plenty of other projects that interested and engaged him, from Newfoundland to British Columbia.
An anecdote is never data, especially here on the SDMB, but I think Dad’s refusal to underwrite Quebec projects is significant. Dad was not shy about saying that the construction business in Quebec was corrupt. Given what we’re seeing about SNC-Lavalin today, it seems that Dad had the right idea.
Lavalin broke the law, yes? The DPA was meant to be used if the infraction seems to be an isolated activity and the company is proactively making changes to root it out. Lavalin has a history of these issues and only fired the people who got caught. It’s as simple as that – no implications of anything else is necessary. I haven’t seen a single lawyer on the news channels say Lavalin is a good test case/poster child to qualify for a DPA. They all said the opposite, actually.
So who do you think they should have fired? The innocent ones, too? All 50,000 employees?
Not a single lawyer? You need to get out more. Or switch channels once in a while. Donald Johnson is a former Liberal, true, but also a former AG and secretary general of the OECD during the time that the Anti-Bribery Convention was adopted, so maybe he knows a thing or two that is worth listening to.
That same article also quotes the Canadian Bar Association as stating that “debarment [from procurement contracts] can lead to the kinds of harm to blameless persons that DPAs are intended to avoid. … An automatic five-to-10 year debarment carries significant consequences and may effectively dissolve a firm that is highly dependent on government contracts.”
Thank god you found a partisan hack to back you up. Too bad he wasn’t still AG, then we never would have heard about this.
Heh, fun fact: the guy who wrote that opinion piece served in père Trudeau’s cabinet.
It’s interesting seeing someone ostensibly on the left trying his best to hand-wave away the behaviour of a corrupt mega corporation.
Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed.
Trudeau’s Liberals blew it by not forcing proportional representation through when he had the chance, for the ongoing splits in the left might make the difference in whether or not the Conservatives get a majority now that the never-ending corruption of SNC-Laval and allegations of it having at times involved the Quebec Liberals are back in the public’s eye.
That’s the first time I ever heard anyone suggest proportional representation as being a benefit to one of the major parties. But I guess you’re not quite saying that. You’re saying they should have passed PR so as to deny the Conservatives a majority in this one election in the wake of a scandal.
Yeah, can’t see that as “blowing it”.