https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbCa6QGs31wEXPLAINED: Why should you care about the Justin Trudeau/ SNC Lavalin Affair? | Michelle Rempel
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-investigation-obstruction-quetions-1.5037252As RCMP lies in wait, legal minds ponder whether SNC-Lavalin scandal warrants criminal probe
'It's not clearly not obstruction,' says an Ottawa-based defence lawyer
Catharine Tunney CBC News Posted: Mar 01, 2019 4:00 AM ET
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According to the Criminal Code, obstructing justice covers
"everyone who wilfully attempts in any manner ... to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice."In her testimony, Wilson-Raybould said she faced intense political pressure and veiled threats related to the SNC-Lavalin affair, and was warned directly by Trudeau about the negative consequences if the company faced prosecution. SNC-Lavalin was facing corruption charges for contracts in Libya and was lobbying for a remediation agreement as an alternative to criminal prosecution.
Former Conservative justice minister Peter MacKay said there's enough from Wilson-Raybould's testimony to warrant further examination - either through a public inquiry or a criminal investigation.
"What's happened here is that
somebody in the office gave her the impression there would be consequences if she was not to follow the instructions, and when that didn't happen we know that she did lose her job," he said.
"I come back to the definition of the Criminal Code section which speaks of perverting justice, it speaks of interference, it speaks of in some way trying to shape the outcome of a prosecution, and the elements appear to be there."Criminal defence lawyer Joseph Neuberger said
an obstruction of justice charge wouldn't be hard to prove in court. He pointed to a meeting Gerry Butts, the prime minister's former principal secretary, had with Wilson-Raybould's trusted chief of staff Jessica Prince where he allegedly said, "There is no solution here that doesn't involve some interference."
"If that is not a smoking gun when it comes to actual interference and obstruction, I don't know what is," said Neuberger.
"This has stepped over the bounds of inappropriate; it has certainly crossed into the realm of criminal conduct."
Spratt said he doesn't think the case is a "slam dunk," for police and prosecutors, but "it's starting to sound a lot like obstruction."
Canadian Civil Liberties Association executive director Michael Bryant, who in the first few days of the scandal called for a police investigation, now says this issue isn't as clear cut.
"The evidence for obstruction of justice requires evidence of intent. So you need to have evidence of the prime minister intended to obstruct justice, and we didn't hear any of that," he said Thursday.
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https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2019/03/01/four-important-questions-in-the-snc-lavalin-scandal.htmlFour important questions in the SNC-Lavalin scandal
By Chantal Hébert Fri., March 1, 2019
MONTREAL-Another week of political drama on Parliament Hill finds the SNC-Lavalin affair no closer to closure. In the aftermath of Jody Wilson-Raybould's appearance at the Commons justice committee, even the future of the prime minister as Liberal leader has become fair game for speculation.
If anything, the former attorney general's testimony has left many Canadians with more questions than definitive answers.
Here are four more:
1. A central assumption in Wilson-Raybould's testimony is that given the same facts, any ethical attorney general would have come to the same conclusion and refused to use his or her discretion to overturn the public prosecutor's decision to pursue a criminal trial against SNC-Lavalin. But is that really the case?
To this day, her successor, David Lametti, along with the prime minister, has kept open the option of issuing a directive to spare the engineering firm the risk of a criminal conviction and a 10-year ban on bidding for federal contracts by offering it a deferred prosecution agreement in lieu of a trial.
This is a difference of opinion at least as fundamental to the understanding of this saga as each side's view of the pressures that attended Wilson-Raybould's refusal to take the route of a negotiated plea.
Inasmuch as she did not or could not share her rationale for declining to redirect the course of the federal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin and for resisting all overtures to reconsider her decision, it is hard to come to an informed judgment as to whether her thinking on this file was as unassailable as she makes it out to be.
One can doubt that it was and still find that the political lobbying she was subjected to was inappropriate.
2. The SNC-Lavalin file commanded an impressive amount of high-level political attention. But would an NDP or Conservative government have been any less responsive to the firm's lobbying?
It is no accident that in their French-language interviews, Conservative and New Democrat MPs from Quebec have been at pains to stress that their parties are not on a vendetta against SNC-Lavalin.
With 9,000 Canadian jobs potentially on the line, any responsible federal government would have taken the time to carefully weigh the option of mitigating the possible damage to the firm's future following a criminal conviction.
That is not to say a Conservative or an NDP government would have come to the same conclusion as Trudeau. But until allegations of political interference surfaced and even as they had been apprised by SNC-Lavalin of its efforts to secure a remediation agreement, neither party had shown any appetite for a fight with the Liberals over the issue.
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https://globalnews.ca/news/5012770/jody-wilson-raybould-snc-lavalin-david-lametti/March 1, 2019 4:18 pm
Lametti says he didn't know Wilson-Raybould rejected cutting SNC-Lavalin a deal when he took over
By Amanda Connolly
Attorney General David Lametti says he didn't know that his predecessor, Jody Wilson-Raybould, had already made a decision not to cut SNC-Lavalin a deal to avoid criminal trial when he took over the post and began learning about the matter before him.
He was also mum on whether knowing that would keep him from reversing the decision. (Reversing the decision would not look good for the Liberals. This is the second trap that they have set for themselves, not including the scandal and cover-up themselves. The first was Jody Wilson-Raybould, in that Trudeau cannot eject her from caucus without the appearance of further vindictiveness and meanness, yet she will still be there to taunt him [even by doing nothing] and possibly building support for herself within the ranks of Liberal MPs. - Loachman)
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https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/03/01/caught-in-the-snc-lavalin-scandal-canadas-top-civil-servant-should-help-us-understand-his-job-expert-says.htmlBy Alex Boutilier Ottawa Bureau
Fri., March 1, 2019
OTTAWA - Canada's top public servant should explain how he balances his role as the non-partisan head of the bureaucracy and the prime minister's deputy, according to one expert on the country's public service.
Prof. Donald Savoie, one of Canada's preeminent scholars on the public service, said that following reforms initiated in 1989, the role of the Privy Council clerk - the nation's top bureaucrat - has changed and he or she now walks a delicate line between public service neutrality and responsibility to the government of the day, whatever its stripe.
Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick - who has faced allegations of partisanship and opposition calls for his resignation over his testimony and role in the SNC-Lavalin affair - should tell Canadians how he manages to strike that balance, Savoie said.
"I think he owes it to the public service to explain how he squares the ... roles," Savoie, who teaches public administration at the Université of Moncton, told the Star on Thursday.
"I would be careful, however, to say that Wernick became partisan. I don't think we can accuse Wernick of being partisan … but I would say, though, I'm sure he has an explanation," Savoie added.
"So let's hear it, how he squares the role of deputy minister to the prime minister with his other … responsibilities."
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Because his testimony largely matched the Liberal government's version of events at the time, and because he suggested a Conservative senator should be condemned for using violent political imagery in a speech, pundits accused him of partisan support for the Trudeau government.
But the modern position of clerk actually combines three roles, Savoie said: the secretary of cabinet, the head of the non-partisan public service, and the deputy minister - or top bureaucrat - to the prime minister.
The three roles were combined into one position in the Public Service 2000 under reforms initiated by then-prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1989 - part of a reimaging of the role and function of the public service that took place in the United States and the United Kingdom around the same time.It was a monumental shift that public governance researchers are still writing about today.
One of the criticisms of the reforms was it encouraged senior public servants to engage in "promiscuous partisanship" in the words of the late scholar Peter Aucoin - a blurring of the line between the rough-and-tumble of politics and the dispassionate execution of the government's vision.Savoie said he didn't agree with the changes in 1989 and he doesn't agree with them now.
"I'm not sure it was ever tenable" for the three responsibilities to rest with one person, Savoie said.
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