Front Burner - “Troubling tactics” and the ethics report on Prime Minister Trudeau
Episode Date: August 15, 2019A report from the Ethics Commissioner Wednesday said Justin Trudeau and his office used “troubling tactics” in the SNC-Lavalin case. The CBC’s Vassy Kapelos breaks down what it all means, two mo...nths before the election.
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Hey, remember back in March when the SNC-Lavalin scandal dominated the news cycle?
There was this dramatic testimony on Parliament Hill from former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who argued that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was trying to help the company in an inappropriate way.
Various officials also urged me to take partisan political considerations into account,
which it was clearly improper for me to do so.
And from Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to Trudeau.
He said what happened with SNC-Lavalin
was politics as usual.
At no time did the prime minister
or anyone in the government direct
or ask the attorney general
to negotiate a remediation agreement.
March feels like a long time ago. Things have calmed down on the S&C front.
But Wednesday, it was vaulted back into the headlines once again.
The Ethics Commissioner released a report saying Prime Minister Trudeau violated the Ethics Act.
He used the words flagrant and troubling.
With two months to go before the election, what does this mean for Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party? Today, we're talking about this with Vashi Capellos.
She's the host of Power and Politics on CBC, and this is FrontBurner.
Vashi, thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
So before we talk about this ethics report, I want to review a few things because it's been a while since we talked about S&C on the show.
To start, can we do a quick recap of what this is all about?
How did we get here?
What have the last few months looked like for this scandal?
Well, we can.
It's very helpful to me as well because I feel like I was starting to forget.
Have you lost the plot? Yeah. We were very much to me as well, because I feel like I was starting to forget. Have you lost the plot?
Yeah, we were very much in it, though, when it all broke. So it was back in the beginning of February, the Globe and Mail released a report that basically said that Jody Wilson-Raybould had felt that people in the prime minister's office and the prime minister himself inappropriately pressured her to get involved as attorney general in a criminal case that was proceeding against
SNC-Lavalin. Now, SNC-Lavalin, it's important to understand, is a big company, engineering company,
construction company, headquartered in Quebec. Just take a look at the Montreal skyline and
you'll see SNC-Lavalin's work everywhere. The roof of the Olympic Stadium, the Mercier Bridge.
In 2017, SNC-Lavalin brought in $9.3 billion in revenue.
They were facing charges of bribery and corruption, pretty extensive criminal charges.
Today, the RCMP is alleging that SNC paid $47 million or more in bribes to officials in Libya
and committed fraud and deals there to the tune of $129 million.
And they were advocating, they had hoped to get what is known as a deferred prosecution
agreement.
We all talk about it now as a DPA.
But what it is, is something new that this government had brought in not long, you know,
in the 2018 budget implementation bill.
That's kind of like a plea deal for companies.
So say you're facing, you're a company, you're facing a big criminal charge.
In order to avoid getting convicted and therefore being barred from bidding on federal infrastructure projects.
You reach this deal, you either pay a huge sum of money or show that you've made a bunch of changes.
And that is sort of what you settle on instead of getting criminally convicted.
So she felt like the prime minister and others were, as Jody Wilson-Raybould felt, like she was being inappropriately pressured to intervene and make sure that they got that kind of plea deal.
There were express statements regarding the necessity of interference in the SNC-Lavalin matter, the potential of consequences, and veiled threats if a DPA was not made available to SNC.
And that's where this all started.
And that's where this all started.
And I think the argument, if I recall correctly, that Gerald Butts had admitted that this was being pursued because of worries about job losses at the company. The 9,000 plus people who could lose their jobs, as well as the many thousands more who work on the company's supply chain.
of all this, but also the prime minister himself, really insisted right until this very day that what they were motivated by was the fact that if the company was barred from bidding
on federal infrastructure projects, thousands of jobs were at stake.
Now, they never showed any sort of proof of that.
We don't know for certain that those jobs would be lost, but we do know that the company
was really concerned about the consequences, the economic consequences of not being able to bid on those infrastructure projects.
Right. Jody Wilson-Raybould gave testimony on Parliament saying that she felt pressured
by Trudeau and other officials. She even had the secret recording to back some of this
up, which we've heard before.
I think he's going to find a way to get it done one way or another. So he's in that kind of mood.
And then you have Gerald Butts giving testimony saying that nothing improper actually happened.
What I am here to do is to give evidence that what happened last fall
is in fact very different from the version of events you heard last week.
So, I mean, is this all just normal in the course of politics?
Well, what's so interesting is until the ethics commissioner released this report, there really was two very distinct, I guess you could call them sides to this story.
And at the end of the day, by the time the whole thing had sort of wrapped up, you really felt, or at least my sense was, that Canadians had fallen on one side or the other.
either believe there was wrongdoing committed by the prime minister and his staff, or they believe that Jody Wilson-Raybould maybe was motivated by something other than doing the right thing,
or that she saw things a certain way, but that was her perspective. And a lot of people also
felt that she shouldn't have made that recording that you referred to, which is a conversation she
had with, at that time, the clerk of the Privy Council. And she recorded it without his knowing,
and then released it towards the end of all the sort of public testimony that was going on around this controversy.
And when that cabinet minister is the Attorney General of Canada secretly recording the clerk
of the Privy Council, it's unconscionable.
So I think a lot of people felt like you could see it both ways or you either did
see it one way or the other.
Integrity is missing in politics.
And for someone to stand up for what she believes in, it takes a lot of guts.
Politics has this kind of thing.
You have to work together to solve the problems.
And if you cannot for any capacity, I think you should leave.
I think, and I'm sure we'll get into it, that that changes today for a lot of people. Wednesday, we see this report from the ethics commissioner.
And the big headline is that Justin Trudeau, quote, sought to influence the attorney general, end quote.
How did he do this?
Basically, the way that Jody Wilson-Raybould described that he did,
what the ethics commissioner does is go through testimony and submissions from everyone on the
prime minister's side and Jody Wilson-Raybould and people, you know, quote unquote, on her side,
people who worked for her. And the conclusion that he arrives at, as you say, is that he did
directly try to intervene in her decisions. And he goes over a number of meetings,
all of which Jody Wilson-Raybould first testified to,
you know, meetings where he brought up the idea of the Quebec election.
The prime minister jumped in, stressing that there is an election in Quebec
and that, quote, I am an MP in Quebec, the member for Papineau.
Or his staff brought up the future in the 2019 election.
Mathieu said, quote, we can brought up the future in the 2019 election.
Mathieu said, quote, we can have the best policy in the world, but we need to get re-elected. Or they talked about jobs, or they talked about having former Supreme Court justices give their
legal opinions. Could she not get an external legal opinion on whether the DPP had exercised
their discretion properly? And he sort of goes through all these instances and he lays out what he sees as essentially four
different things that were inappropriate and calls them troubling. And then comes to the
conclusion that basically Justin Trudeau was in those attempts able to further the private
interests of SNC. And that in and of itself, quote unquote,
contravenes Section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act.
So that's where he broke the ethics rules.
And I believe Section 9, it's not just enough to influence someone, correct?
There's actually a higher bar for a violation of Section 9.
And that higher bar is what Trudeau met.
Yeah, that's what the ethics commissioner is saying.
Now, Trudeau isn't sold on that, it seems., that's what the ethics commissioner is saying. Now, Trudeau isn't sold on that, it seems,
but that's what the ethics commissioner is saying,
that you're inappropriately intervening
and trying to advance the private interests of SNC.
So even if your intention was jobs or whatever it is,
at the end of the day,
SNC is better off for your intervention,
and that's not a good thing.
How does Beverly McLaughlin, the former Chief Justice of Canada, play into all of this? This is one of those new things that we learned that definitely my eyebrows were peaked when I read this.
were piqued when I read this.
What we knew from previous testimony was that the Prime Minister's office
had really tried to advocate for Jody Wilson-Raybould
as Attorney General getting an outside legal opinion.
So we know you've decided that you don't want to intervene,
but hey, don't you think it would be a good idea
to get someone like, hey, you know,
Beverly McLaughlin, a former Supreme Court justice
or some other retired Supreme Court justice
to weigh in and maybe give their take,
because it might be different than yours. They might raise something that you hadn't thought of.
Well, what this report makes clear is that actually, they had already gotten those opinions.
They had already gone to two former Supreme Court justices, sought those opinions, and then went to
Jody Wilson-Raybould and raised it like, hey, maybe you want to do this too, knowing full well,
I guess, what they would say. So it's just another one of those head scratchers that never became clear in the testimony
from members of the government or the staff of the prime minister's office previously. It just
all contributes to the sort of narrative like something ominous was going on behind the scenes.
Perhaps this wasn't as altruistic as they've said that it was.
Something else that I thought was interesting,
it stuck out to me when I was reading portions of the report,
was that the Office of the Ethics Commissioner said that there was a decision to deny access to some cabinet conferences that they, I guess, felt would be important
to see in their investigation.
Is that significant?
Is that what exactly is the implication of that?
It seems pretty significant because what the opposition is going to try to say is that
the prime minister and his delegates held back relevant info, that they weren't as forthcoming
as they should have been.
If Justin Trudeau believes that he did nothing wrong, if he believes that he has nothing
to hide, he should let the light of day shine upon this entire scandal.
And in fact, the ethics commissioner himself really goes over in detail what kind of information
he was seeking.
He says that nine witnesses informed his office that they had information that they thought
was relevant and they wanted to give it over, but they couldn't because of cabinet confidences so then he goes to the guy who's
replaced michael wernick who was a controversial figure himself during the whole thing as clerk of
the prevy council and his name is ian shugart and he says okay mr shugart you got to waive these
confidences so that i can get this information and mr shugart says and he actually even raises
it to mr trudeau to prime the prime minister says, I'm having trouble getting this info. Can you make sure that we get that cabinet confidence waived so I can get it? And Justin Trudeau says that, okay, he'll see what can happen type of thing. But the clerk basically says no, or does say no, and doesn't allow for cabinet confidence to be waived and therefore that information to be shared. And so basically he concludes, the ethics commissioner concludes,
that he didn't have all the relevant info or he couldn't conduct kind of a full examination
of the evidence in order to arrive at the conclusions that he did.
And that is pretty interesting.
And Justin Trudeau was asked about that yesterday and he was very vague in his answers.
Like, why wouldn't you waive cabinet confidence?
Why wouldn't you just provide everything that the ethics commissioner needed? It was not a small thing for our government to
decide to waive both solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidence. And he sort of danced
around the answer and then said something along the lines of, and I'm paraphrasing here,
he didn't want to set a precedent for that kind of thing. And I believe during that same press conference that Trudeau spoke at yesterday,
and we'll get more to the substance of what else he had to say in a bit, but I believe he also
says something about them turning over the cabinet confidences that were relevant to the investigation.
The decision by the Privy Council to not further extend into less relevant or non-relevant elements of cabinet
confidentiality and solicitor-client privilege is an important one that maintains the integrity of
our institutions and our capacity to function as a government. What do we take away from that? Is he
making a determination around what is and isn't relevant in this case? Yeah, and he was kind of trying to assure Canadians, like, don't worry,
we made sure everything relevant was handed over, again, to seem very transparent. The problem is,
my guess is, critics will say, is it really up to you to determine that relevancy? If the witnesses
who want to provide that information deem it to be relevant, they say, from their own perspective,
that it's relevant. Isn't it up to the ethics commissioner then to get that information and make the determination himself? Why is it that the prime minister is
determining what evidence is relevant and not? So what happens now? What consequences might
Justin Trudeau face because of this report? Well, there are no real consequences insofar
as the ethics commissioner is concerned, because the ethics commissioner just comes to this finding,
there's no penalties, no fines attached to it, nothing. And actually, that's sort of like a subject for another day.
But the ethics commissioner has asked for more teeth, has asked to be able to levy penalties
and steeper penalties. So there's no actual consequence to this. However, I mean, taking
a step back or a thousand steps back and looking down over the election, that's basically about
two months to the day away or two months and a week and a half away, there could be very real consequences.
So a few hours after this report drops, Trudeau has a press conference in Niagara-on-the-Lake,
and he answers some questions. He reads a statement. He responds to this report.
First off, I want to thank the ethics commissioner for his report. And even though I disagree
with some of his conclusions, I fully accept this report.
What was the substance of what he had to say?
So it was kind of like, I'm a bit sorry. I kind of disagree with what the ethics commissioner says.
I do take responsibility and will try to fix things going forward.
It was a very confusing press conference, in my humble opinion.
Did he ever actually apologize?
I was sort of thinking right before the press conference,
okay, is this going to be a real may a couple?
Will he come out and say, I accept the findings, I was wrong, and I'm sorry.
That didn't happen i can't apologize for standing up for canadian jobs because that's part of what canadians expect me to do and he actually said he disagreed with a certain finding of the
ethics commissioner that was sort of central to the overall conclusions that the ethics commissioner
drew and the finding that he disagreed with was the idea that he shouldn't have communicated at all.
The prime minister shouldn't have communicated at all with the attorney general.
So that was something clear that the ethics commissioner made in the report that leave it to the prosecution.
Because this involved SNC and furthering their interest, the prime minister should not have talked to the attorney general.
So he says he disagrees with that.
We need to be able to talk about the impacts on Canadians right across the country of decisions being made.
There was no sort of like, I had some ethical lapses in judgment, you know?
How have the opposition parties tried to play this in response?
Well, it's like Christmas came early for them today.
Although I will say that a couple of them texted me saying, if only this happened on October 17th.
So I think they even recognize that something like this can fade from the public's consciousness.
Anyway, they are attempting to seize on it.
The conservatives are saying that this is further reason, more reason for the RCMP to investigate.
There are several key witnesses who are unable to testify
to the ethics commissioner because Justin Trudeau blocked that from happening. So I certainly do
believe that there is enough here to warrant a further investigation. They are continuing to
frame the idea that this is a prime minister who breaks ethical rules, who doesn't live up to the
standards that he set. He promised he would be different. Instead,
we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Justin Trudeau is not as advertised. Jagmeet Singh is
positioning himself a little bit differently in criticizing, and he has really since the beginning,
the NDP has the idea of SNC winning favor and that the Liberals help their friends out in high places,
but they're not out for the rest of us type of thing the prime minister was working to benefit the interest of a multi-millionaire corporation
and was working to benefit his own self-interest to get re-elected this is just unacceptable and
he's saying that's what you'll get with the conservatives too and pointing to some sort of
ethical scandals with them for example example, with Mike Duffy,
and saying, you know, if you vote for either of them, you're going to get somebody who isn't very ethical, but you won't if you vote for us type of thing. There's a choice to vote for new Democratic
MPs who will put people at the heart of everything we do. So both opposition parties certainly are
trying to seize on this. What's interesting, though, what SNC shows us from the past is
they haven't necessarily been able to. While the Liberals lost a lot of popularity due to SNC,
no one party was single-handedly able to capitalize on it and take all those votes
for themselves. It was kind of distributed among others or just people who didn't end
up caring too much for anybody. So whether that changes this time around will be interesting to see.
So I know in the last few weeks, the Liberals have rebounded in the polls.
They're now in a near tie with the Conservative Party.
And sure, it's early.
But I'm wondering how this is going to influence the next two months before the election,
because it certainly looked like people had begun to move on from the SNC affair. This is something that had started to fade
from people's memories. The liberals were doing better. And now where does this leave us in the
run up to the election? Yeah, and the polls totally back that up, right? Like popular support had
rebounded since February and March when it hit a real kind of low for the Liberals.
And in fact, if you look at the way in which that popular support translated to seats,
they were doing in the past two weeks better than they had since February.
The seat projection right now, it's more or less still a toss-up, but it is favoring the Liberals, that the Liberals would be more likely to win more seats with these kinds of numbers.
This is the first time we've had the Liberals leading in the seat projection since more or
less once the SNC-Lavalin affair broke in February. February, it was not pretty for the
Liberals after that. And for months, the SNC thing kind of stuck to them. And you're absolutely right.
It just started to fade all of a sudden. The question is whether this sets the dial back
again. And I don't know. It's really hard to be able to say that. I think that there is something
about the issue of ethics that strikes a chord with that. I think that there is something about the issue of ethics that
strikes a chord with voters. I think that that narrative, because Trudeau came in on this idea
of doing things differently, because the mandate letters for ministers explicitly say you have to
hold yourself to the highest standard possible, not just within the letter of the law, but an
even higher standard, because he promised so much.
I think it's a contrast that voters will be able to draw fairly easily.
You know, this isn't exactly what we thought we were getting.
Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways.
That doesn't mean, though, that the election won't be about other things, that other scandals won't come out, or that there aren't judgments to be made of the way in which other political parties and leaders have conducted themselves too. But I do think when so much of the
2015 election was about who Trudeau was and his popularity, if that is deflated or diluted in
this election, it could pose a serious problem for the liberals. Well, you bet we'll be having
you back on the show over the next couple of months. Vashti, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
So after I talked to Vashti, we also heard from Jody Wilson-Raybould, who is running as an independent in the upcoming election.
She released a statement about the ethics commissioner's report, essentially saying that it backs up the position she's held on the SNC-Lavalin affair all along and underscores the importance of an independent attorney general.
That's all for today.
I'm Matthew Braga.
Talk to you tomorrow.
For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.
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