Howard Anglin responds to an early excerpt from former Trudeau cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould:
Jody Wilson-Raybould, 30 January, 2014.
Photo by Erich Saide via Wikimedia Commons.
Reading the first excerpt of her book, I did find myself occasionally cocking an eyebrow at the portrayal of a wide-eyed innocent who somehow awoke to find herself in a den of partisan thieves.
It was, after all, the Liberal Party she had joined — the most ruthless and successful vote-winning machine in Western politics this side of Mexico’s PRI — not the parish altar guild.
But setting aside questions of systemic hypocrisy and looking only at the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio, it is as clear today as it was in 2019 that Wilson-Raybould was right and Trudeau was wrong.
She was right as attorney general to rebuff political pressure to offer SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement — a slap on the wrist that would have seen the engineering and construction company avoid criminal conviction and remain eligible for more federal contracts — and Trudeau and his office were wrong to pressure her to consider it.
Now, she is fully justified in reminding us of that fact. And if the book’s self-righteousness message is belied by the calculated timing of its release, well, she has earned the right to say “I told you so” at the time of her choosing.
As far as the election goes, the most important revelations are about Trudeau’s character.
To constitutional law nerds like me, however, the highlight is Wilson-Raybould’s disagreement with the prime minister over the role of the Attorney Genereal, including her description of a freshly briefed Trudeau expatiating scholastically on the nuances of the Shawcross doctrine before she drily punctures his condescension with the comment: “You have been talking to a lawyer.”
Coming from someone who was until a few weeks earlier “his” lawyer, at least in his capacity as head of government, the comment is doubly ironic.
Wilson-Raybould had, by her account, explained the doctrine and its implications at length to Trudeau, as well as to his principal secretary, Gerry Butts, and the Clerk, neither of whom is a lawyer but both of whom were nevertheless dispatched to try to explain their version of it to her and her lawyer chief of staff.
