Quotulatiousness

May 18, 2019

Justin Trudeau expects more than just ordinary loyalty from civil servants

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Post Millennial, Mika Ryu summarizes Trudeau’s un-statesman-like behaviour through the Admiral Norman persecution — including his decision not to be in the house when a motion was passed apologizing to Norman — and offers an explanation for Trudeau’s oddities:

… according to a Globe and Mail report published around 6am on Friday by their Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife, who also broke the SNC-Lavalin story in February of this year.

In the new bombshell report, Mr. Trudeau is alleged to have been furious about the leak that prevented the Liberal government from cancelling a massive ship building contract that was already well on its way to being executed.

The prime minister is alleged to have felt “betrayed” by the leak, after “all he had done” for the public service after a decade under Harper. This is very similar to the reason why he yelled at MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes when she told him that she would not run for re-election.

It is becoming clear that defeating Harper has turned Trudeau into a hero in his own mind, for which the entire country and all of its citizen owe him an infinite debt.

It was already known that the Privy Council Office had called in the RCMP to investigate the person behind the collapse of a would-be sweetheart deal for the well-connected “Rockefellers of Atlantic Canada”. This was a very unusual move, which was supported by alleged “Irving’s Boy”.

It continues to paint a troubling picture of the prime minister, a man who perhaps might not have “been so forward” with his corruption if he knew that the national newspapers would report on it, even in the face of the state’s increasing use of sinister carrots and sticks in the run-up to the election.

May 13, 2019

The political persecution of Vice-Admiral Norman

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Conrad Black on the recently stayed prosecution of the former Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman:

The RCMP, the same Palooka force that brought us the ghastly fiasco of the trial and resounding acquittal of Senator Mike Duffy, alleged that Vice Adm. Norman was the source of press leaks, and searched his house with a warrant in January 2017, a fact that was also mysteriously leaked to the press. He was suspended with full pay, and finally, in March of 2018, he was charged with a criminal breach of trust. The government barred him from the benefit of the loan of money for legal fees to accused government employees pending judgment, a capricious attempt to starve him into surrender.

Neither the media, usually pretty quick to jump on the back of any defendant, nor any other serious observers, believed the defendant, who started in the navy as a diesel mechanic and rose for 33 years to commander of the fleet and then serve as vice-chief of the defence staff, would do such a thing, or that the RCMP had any real evidence. It didn’t, inciting the suspicion that the Mounties, if they can’t raise their game, should stick to musical rides and selling ginger ale, and reinforcing the view that the Armed Forces should be funded properly, and not just in phony announcements every few years of naval construction and army and air force procurement programs that don’t happen. And It is, in any case unacceptable that police corporals get warrants to search the home of the second highest military officer in the country on grounds that are eventually shown to be unfounded.

It appears to be clear that exculpatory evidence was withheld by the prosecutors, deliberately or otherwise. Outgoing Liberal MP and parliamentary secretary Lt. Gen. (Rt.) Andrew Leslie (a grandson of two former defence ministers, Gen. Andrew McNaughton and Brooke Claxton), had announced he would testify on behalf of Vice Adm. Norman. The prime minister ducked out of question period for two days as this contemptible abuse of prosecution collapsed. Instead, he should, if conscientiously possible, have blamed it on the former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould. That would have been believable, given some of her other antics in that office.

If he can’t do that, then this rotten egg falls on him and could be a politically mortal blow. The SNC-Lavalin affair was an attempt to save jobs in Canada and avoid over-penalization of a successful international company where there is a legal right for the justice department to choose between a fine and criminal prosecution. It was bungled, a ludicrous amateur hour that brought down senior civil servants and led to expulsions of ex-cabinet ministers as Liberal MPs, but it was not a show-stopper unless the prime minister lied to Parliament.

This appears to be a malicious and illegal prosecution of a blameless senior serving officer, who fought his corner as a brave man must. If that is what it is, heads should roll, not of scapegoats, token juniors, or fall-guys, but of those responsible for this outrage.

May 9, 2019

MV Asterix delivers for the Royal Canadian Navy and breach of trust charge is dropped

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Amid rumours that the Trudeau government is contemplating dropping the charge against Admiral Mark Norman, Matthew Fisher retweeted a link to his article from last year, praising the ship and suggesting that it should be renamed in honour of the man who did everything he could to get the RCN’s only current replenishment ship to sea:

MV Asterix
Photo via Canadian Defence Review

Aboard MV Asterix and HMCS Charlottetown – The Trudeau government would have fits, but the Royal Canadian Navy should consider renaming the MV Asterix the HMCS Admiral Mark Norman.

The controversial new replenishment ship, which entered service on time and on budget this past January, has been performing brilliantly for the navy during sea trials. That was the unanimous opinion of sailors on HMCS Charlottetown and on MV Asterix after a series of refuelling exercises with the Canadian frigate and American destroyers during a hunt for three U.S. nuclear subs that I witnessed recently in the Caribbean.

The only hiccup during the five-day war game was on the American side. The crew on one of the destroyers was unable to establish a good seal on the fuel probe Asterix sent over as the vessels sailed at 15 knots in a two-metre sea with about 30 metres of water between them. However, it only took about 10 minutes to fix the problem.

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, who ran the RCN before becoming the military’s second-in-command, strongly supported leasing or buying Asterix. The admiral was suspended early last year and subsequently charged with breach of trust for allegedly violating cabinet confidences. He is accused of passing on information pertaining to doubts that the Trudeau government was believed to have had about leasing the vessel. Although there were strong signals that it wanted out of the deal, the government eventually decided to honour a contract that Davie had with the Harper government to lease Asterix for five years at will be a cost of $677 million,according to the Globe and Mail.

“I think the Asterix is fantastic,” said Chief Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Parsons, the Charlottetown’s chief bosun’s mate, who oversaw two approximately hour-long, problem-free fuel transfers from the tanker to his warship. “We have missed that capability since (HMCS) Preserver was retired in 2014” because of electrical problems and corrosion.

Parsons’ opposite number on Asterix, CPO2 Steve Turgeon, served on the 48-year old Preserver until 2013. Since January he has been training four deck crews of 11 navy sailors each to handle refuellings. This has allowed Canada to once again be an independent blue-water navy after several years in which it depended on NATO allies and leased Chilean and Spanish navy tankers for fuel at sea. A fresh group of navy sailors has just begun training on the Asterix, which is participating with two Canadian frigates in the vast U.S.-led, 25-nation Rim of the Pacific naval exercise off Hawaii this month.

And on the legal front:

Later in the day, the news was finally made official: the government has dropped the charge and Vice-Admiral Mark Norman wants his job back:

The newly exonerated Vice-Admiral Mark Norman says he was alarmed by the persistent belief among senior government officials that he was guilty, and that their false assumptions took a significant financial and emotional toll on him and on his family.

On Wednesday, prosecutors stayed the single criminal charge of breach of trust laid against Norman, a major victory for the senior naval officer who has always maintained his innocence in the face of allegations he leaked confidential information about a project to procure a supply ship for the Royal Canadian Navy. In announcing the decision, Crown prosecutor Barbara Mercier told the court it was necessary in part due to new evidence the defence produced in March.

“This new information definitely provided greater context to the conduct of Vice-Admiral Norman, and it revealed a number of complexities in the process that we were not aware of,” Mercier said. “Based on the new information, we have come to the conclusion that given the particular situation involving Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, there is no reasonable prospect of conviction in this case.”

She did not provide any details on what exactly that information was.

The announcement ends the two-year legal battle against the officer and heads off what would have been a politically explosive trial for the Liberal government in the middle of a federal election campaign.

A fascinating little detail is also reported:

[Admiral Norman only] learned from a reporter’s question that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had announced the government would pay for his legal fees. “Wow,” was all he could muster in response. In 2017, the Department of National Defence had denied Norman’s request for financial assistance, concluding he was likely guilty.

So even though they’re finally making the right gestures, they still manage to be as ungracious as humanly possible while doing so. It’s not the kind of reputation you’d want to encourage.

May 6, 2019

QotD: Political scandals

Filed under: Business, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you say “Clinton scandal,” the first thing that comes to mind for most people, at least for those of us old enough to have been around for Bill Clinton’s presidency, is Monica Lewinsky. That’s a shame: I am convinced that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cattle-futures shenanigans were in fact a much more serious offense as a matter of public corruption. But most people don’t understand futures trading. Everybody understands diddling the interns. Nobody understands finance. Everybody understands sex.

(Except Objectivists.)

That’s why financial scandals rarely end political careers, but sex scandals often do, especially for Republicans.

Kevin D. Williamson, “Fanciful Trump ‘Scandals'”, National Review, 2017-04-16.

April 7, 2019

Justin’s SNC-Lavalin swamp … how deep does it go?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For a penny-ante scandal where there’s no hint of sexual impropriety or unmarked bundles of bills being passed along in brown paper bags, Justin’s SNC-Lavalin scandal looks more and more interesting the more we look at it:

A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould.

It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist — Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post — has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story.

The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It’s bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money.

The Trudeau-SNC-Lavalin scandal is so much more, involving the corruption of the supposedly non-partisan civil service, and even the judiciary, for the political benefit of a disgraced political party, and a cover-up endorsed, encouraged and actively engaged in by the sitting Members of Parliament of that political party.

[…]

Which brings us to the ticking-timebomb-evidence the committee and the public didn’t get to hear.

In between the appearances by Butts and Warnick, Wilson-Raybould testified to getting a report from her chief of staff who had had a meeting with Butts and Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford. They aggressively pushed the attorney general to get an “outside” opinion from someone like the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Beverley McLachlin, on dropping the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin in favour of a non-criminal plea deal.

Wilson-Raybould took contemporary notes of what her staff member told her.

    “My COS (chief of staff…ed) asked what if the opinion comes saying “She can review it, but she shouldn’t” or simply “She can’t review it” end of story? Mr. Butts stated “It wouldn’t say that.”

BOOM!!!!!!

Read what Butts said again. And again. And again.

“IT WOULDN’T SAY THAT”

H/T to Halls of Macademia and Small Dead Animals for the link.

April 6, 2019

SNC-Lavalin – Justin couldn’t admit that he was wr… wr… wr… not right

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the Prime Minister’s odd decision not to get ahead of the SNC-Lavalin scandal while he still had some credibility with the public:

It seems like another century, but was in fact only a few weeks ago, that Justin Trudeau had a plausible plan to cauterize the SNC-Lavalin wound within his party: He would apologize for … something.

Presumably he would not apologize for trying to protect 9,000 jobs, and presumably he would not admit improper interference in the attorney general’s and director of public prosecution’s roles. But perhaps he might cop to overzealousness in concern for those jobs, or for poorly communicating his entirely appropriate concerns, or for the various anonymous party sources who were slagging off Jody Wilson-Raybould to friendly journalists.

The latter, certainly, seemed downright imperative. Trudeau and his minions, either under orders or self-assigning, had snatched calamity from the jaws of bother. They were badmouthing an accomplished Indigenous female lawyer for being headstrong, “difficult to work with,” and various other descriptors commonly attached to Type A women when they behave like Type A men. When they ran out of those, they started insinuating she wasn’t a very good justice minister — which is certainly an arguable point, but which rather clashed with Trudeau’s insistence she would still hold that title if not for Scott Brison’s impending departure.

It was absolutely torching their brand. People were laughing in their faces. Something had to be done. And this stand-by-for-contrition narrative was lent some credence, fittingly enough, by anonymous sources. “A senior government official said one of the options being discussed is for Trudeau to ‘show some ownership over the actions of his staff and officials’ in their dealings with his former attorney general,” CBC reported on March 5.

Floating a trial balloon to measure potential reactions is not often prelude to the sincerest of apologies. But in the end, no real apology was forthcoming. The brand-torching continued unabated. And by Wednesday this week, the Anonymous Sources had come full circle: Wilson-Raybould had set various extraordinary conditions for remaining in Cabinet, they told various outlets.

One of them was that Trudeau apologize.

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells wonders why SNC-Lavalin has shaken the Liberals so much:

How did this scandal manage to rattle this government so profoundly? And the best answer I can find is this: Because it reveals truths about this Prime Minister that shake many Canadians’ confidence in him.

As my moral betters in the newspaper columns never tire of repeating, by many standards the SNC-Lavalin mess is quite modest. It seems probable that no money changed hands improperly in 2018 and no law was broken. The protagonists were motivated mostly by a kind of distracted hunch that jobs might be at stake. I mean, the extent to which they had zero evidence for that is breathtaking, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. And also by a similarly vague suspicion that it might be bad for branded Liberal candidates if SNC ran into trouble ahead of a Quebec or federal election.

[…]

Finally, all three of these scandalettes have laid bare a stubbornly ramshackle approach to running what has sometimes been a serious country. When flying to India, sure, pack your embroidered sherwani and your convicted attempted murderer, but also maybe bring along a travel plan, a sales pitch and a list of objectives worth achieving. Especially if your ineptitude is about to guarantee you will never get a second chance to visit India.

On SNC, what emerges from all the testimony is the impression that a dozen kids from the McGill debating team snuck into the abandoned ruins of Ottawa and started pretending to be the government of Canada. Jody complained to Bill that Elder and Ben were being mean to Jessica. Justin sent Michael but somehow Michael didn’t have the Section 13 ruling Jody had sent to Mathieu. Then it was Christmas and they all went home for a month.

Where the hell were the 208,000 public servants whose job was to ensure options were explored and workflows respected? Why, in September, when Wernick says everyone was distracted by NAFTA, did nobody at the weekly deputy ministers’ meeting say, “Well, there’s only room for 10 people at the NAFTA table, so why don’t the rest of us strike a working group of officials from Justice, Finance, Innovation and the Privy Council to ride this SNC puppy until we know what’s what?”

I’m pretty sure the reason this didn’t happen is that Butts found it thrilling to have all the important conversations run through his phone. That’s a bush-league reason to stumble into a government-shaking mess.

April 4, 2019

LPC Omertà in action

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Omertà, according to Wikipedia, is “a Southern Italian code of honor and code of silence that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders; and willfully ignoring and generally avoiding interference with the illegal activities of others.” It’s also a remarkably appropriate way to describe the Liberal Party of Canada’s standard operating procedure:

“Ultimately the choice that is before you,” Jody Wilson-Raybould pleaded with her caucus colleagues, in a letter written hours before they were to pass sentence on her, “is about what kind of party you want to be a part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up.”

But they made that choice long ago. They knew what kind of party they wanted to be a part of from the moment they accepted their nominations; indeed, were they not the type of person that party attracts they would not have been recruited for it. It is the kind of party, and person, that unquestioningly puts loyalty to party before principle — and mercilessly punishes those who do not.

So on the question of whether to expel the former minister of justice and attorney general — along with the former Treasury Board president, Jane Philpott — for the crime of denouncing the attempt, by the prime minister and senior government officials, to interfere with a criminal prosecution, there could have been little doubt how they would vote.

Whether they chose to shoot the messengers so spontaneously, over Justin Trudeau’s objections, as some reports have claimed — they were “determined to take the matter into their own hands,” according to a Canadian Press story, as if MPs were so eager to prove their obedience to the leader as to be willing to defy him — or whether they did so under orders doesn’t much matter. The rotting of the soul is the same either way.

We can now see, if it were not already apparent, the moral compass by which the prime minister and his caucus steer. The scandal in the SNC-Lavalin affair is, by this reckoning, not the months-long campaign to subvert the independence of the attorney general and, through her, to force the independent director of public prosecutions to drop charges of fraud and corruption against a long-time Liberal party contributor, but the opposition to it.

Traditional political theory teaches that the executive branch of government is responsible to the legislative. It is now clearer than ever that the reverse more nearly applies: members of the Liberal caucus plainly see it as their role, not to hold the government to account, but rather their fellow MPs — on behalf of the government. When wrongdoing by those high in government is alleged by a pair of whistleblowers, their first thought is to root out the whistleblowers.

March 10, 2019

There’s something bigger at stake in the SNC-Lavalin affair than Trudeau’s career

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley explains why SNC-Lavalin is an example of Canada’s less-than-stellar record of holding corporations to account:

… University of Michigan law professor David Uhlmann argues in a 2016 paper, “criminal prosecution of corporations upholds the rule of law, validates the choices of law-abiding companies, and promotes accountability. … When corporations face no consequences for their criminal behavior, we minimize their lawlessness, and increase cynicism about the outsized influence of corporations.”

No kidding. And in a country like Canada, not to say a province like Quebec, it’s safe to say these lines of accountability and trust get severely tangled. Once a government deems any company “too big to fail,” whether it’s because of political donations or connections, or because its pension plan is heavily invested, or because it has acquired a creepy semi-sacred status among otherwise normal people — or indeed, because of an alleged 9,000 jobs — all these nice theories about the rule of law break down. That’s what we’ve been witnessing.

But there’s an even bigger breakdown going on that’s received far less attention. Employees allegedly behind Lavalin’s Libyan capers were criminally charged as well. Between them, former vice-president Sami Bebawi and former controller Stéphane Roy faced charges including defrauding the Libyan state, money laundering, violating UN sanctions, bribing Saadi Gadhafi — Moammar’s soccer-playing, Montreal-enjoying third son — and trying to extract him from Libya once it all kicked off in 2011.

Those charges were laid in February 2014. Last month, some against Bebawi and all against Roy were dismissed because the Crown didn’t manage to bring them to trial in five blessed years. In a scathing decision, judge Patricia Compagnone characterized the Crown’s behaviour as a perfect illustration of the “culture of complacency” and the “culture of delays” the Supreme Court had assailed in its landmark 2016 Jordan decision, which established empirical standards for the Charter right “to be tried within a reasonable time.”

It is an ever-more-curious mystery that Canada’s comprehensively screwed-up justice system never rises to the level of political crisis. In the first year after the Jordan decision alone, some 200 cases were thrown out on grounds of excessive delays. Some of the accused make the Friends of Moammar look like saints. They include alleged murderers, child molesters and drunk drivers.

The charges against SNC-Lavalin were laid in February 2015. More than four years later, we’re still fighting over whether to pursue them — and not, it must be said, in a way that makes us look like a terribly serious country. How nauseatingly fitting it would be if a court threw the case out before the feds even got a chance to decide what to do with it.

March 7, 2019

JWR should have reconsidered as many times as necessary to come to the “correct” decision, apparently

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh asks who is the one with memory issues — former Trudeau puppet-master Gerald Butts who resigned unexpectedly (but not at all for reasons related to the SNC-Lavalin affair, we’re told) or the minister who was relegated to the least important portfolio (in the view of the Trudeau government) in a totally unrelated cabinet shuffle after failing to fold under pressure?

On Wednesday, in testifying about the SNC-Lavalin scandal that has punched a hole in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Gerald Butts left an impression of sincerity, or at least earnestness, and professed the best of intentions as Trudeau’s exiled principal secretary. Do you suppose it will help? The Liberal government’s SNC situation clearly has a traplike nature. Until the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin are heard in a trial and resolved, or until they are abandoned, the thing will remain news, and Liberals will suffer.

The government’s line is that it was inappropriate for former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to make a final commitment to leaving her Director of Public Prosecutions alone and to living with the decision not to enter a plea-bargaining process with SNC-Lavalin. Her successor in the office, David Lametti, will not make such a commitment now. We will never get the reassurance of hearing that the matter is closed. The professed view of cabinet, what’s left of it, is that it would be wrong to close it.

The government has tried to explain its belabouring of Wilson-Raybould as being perfectly appropriate. She was supposed to verrrry carefully consider the fate of 9,000 SNC-Lavalin jobs and a head office in Quebec, and then consider it again, and then consider it again. Butts tells us that they weren’t looking for a particular politically convenient answer, mind you.

They just stayed after her to keep reconsidering the answer she kept giving, explicitly or implicitly. They reassured her at every turn that the decision was hers. And then they got rid of her and made it someone else’s.

[…]

In theory, if you wanted to get rid of a truculent justice minister who won’t put a thumb on the scales of justice, offering her a job you know she will never, ever take seems like a good way to set about doing that. But this is just an unhappy coincidence, and we are not to draw inferences from it. I would conclude that “The Liberal government undoubtedly meant well,” but saying this sarcastically has, I am afraid, already become a Canadian cliché.

March 5, 2019

It’s almost as if we elected the actor, but really wanted the character he’d played on TV instead

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells calls Justin Trudeau an imposter:

… the problem for Trudeau — who came to power promising a new era of transparency — is that this phoniness is a trait he shows all too often.

In 2016, when the Globe and Mail reported that the Prime Minister had attended a Vancouver fundraiser attended by Chinese billionaires — one of whom promptly donated money to the private Montreal foundation named for Trudeau’s father — the Liberal Party of Canada said no government business is discussed at such events. Trudeau later admitted they asked about policy and he talked about jobs.

Legalizing cannabis is one of the signature achievements of this government. But Trudeau has never been able to say he did it so affluent consumers could more readily get high. Instead, he had everyone in his government swear the goal was to drain the black market and keep the stuff out of the hands of teenagers. Neither goal has come anywhere close to being reached. Judged by the standards of a bake-off for the children of privilege, legalization has been a great success. Judged by the standards the Prime Minister claims, it’s a mess. The operating assumption seems to be that we’re simply supposed to read between the lines — that we’ll understand that when Trudeau speaks he is not to be taken seriously.

[…]

I could keep picking examples of Trudeau acting one way and talking another (climate change, Indigenous reconciliation) until the cows come home. But at some point you’d say, with reason, that this is not exactly innovative behaviour for an elected politician. But what’s so damaging about the SNC-Lavalin affair is that, in private, there’s no evidence Trudeau governs as the future-looking sophisticate he plays on TV.

[…]

There’s a stack of assumptions behind that strategy as long as your arm: that SNC does work so good it could never be replaced, that a trial would wreck it, that a mere judge couldn’t possibly weigh the company’s social contribution in determining its legal liability. And the biggest assumption of them all is that all of this is so obvious, none of it needed explaining in two years of feverish PMO activity. Not to the attorney general — she got earfuls of explanation, delivered in shifts working overtime, for months after she made what Trudeau felt was the wrong decision. And not to you and me. Trudeau never thought you and I deserved to know why he was trying to keep SNC out of a trial court. This makes a mockery of a simple idea: the consent of the governed.

It turns out that behind the curtain, the wizard from the woke future of politics was indulging the oldest of old-fashioned industrial policy. Navdeep Bains, the so-called innovation minister, might as well legally change his name to C.D. Howe for all the innovation going on here.

As for Wilson-Raybould’s diversity of background and perspective, it turned out to be inconvenient. She didn’t buy into a cozy meeting of minds along the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor. And the meeting of minds was what really mattered. Because it’s 2019.

The day got worse for Trudeau, as another cabinet minister resigned rather than stick around for the deck chairs to start floating away:

March 3, 2019

We need more data on the SNC-Lavalin affair

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne insists the whole story must come out before we call in the RCMP:

Where do we go from here? It is important not to get ahead of ourselves. Opposition calls for the prime minister to resign over the SNC-Lavalin affair, or for the RCMP to investigate, are premature at this point. However compelling Wednesday’s testimony before the Commons justice committee by the former minister of justice and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, may have been, all of the facts are not in.

It is still open to the government to provide those missing facts, and still possible to hope they may prove exculpatory. That they have done their level best so far to provide none, alas, strongly suggests the contrary. Even in response to Wilson-Raybould’s detailed, documented account of the many and sustained ways in which he and officials in his government attempted to interfere with a criminal prosecution, to the point not only of threatening her job but, it would seem, of carrying out the threat, the best that Justin Trudeau could offer was that he “disagreed” with it.

The prime minister prevented Wilson-Raybould from speaking for as long as he dared, and is still insisting she may not discuss potentially significant conversations with him and his cabinet after she was shuffled out of Justice. The prime minister’s former principal secretary, Gerry Butts, has agreed to testify before the committee, but no current employee of the prime minister’s office has yet been called, nor have any of the others Wilson-Raybould identified as having pressured her to go easy on SNC-Lavalin, save the clerk of the privy council, Michael Wernick.

Demands for a public inquiry, then, or at least for all of the relevant witnesses to be called before the committee, are closer to the mark. Whatever the prime minister and his people may or may not be guilty of, they cannot be allowed to get away with this blatant stonewalling. So, too, the Conservative and NDP leaders were justified in calling for Parliament to continue to sit next week, rather than take the next two weeks off. Indeed, they would be within their rights to hold up all parliamentary business, including the budget, until they get satisfaction. It is that important.

March 2, 2019

Mark Steyn – Trudeaupia on the Waterfront

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the “nothing to see here, let’s just move on” SNC-Lavalin affair:

Speaking as someone who gets sued a lot, I account Jody Wilson-Raybould as a killer exemplar of what every litigant dreads the other side coming up with – a credible witness. In a riveting performance, the former Attorney General of Canada laid out calmly and without overheated rhetorical flourish a campaign by the most powerful figures in the government to get their cronies at SNC-Lavalin off the hook of a criminal prosecution for bribing (Libyan) government officials. Ms Wilson-Raybould identified just shy of a dozen Liberal Party bruisers who leaned on her, including the most senior chaps in the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office and the Ministry of Finance – and ultimately the PM himself.

But, in a competitive field, perhaps the behavior of Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council, a career civil servant and the highest-ranking in Canada, is the most outrageous. In a three-man meeting – the Clerk, the Attorney General and the PM – Mr Wernick acted not as an impartial public servant but as a gung-ho party hack demanding political interference in a criminal prosecution in order to help Justin’s pals beat the rap:

    The PM again cited potential loss of jobs and SNC moving. Then to my surprise – the Clerk started to make the case for the need to have a DPA – he said “there is a board meeting on Thursday (Sept 20) with stock holders” … “they will likely be moving to London if this happens”… “and there is an election in Quebec soon”…

    At that point the PM jumped in stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that “and I am an MP in Quebec – the member for Papineau”.

    I was quite taken aback. My response – and I remember this vividly – was to ask the PM a direct question while looking him in the eye – I asked: “Are you politically interfering with my role / my decision as the AG? I would strongly advise against it.” The Prime Minister said “No, No, No – we just need to find a solution.”

When Ms Wilson-Raybould held firm against Justin’s pressure to lean on the Crown’s prosecution of a serious criminal case, he arranged a Cabinet reshuffle to remove her as Attorney General.

This is a protection racket: Underneath the LGBTQWERTY Ramadan socks and the Bollywood bridesmaid outfits for his passage through India, Justin Trudeau turns out to be Lee J Cobb in On the Waterfront. My old friend Paul Wells calls this a “moral catastrophe” for Justin. Not quite: He is who he is. It’s a moral catastrophe for Canada if those who dote on the Dauphin make the rest of us go along with it.

February 26, 2019

“The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Conrad Black on the ongoing SNC-Lavalin scandal:

The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy. It is alleged by unnamed sources that the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, was pressured to order her officials to assess fines rather than prosecute executives for financial crimes in the matter of SNC-Lavalin’s methods in seeking certain construction contracts in Libya, not a country where the Better Business Bureau rules commerce with an iron fist. At a later date, Ms. Wilson-Raybould consented to be moved to the position of associate minister of national defence and minister of veterans’ affairs, generally considered a demotion. When rumours circulated in the media about the propriety of allowing the company to pay fines rather than prosecute some of its executives, the prime minister defended the government, denied the rumours, and stated that the minister’s continued presence in the government was proof that the rumours were unfounded. The minister then resigned, but has since attended a full caucus meeting and had a calming effect on the Liberal MPs. She has said nothing publicly because of the delicacy of lawyer/client privilege opposite the prime minister, who has declined to waive the privilege. This is, in fact, bunk. The prime minister was not the client of the minister of justice in the SNC-Lavalin affair, and the prime minister doesn’t have any standing to waive anything on this subject, and his invocation of cabinet secrecy is twaddle, especially after the subject was aired before the entire Liberal caucus.

All government spokespeople deny any official misconduct or impropriety but the principal secretary and chief strategist of the regime, Gerald Butts, resigned, with the novel explanation that although nothing inappropriate had occurred, he thought the air should be cleared, so he walked the plank. This is the point at which this supposed scandal becomes uniquely Canadian. A minister belatedly resigns but informally continues to attend cabinet and expatiate on this issue and the government reinforces its protestations of absolute innocence of wrongdoing by the prime minister accepting the abrupt resignation of the most influential non-elected person in the government (and he also had a great deal more influence than almost all the elected ministers and MP’s).

I invite any reader to cite another country where a minister would consent to be shuffled down, maintain a complete silence while her father, an indigenous leader, has conducted an entertaining non-stop press conference denouncing the “white man’s justice,” although he has clearly gamed the system pretty well for himself, and the head of the prime minister’s office and closest collaborator of the prime minister resigns while proclaiming that nothing improper has been done and that he is only sacrificing himself to satiate the false accusers. This is too innocuous for the Americans and major European countries, too wholesome for Latin America, too complicated for the Swiss and Scandinavians, too discrete for Australia, and small potatoes for the Japanese. This is Canada, the land of Dudley Do-Right, and before him, of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald singing Rose-Marie in the Rockies. The story line of this scandal is absurd, but in its way, magnificently Canadian.

February 22, 2019

The odd dual role of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh provides an interesting tidbit of Canadian constitutional detail in the SNC-Lavalin affair:

As a minister she can be expected, and will have expected, to sometimes be given advice and orders from the PM. It would not be an unusual feature of her job to have one of the PM’s close advisers visit her with delegated instructions. Maybe sometimes those instructions would be delivered somewhat abruptly. It happens.

But. The minister of justice also bears an associated title: she is also the attorney general of Canada. You may have gotten the idea that this is just a matter of tradition, a romantic holdover from olden times. It is in fact a matter of explicit statute, the Department of Justice Act, as well as an important constitutional concept. The minister of justice is a politician who writes legislation and oversees the operation of law and courts. The attorney general, although always and necessarily the same human as the minister of justice, is a distinct person charged with the royal authority to commence, manage and cancel criminal prosecutions. When someone sues the Crown it is normally the attorney general who answers, and when the Crown sues it is done through her.

What does this mean? It means that if you are the prime minister’s trusted old chum who does his dirty work, it is all right for you to visit a mere minister of justice, operating in that capacity, and to tell her what the boss wants done for crude partisan reasons. But it is quite strictly forbidden to do that to an attorney general.

In matters of hiring or statute-writing, you can go ahead, kick down her door, and tell her “Orillia needs more red-headed Hungarian judges!” or “There really oughta be a law against candy.” When it comes to prosecutions — when madame has her attorney general hat on — it is very different. You, as a sunny-ways enforcer, are not even supposed to provide unsolicited advice or hints from the prime minister. The PM may be the minister of justice’s boss, but he is not in the chain of command between the attorney general and the sovereign at all.

An attorney general is supposed to make prosecution decisions with the good of the country in mind, and she can ask ministers for their opinions about what would be good, just as she could consult any other schmuck. But for a PM or his dogsbody to venture such an opinion spontaneously, whatever the motive, is not cool. If someone tried to give an attorney general such advice, and she told that person to shove off back to Cape Breton in a leaky dory, and she woke up one morning not long after and turned on the radio and heard that she was no longer attorney general, that would certainly be a mighty big deal.

November 6, 2018

Fly the “Party Flight” with Canadian (Forces) Airways!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Ottawa Citizen, David Pugliese reminds us that not all is right with the higher-ups of the Canadian military, based on what was allowed to occur — and at least partly covered-up — on a VIP flight last year:

The December 2017 “Team Canada” tour – now more popularly known in some quarters in the military as “the party flight” – has without a doubt been a major public relations black eye for the Canadian Forces.

The tour, with VIPs who were supposed to boost the morale of military personnel deployed overseas, turned into a fiasco. Some VIPs on the RCAF flight to Greece and Latvia were drunk and abusive to the crew, in particular the military flight attendants. The VIP civilian passengers, including former NHL player Dave “Tiger” Williams were exempt from security screening before the flight, and some — already drunk — walked on to the Canadian Forces aircraft with open alcoholic drinks in their hands.

Two individuals were so drunk they were reported to have urinated themselves. Video taken aboard the plane showed people — including a staff member from Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance’s office — dancing in the aisles of the aircraft with their drinks as a rock band played at the back of the plane. Others chewed tobacco, in violation of Canadian Forces rules, spitting the slimy juice into cups for flight attendants to clean up.

The military flight crew was prohibited from approaching the VIPs except to provide them with service. The crew felt they couldn’t do anything to put a halt to the antics as these very important people were Vance’s guests.

Williams has been charged with sex assault and assault. He denies the charges.

The $337,000 taxpayer-funded trip was planned by Vance’s office. Vance okayed the booze on the RCAF aircraft.

We know all of this now.

But almost right from the beginning, the Canadian Forces/Department of National Defence Staff Public Affairs branch appeared to try its best to mislead journalists – and ultimately the public – on what actually took place on that flight.

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