{"id":47279,"date":"2019-03-10T03:00:10","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T07:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47279"},"modified":"2019-03-09T10:16:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-09T15:16:11","slug":"theres-something-bigger-at-stake-in-the-snc-lavalin-affair-than-trudeaus-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/03\/10\/theres-something-bigger-at-stake-in-the-snc-lavalin-affair-than-trudeaus-career\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s something bigger at stake in the SNC-Lavalin affair than Trudeau’s career"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Selley<\/a> explains why SNC-Lavalin is an example of Canada’s less-than-stellar record of holding corporations to account:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

… University of Michigan law professor David Uhlmann argues in a 2016 paper, \u201ccriminal prosecution of corporations upholds the rule of law, validates the choices of law-abiding companies, and promotes accountability. \u2026 When corporations face no consequences for their criminal behavior, we minimize their lawlessness, and increase cynicism about the outsized influence of corporations.\u201d<\/p>\n

No kidding. And in a country like Canada, not to say a province like Quebec, it\u2019s safe to say these lines of accountability and trust get severely tangled. Once a government deems any company \u201ctoo big to fail,\u201d whether it\u2019s 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 \u2014 or indeed, because of an alleged 9,000 jobs \u2014 all these nice theories about the rule of law break down. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve been witnessing.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s an even bigger breakdown going on that\u2019s received far less attention. Employees allegedly behind Lavalin\u2019s Libyan capers were criminally charged as well. Between them, former vice-president Sami Bebawi and former controller St\u00e9phane Roy faced charges including defrauding the Libyan state, money laundering, violating UN sanctions, bribing Saadi Gadhafi \u2014 Moammar\u2019s soccer-playing, Montreal-enjoying third son \u2014 and trying to extract him from Libya once it all kicked off in 2011.<\/p>\n

Those charges were laid in February 2014. Last month, some against Bebawi and all against Roy were dismissed because the Crown didn\u2019t manage to bring them to trial in five blessed years. In a scathing decision, judge Patricia Compagnone characterized the Crown\u2019s behaviour as a perfect illustration of the \u201cculture of complacency\u201d and the \u201cculture of delays\u201d the Supreme Court had assailed in its landmark 2016 Jordan decision, which established empirical standards for the Charter right \u201cto be tried within a reasonable time.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is an ever-more-curious mystery that Canada\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The charges against SNC-Lavalin were laid in February 2015. More than four years later, we\u2019re still fighting over whether to pursue them \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, \u201ccriminal prosecution of corporations upholds the rule of law, validates the choices of law-abiding companies, and promotes accountability. \u2026 When corporations face no consequences for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,6,84,9],"tags":[363,343,267,687,113,413],"class_list":["post-47279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cancon","category-government","category-law","tag-corruption","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-justice","tag-libya","tag-quebec","tag-scandal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ciz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47279"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47280,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47279\/revisions\/47280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}