SNC-Lavalin report vindicates Jody Wilson-Raybould, says political scientist
David Moscrop says nobody comes off as 'deeply nefarious' in the ethics commissioner's report
The ethics commissioner's report completely vindicates former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould, says a political science professor — but it still doesn't give us any clear heroes and villains in the SNC-Lavalin affair.
In a report released on Wednesday, Mario Dion found Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated the Conflict of Interest Act in 2018 when he tried to pressure then-justice minister Wilson-Raybould to overrule a federal prosecutor's decision to send Quebec-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin to trial on corruption charges.
Trudeau told reporters that while he accepts the report and takes full responsibility for what happened, he disagrees with some of Dion's conclusions.
David Moscrop, a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, says Dion makes a strong case against Trudeau, but there's still no "smoking gun."
Here is part of his conversation with As It Happens guest host Nil Köksal.
We've all been poring through the 63 pages of the ethics commissioner's report. But in a nutshell for our listeners, break down the key points.
There's a couple of things that stand out as new and remarkable, and one of them is that in the course of his investigation the ethics commissioner, Mr. Dion, had a hard time getting access to all of the documents that he needed to carry out the investigation.
That's a significant problem. I think that's an indictment of the system to some extent.
But the broader, more interesting takeaway is that this is the first time the entire affair has been laid out in one place in comprehensive detail. And it is ultimately a narrative that backs up Jody Wilson-Raybould's story, that she was pressured consistently and inappropriately to intervene.
She's just released a statement on her Facebook page using the word "vindication." It's a word that some other analysts have used as we waited for her response. What do you make of what she said in response?
It's a word I have been using all day. It's a word that kept rolling across my mind as I read through the report earlier today. It reads like a vindication of everything that she has said publicly after February [and] everything that she had been concerned about in the events that led up to February.
He makes the distinction, Dion does, that just trying to influence the decision of another person — speaking to the attorney general — doesn't violate the Code, this Section 9. But that trying to promote the interests, private interests of another person, that's the key here.
He lays out three instances ... in which there was undue or inappropriate pressure placed on Jody Wilson-Raybould as attorney general. To me, that is not quite, I think, what you call a smoking gun, but certainly a persuasive case made that there had been a contravention of Section 9.
Take us through those points.
The first was Michael Wernick, who was then head of the Privy Council, bringing up SNC-Lavalin's impending board meeting and mentioning economic consequences.
And of course then the others were [Trudeau] mentioning the federal election and mentioning the Quebec election.
That was a line from the Liberals repeatedly — there are 9,000 jobs to be protected in Quebec, that those would be lost if SNC-Lavalin faced a corruption trial. We heard the prime minister hint at that again. He is sticking to that argument.
I think one of the interesting challenges in this whole affair is that we want a caricature of people. Observers like when it's black and white or when there's a villain and a hero.
I think the truth is, reading through this report, looking back on the committee testimony, reading reports that were released in stories in February and March, what you see as human beings in the middle of a political system who are acting for a whole bunch of different reasons — some of them you would say were perfectly consistent with their roles and with the Conflict of Interest Act, and some that weren't. And what Mr. Dion has highlighted in this report are the ones that weren't.
At the end of the day. we'd like for things to be clean and direct and simple, but I don't think anyone is deeply nefarious in any of this. Misguided, definitely. Part of a toxic political culture, no doubt. But it certainly comes off as slightly more complicated than you might think.
But Canadians are trying to make up their minds, right? Ten weeks before an election. So the timing of all this is critical. It could work for or against Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals. What do you make of the timing?
My working hypothesis is that this was deemed as a priority and something that was in the public interest to release sooner rather than later.
Although I can't imagine that the thought hadn't crossed someone's mind in the ethics office that after a certain point, as we approach the election, it gets politically pretty dicey to release it.
We don't want a Comey letter in Canada, right? So if this came out in October, it would have been a massive problem.
Could this sway or decide the election in your view?
My sense is that it's certainly going to do the Liberals no favours. It's going to make what was already a very difficult task getting re-elected even more difficult. It's going to confirm a lot of what people already believe.
I don't know how many minds are going to get changed because of this. I suspect most people sort of made up their mind about SNC back in the spring and early summer, and I don't imagine much is going to change.
But it's going to distract quite a bit. So there's going to be things that the Liberals want to talk about that they no longer get to talk about, or get to talk about far less.
It's also going to motivate opponents. We've already seen the energy coming from Jagmeet Singh and Andrew Scheer already today. It's going to motivate them going forward.
Written by Sheena Goodyear with files from John Paul Tasker and The Canadian Press. Interview produced by Jeanne Armstrong. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.