Trudeau spoke to Wilson-Raybould after prosecutors refused SNC-Lavalin deal

Prime Minister Trudeau has repeatedly said that he told Jody Wilson-Raybould in a September 17th conversation that the decision to prosecute SNC-Lavalin was hers alone, but that there were various concerns about the economic impact that a conviction could have.

Canada’s new deferred prosecution agreement law states that the prosecution service is now allowed to consider national economic interest in deciding whether to settle when a company faces charges under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act.

Up until now, information available to the public indicated that Trudeau spoke to Wilson-Raybould before a decision was made by the prosecutors, announced by SNC-Lavalin on Oct. 10th.

They spoke two weeks after the September 4th decision, at which time it was up to Wilson-Raybould to decide if she would publicly instruct prosecutors to instead cut a deal.

The original report by The Globe reported on February 7th that senior officials from the PMO put pressure on Wilson-Raybould to not follow through on charges against SNC-Lavalin. She refused, and shortly later was demoted by Trudeau to the Veterans Affairs portfolio, which she has since resigned from.

The PM’s director of communications, Cameron Ahmad, said ‘for the time being, I don’t have anything further’ to say when he was asked if Trudeau was aware of the prosecutor's decision when he spoke to Ms. Wilson Raybould on September 17th.”

The SNC-Lavalin fiasco has led to a plethora of resignations that have raised eyebrows across the nation. After Wilson-Raybould resigned, Trudeau’s principal secretary and longtime friend Gerald Butts quit his gig amid opposition calls to have all the key players in the SNC-Lavalin scandal publicly testify, and calling for the PM to waive his solicitor-client privilege with the former Justice Minister.

Deputy Conservative leader Lisa Raitt has said that the new timeline of events “casts the September 17 meeting between PM Trudeau and Jody Wilson Raybould in a much more serious light.”

“If SNC-Lavalin had already been denied a special deal through an independent process and then the Prime Minister met with Ms. Wilson-Raybould to reaffirm her authority, the message to her would seem clear – that he’s not happy with the decision and that she should get involved,” she said.

Wilson-Raybould met with her former ministerial colleagues in a closed-door cabinet meeting and told media that she was still figuring out what she was legally able to say without violating solicitor-client privilege.

“As I think people can appreciate or should appreciate, the rules and laws around privilege, around confidentiality, around my responsibility as a member of Parliament, my ethical and professional responsibilities as a lawyer are layered and incredibly complicated," Ms. Wilson-Raybould told reporters.

When Wilson-Raybould was asked if she was put under pressure by the PMO, she said that she was still consulting with her lawyer.

The House of Commons justice committee also voted to call Wilson-Raybould to testify in hearings, but rejected opposition calls to have Gerald Butts and other senior PMO officials appear.

Wilson-Raybould said that she would appear before the committee, but was unsure how much she could reveal, again, due to solicitor-client privileges.

Since The Globe’s original report in February, the Liberal government has given an array of storylines about the debacle with SNC-Lavalin. PM Trudeau originally had stated that the entire story was false, claiming that he had never directed Ms. Wilson-Raybould to squash the prosecution. The Globe had never reported that anyone had directed her to abandon the SNC-Lavalin case at that point.

Later, government officials told The Globe that they had vigorous and robust talks with Wilson-Raybould about the issues at hand. They also stated, though, that should not be construed as political pressure. Liberal seniors later anonymously attacked her credibility and reputation.

On Friday, Mr. Trudeau again claimed that Wilson-Raybould was told on September 17th that the SNC-Lavalin prosecution was hers alone to make, using the exchange as a type of evidence that he did not put pressure on her to allow the engineering giant to avoid prosecution. He then acknowledged that she did ask him if he was directing her or going to direct her to make a decision.

During Question time in the House on Tuesday, opposition parties grilled Trudeau, all the while pressing for an independent public inquiry into the SNC-Lavalin Affair.

“The way in which this story has unfolded – with almost daily changes to the Prime Minister’s version of events, with high-profile resignations, with anonymously sourced smear campaigns, and with co-ordinated cover-up manoeuvring – suggests this is not an ordinary political scandal,” Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said in the Commons.

He said Parliament needs to get to the bottom of “the alarming possibility that the Prime Minister’s Office exerted its power to influence the administration of justice” in Canada.