https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/28/news/bill-morneau-denies-wrongdoing-snc-lavalin
Bill Morneau denies wrongdoing on SNC-Lavalin
By Fatima Syed & Alastair Sharp in News, Politics | February 28th 2019
Finance Minister Bill Morneau says his staff acted "absolutely appropriately" on the SNC-Lavalin file, denying any wrongdoing in presenting the economic case for helping the engineering company avoid a criminal trial.
Morneau defended the behaviour of officials including his chief of staff, Ben Chin, to reporters in Toronto Thursday, less than 24 hours after the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, gave damning testimony in front of the House of Commons justice committee accusing him of applying "extraordinary pressure" on her.
Asked repeatedly whether he had directed his chief of staff Ben Chin to contact @Puglaas' staff with message that a deferral for SNC-Lavalin had to happen, @Bill_Morneau finally answered: "No, I did not."
In the short press conference, Morneau responded unequivocally that neither he, nor his staff, did anything wrong.
"I want to be clear. I never raised this issue with Ms. Jody Wilson-Raybould," said Morneau, who also acknowledged that, as per her testimony, the former attorney general approached him about the issue on Sept. 19.
"She approached me (in the House of Commons) to tell me that my staff was approaching her staff, which I think is entirely appropriate," he said, adding that he could not recall more details about that interaction in the House.
In her testimony, Wilson-Raybould said she spoke with Morneau in the Commons, where “he again stressed the need to save jobs, and I told him that engagements from his office to mine on SNC had to stop - that they were inappropriate.”
Wilson-Raybould detailed two other meetings with Morneau's chief of staff Ben Chin in her testimony, noting that he had urged her office to "find a solution" to help save jobs in the context of the Quebec Oct. 1 general election.
"My staff, appropriately, would make her staff aware of the economic consequences of decisions, about the importance of thinking about jobs," Morneau said Thursday.
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Morneau's comments came hours after Trudeau told reporters, again, that Wilson-Raybould's continued membership in the Liberal caucus was under consideration.
(She has stated that "I was elected by the constituents of Vancouver-Granville to represent them as a Liberal Member of Parliament" and has no intention of leaving her party, and does not expect to be expelled; expulsion would, in my view, weaken Trudeau even further - Loachman)
Speaking to reporters after an event at the Canadian Space Agency in Quebec, Trudeau said he has "taken knowledge of her testimony and there are still reflections to have on next steps."
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When asked about this Thursday, Trudeau deflected by saying, again, that "had [former treasury board president] Scott Brison not stepped down, Jody Wilson-Raybould would still be minister of justice and attorney general of Canada." He also repeated that both him and his office were appropriate in all their dealings with Wilson-Raybould and her office, and that he disagreed with her version of events.
The following article was originally linked by Milnews. I have included a little more from the article:
https://globalnews.ca/news/5007305/analysis-trudeau-brand-jody-wilson-raybould-testimony/
February 28, 2019 6:00 am
ANALYSIS: The Trudeau brand takes a hit after Jody Wilson-Raybould testimony
By David Akin
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Well, here’s some news for Bouchard and everyone else in the Trudeau PMO: you know what’s worse than SNC-Lavalin moving out of Montreal six months before an election? The testimony Wilson-Raybould gave Wednesday afternoon at a House of Commons committee. It was bad. Real bad.
Wilson-Raybould’s careful, measured testimony - based on copious notes she took after each and every one of the 10 instances last fall in which she or her staff were bullied to intervene in SNC-Lavalin’s court case - was one jaw-dropping revelation after another of misbehaviour in the most senior offices in the land.
Steve Saideman, a political science professor at Carleton University who keeps a keen eye on Canadian politics, turned to Twitter to neatly sum up the afternoon’s revelations: “Liberals ditched an Indigenous woman who was first to have such a visible and important post to pander to a corrupt company to avoid losing votes in Quebec, right?”
That’s pretty much it, professor. A prime minister who built a nice little international brand as a feminist, who preached reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples as his top priority fired a female, Indigenous justice minister because she wouldn’t help the team win some votes in Quebec.
Wilson-Raybould described herself as a descendant of Kwakwaka’wakw matriarchs who are “truth-tellers,” and after a long afternoon of fulfilling that destiny, Trudeau called reporters for a quick early evening press conference in Montreal to essentially say there was no truth to what she had told. Oddly, he conceded that he had not watched all of her testimony but was nonetheless able to “strongly disagree” with the testimony he did not see. He suggested she had got it all wrong without offering a single specific instance of a fact Wilson-Raybould presented that was false. Well, if she was so wrong, Mr. Prime Minister, why is she no longer the country’s justice minister?
And how would they know Wilson-Raybould was wrong? While Wilson-Raybould was at pains Monday to explain her prodigious note-taking, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick - one of Wilson-Raybould’s tormenters - proudly boasted to the same justice committee last week that he took no notes during the meeting with Wilson-Raybould in mid-December, during which he allegedly delivered what Wilson-Raybould described as “veiled threats” that she should come around and bail out SNC-Lavalin.
This is where I have to take issue with Wilson-Raybould’s use of the phrase “veiled threats.” They were not veiled at all. They were naked threats, vicious threats, threats that could not be missed. And, most damning of all, they were threats on which a vengeful prime minister made good on Jan. 7, telling Wilson-Raybould in person that she was no longer his justice minister and could instead serve Canada as veterans affairs minister. (She would resign, shortly afterwards, from cabinet completely, though she remains, as of Wednesday night, a member of the Liberal caucus.)
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-moral-catastrophe-of-justin-trudeau/
The moral catastrophe of Justin Trudeau
Paul Wells: What Jody Wilson-Raybould described today is a sickeningly smug protection racket and it should make us all question what we’re willing to tolerate
by Paul Wells Feb 27, 2019
The dangerous files are never the obscure ones. Scandals don’t happen in the weird little corners of government, in amateur sport or in crop science. They happen on the issues a prime minister cares most about, because everyone gets the message that the rules matter less than the result.
It’s a constant in politics. In 2016 I took one look at Bill Morneau’s first budget and wrote this: “The sponsorship scandal of the late Chrétien years was possible because it was obvious to every scoundrel with Liberal friends that spending on national unity would not receive close scrutiny from a government that was desperate to be seen doing something on the file. A government that considers the scale of its spending to be proof of its virtue is an easy mark for hucksters and worse.”
It wasn’t a perfect prediction. I kind of expected the hucksters and worse to be outside government. Unless the Trudeau Liberals can produce persuasive evidence that Jody Wilson-Raybould is an utter fabulist (and frankly, I now expect several to try), her testimony before the Commons Justice Committee establishes pretty clearly that the hucksters and worse were running the show. Led by the grinning legatee who taints the Prime Ministers’ office.
There will now be a period of stark partisanship. We’re in an election year. Loyal Liberals will tell themselves, and then everyone else, that the price of looking clearly at Justin Trudeau’s bully club (so many men; wonder how Katie Telford felt about that while she was signing off on every element of it) is ceding the field to Andrew Scheer. Who, they will tell themselves and then the country, is an actual Nazi.
I mean, after all, that’s pretty close to what they told one another, and then Jody Wilson-Raybould, last fall, isn’t it? There was an election in Quebec in the first week of October. And Ben Chin, a former journalist who did whatever Christy Clark needed done in B.C. before moving east to do whatever Bill Morneau and the PMO needed doing, used that thin reed of an excuse to try to sway Wilson-Raybould’s chief of staff, Jessica Prince. “If they don’t get a [deferred prosecution agreement], they will leave Montreal, and it’s the Quebec election right now, so we can’t have that happen,” Wilson-Raybould told the committee, paraphrasing Chin’s conversation with Prince.
I’ve never met a Liberal yet who doesn’t reliably confuse his electoral skin with the national interest. So much of what Trudeau and his minions have done in the last year stems from that instinct. Take the ludicrous half-billion-dollar bailout for people in my line of work, never explained, sprung out of nowhere in Morneau’s fall economic update - or as I now like to think of it, between Trudeau advisor Mathieu Bouchard’s meeting (yet another one) with Prince and Michael Wernick’s chat with Wilson-Raybould. (This is a serious statement from a journalist; I do not see any inclination from any journalist, so far, to defend Trudeau or his party, or cover anything up - Loachman) You can get a lot of op-eds written with that kind of dough. Take the cool billion the Canada Infrastructure Bank coughed up to pay for a politically popular and impeccably well-connected transit project around Montreal. That money appeared, from a brand-new bank that has not funded a single other project and did not then yet have a CEO [Update, Thursday: Wrong! It had had a CEO since last May – pw], on the day before Philippe Couillard launched the Quebec election campaign. It is now impossible to believe on faith that the Canada Infrastructure Bank is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ben Chin, Mathieu Bouchard, Katie Telford and Justin Trudeau.
But anyway, back to partisanship. Liberals and their many friends across the land will insist that all this behaviour must have no real-world repercussions because the other side cannot be permitted to gain the upper hand. And similarly, a lot of battle-hardened opponents of the Liberals will call for the jails to be opened up to welcome fresh Liberal meat. Fortunately, there is indeed an election coming up, and I’m content to let voters decide the partisan affiliation of the next government. I offer them no counsel.
But we get to draw our own conclusions as citizens. What the former attorney general described tonight is a sickeningly smug protection racket whose participants must have been astonished when she refused to play along. If a company can rewrite the Criminal Code to get out of a trial whose start date was set before the legislation was drafted, all because a doomed Quebec government has its appointment with the voter, then which excesses are not permitted, under the same justification? If a Clerk of the Privy Council can claim with a straight face that ten calls and meetings with the attorney general, during which massive job loss, an angry PM and a lost election are threatened, don’t constitute interference, then what on earth would interference look like? Tonight I talked with two former public servants whose records rival Michael Wernick’s. Both were flat astonished that he seems not to have pushed back against this deeply disturbing, and plainly widespread, behaviour.
There’ll be time to contemplate mechanisms in the days ahead. I don’t think the ethics commissioner has a broad enough mandate to investigate matters like that Canada Infrastructure Bank investment and other tendrils of this affair. But in the end, the moral collapse of Justin Trudeau’s government teaches each of us a lesson, if we will only listen: There had damned well better be a limit to what we’re willing to do or say, whatever the cause we claim to serve. The rules need to be rules - not for the people we despise, but for ourselves. For myself. For you. Or else we have no souls.
https://torontosun.com/news/national/the-sex-side-of-the-snc-scandal
The sex side of the SNC scandal
Brian Lilley Published: February 27, 2019
The SNC-Lavalin affair has had allegations of bribery, political intrigue and a major cover-up, all that was missing was sex.
Now we have the sex component!
A report by Montreal’s La Presse newspaper says that SNC-Lavalin allegedly paid for a sex-filled trip across Canada for the son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
“Naked dancers, porn movies and many, many, many prostitutes,” the story states.
Saadi Gaddafi was supposedly working on development issues, specifically making Libya a “new Hong Kong” in North Africa, instead it was all about sex.
Security firm Garda World was hired by SNC to escort Gaddafi across the country as he picked up escorts in city after city.
The total bill was more than $30,000 and one Vancouver escort agency charged as much as $10,000 for a single session.
Bills from other escort agencies ranged from $600 to $7,500 per session.
Previous stories about the relationship between SNC-Lavalin and the Gaddafi family noted the lavish trips the company had paid for and the placement of Saadi Gaddafi’s wife was on the company payroll during the Libyan civil war.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-ivison-wilson-rayboulds-convincing-testimony-may-cost-trudeau-his-job?video_autoplay=true
John Ivison: Wilson-Raybould's convincing testimony may cost Trudeau his job
If you were watching Wilson-Raybould’s appearance Wednesday afternoon, that cracking sound you heard was Liberal Party unity breaking up
February 27, 2019 10:39 PM EST
Jody Wilson-Raybould’s testimony was so much worse than the opposition could have hoped, or the government might have feared. Justin Trudeau has been hoist by his own petard, and it may cost him his job.
Trudeau appointed as justice minister someone who said she is a “truth-teller,” an Indigenous person who said she has witnessed the consequences of the rule of law not being respected.
He appointed her and then he tried to make her complicit in running roughshod over that law.
If she is to be believed - and her testimony was convincing enough that it is likely she had public opinion in her pocket very early on - when she refused to play along he applied, in her words, “inappropriate political pressure.” When she still failed to bend to his will, he removed her from her position as justice minister.
If he thought she would respond to the “veiled threats” levelled against her, he clearly misread this woman.
If you were watching Wilson-Raybould’s appearance Wednesday afternoon, that cracking sound you heard was Liberal Party unity breaking up. The former attorney general remains a member of the Liberal caucus, and a candidate at the next election. But it is a malignant fidelity. Her testimony has done more harm to her party’s chances of re-election than anything achieved by a hapless opposition. It seems hard to see how she can continue to sit as a Liberal member, far less run again.
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If she is to be believed - and it has to be noted she made for an extremely credible witness - even the dimmest of dunces would have been able to conclude this was a woman who was resolute and unyielding once her mind was made up.
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But if the former justice minister’s testimony is to be believed, the sustained nature of the campaign to make her change her mind - with the hint that there would be consequences if she didn’t - may have crossed the line from information to interference.
An independent arbiter - be it the ethics commissioner, or even a judge - needs to make that deliberation.
But voters will reach their own conclusions long before any judicial proceedings take place. The verdict is likely to be harsh.
