[PluggyRug]

Federal Court of Canada strikes down SNC-Lavalin’s request to review prosecutor’s dec


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...s-decision-to/

$1:

Federal Court of Canada strikes down SNC-Lavalin’s request to review prosecutor’s decision to proceed with charges

The Federal Court of Canada has dismissed a request by SNC-Lavalin to review a federal prosecutor’s decision declining to settle criminal charges against the company out of court.

“It has no reasonable prospect of success in the context of the law and the governing jurisprudence and taking a realistic view,” Federal Court Justice Catherine Kane said in her ruling, issued Friday.

“The law is clear that prosecutorial discretion is not subject to judicial review, except for abuse of process. The decision at issue – whether to invite an organization to enter into negotiations for a remediation agreement – clearly falls within the ambit of prosecutorial discretion and the nature of decisions that prosecutors are regularly called to make in criminal proceedings.”

The Quebec engineering giant had made an unprecedented request for judicial review of a federal prosecutor’s decision last September to proceed with charges of fraud and bribery.

In judicial review, courts look at the fairness of proceedings undertaken by government tribunals and certain officials. But prosecutors’ decisions have long been seen as off limits to such review, except in cases of abuses of power. SNC-Lavalin did not allege such an abuse.

The federal prosecution office asked the Federal Court to dismiss the company’s claim for judicial review. Justice Catherine Kane conducted a five-hour hearing on the matter on Feb. 1.

The prosecutor’s decision has been at the heart of a political dispute that has shaken Ottawa, resulted in the resignations of two cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister’s top aide, and led to dramatic hearings at the Commons justice committee.

Under a 2018 federal law, prosecutors may negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement with corporate offenders. In return for a statement of wrongdoing, a fine and terms intended to ensure good conduct in the future, a company is permitted to settle out of court. But Kathleen Roussel, Director of Public Prosecutions, declined to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement, also known as a remediation. The attorney-general at the time, Jody Wilson-Raybould, had the legal authority to issue a public directive to Ms. Roussel to negotiate a remediation agreement, but she declined to do so.

In court documents filed in the case, SNC-Lavalin said it had made “permanent transformative changes” to its business practices, and “easily met” requirements for settling a federal prosecution out of court. It accused federal prosecutors of being “incoherent” in their explanation of why they won’t settle. Outside lawyers retained by the Director of Public Prosecutions to fight the judicial-review application argued that the attorney-general’s independence to decide whether to prosecute a case is a hallmark of a free society.

As Ms. Wilson-Raybould later testified at the Commons justice committee, she was then subjected to what she characterized as inappropriate pressure from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, officials in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Finance Minister’s Office from September through December. In January, she was moved to Veterans Affairs, and later resigned from cabinet.

The Federal Court decision clears the way for a criminal trial to proceed on charges of fraud and bribery related to construction in Libya between 2001 and 2011, pending completion of a preliminary inquiry in Montreal. If convicted, it could be barred for 10 years from federal government contracts.

Attorney-General David Lametti, who succeeded Ms. Wilson-Raybould in the position, has said he could still direct the prosecution office to negotiate a remediation.

[peck420]

This post has brightened my snowy day, thank you.

[JaredMilne]

I found two compelling things about Butts' testimony as recorded by Macleans:

First of all, there are so many additions and omissions between what he told the justice committee and what he posted online that it looks like the first draft of a badly done high school term paper.

Second, he noted that the Attorney General is responsible for warning the Prime Minister about any potential legal problems that could come up...which is exactly what JWR testified she was doing when she talked about trying to save the PM's hide.

Seriously, Trudeau and Butts couldn't have bungled this any more if they'd deliberately tried.

[N_Fiddledog]

$1:

What compounds Lavscam is the Mark Norman trial, also before the courts right now. The former head of the Navy is facing one charge of breach of trust. But his lawyer Marie Henein is trying to get it dismissed on the grounds of political interference. They believe the PMO pushed for these charges and are currently subpoenaing documents to prove their case.

If true, we have a very troubling trend. We have Canada slipping away, undergoing a phenomenon that academics call “democratic backsliding”. We’ve been an example of how things should be done for other countries for years. Instead, we’re now picking up some of the bad habits of those countries.

This is why Lavscam matters so much, why it is a test case for what sort of country Canada wants to be in the decades to come.

https://tnc.news/2019/03/09/furey-lavsc ... rk-norman/

[DrCaleb]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Seriously, Trudeau and Butts couldn't have bungled this any more if they'd deliberately tried.

Oh come now! I'm sure they could. Never underestimate the ineptness of a politician.

[llama66]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Seriously, Trudeau and Butts couldn't have bungled this any more if they'd deliberately tried.

Oh come now! I'm sure they could. Never underestimate the ineptness of a politician.

Agreed.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

SNC Lavalin is also a major government contractor, and reducing their stock price leaves them vulnerable to takeover. Do we really want sensitive information in foreign hands?

Yeah, never mind the fact that the Quebec pension fund has a 20% stake in the company. And THAT is the ONLY reason this govt is trying to cut SNC a deal.

What else is interesting is SNC was already prevented from bidding on federal contracts until Dec. 2015, just a month after Groper was elected, when Groper's govt signed some crap about "being a benefit to Canada and Canadians" allowing SNC to bid on federal contracts again. So, the lie about them not being to bid on federal contracts is just that, a lie. All the govt has to do is claim the survivability of the company is in the country's best interests and voila, they can still bid on federal contracts regardless of any legal ruling.

[PluggyRug]

Liberals shut down SNC justice committee meeting, preventing vote on recalling Wilson-Raybould

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politic ... ng-wilson/

[llama66]

Ah... Canadian Democracy.

[PluggyRug]

So much for openness and transparency.

[llama66]

PluggyRug PluggyRug:

So much for openness and transparency.*

*Terms and Conditions apply. May not be available in all areas. Program may be changed or terminated without warning.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

Well, it's what you get when you elect a drama teacher/ski instructor. You get lots of drama from an idiot that's pushing this country downhill.

[JaredMilne]

A lot of people say that the media in Canada is biased towards the political left. I've always been skeptical of that, given that the National Post and the Sun media newspapers remain major news outlets in Canada. Here's even more evidence against the claim, given this article by Stephen Maher in Macleans magazine:

$1:

L’affaire SNC-Lavalin is a scandal with “no money, no sex and nothing illegal happened,” the Associated Press wrote on Sunday, accurately summing up the relatively mild wrongdoing at the heart of this controversy.

There are no envelopes full of money for party organizers, no bribes from arms dealers, no electoral cheating.

Viewed through a charitable lens, Justin Trudeau’s government finds itself on the brink of collapse because his aides pushed too hard for a legal opinion from a retired Supreme Court justice.

Meanwhile, in the United States, thousands of children have been separated from their parents by a president whose election was aided by Vladimir Putin’s hackers.

Trudeau’s misdeeds may pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s, or even those of other recent Canadian prime ministers, but that should be cold comfort to progressives because, so far, this affair raises more corrosive questions about Trudeau’s competence than his ethics.

The most charitable interpretation of the facts in this matter suggest that Trudeau was ill-advised, that his aides, including clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick, failed to understand the law that Trudeau’s government passed—jammed in a budget omnibus bill—that would have allowed SNC-Lavalin to escape prosecution.

The law—Section 715.32(3) of the Criminal Code—forbids prosecutors from considering “the national economic interest … or the identity of the organization or individual involved.” This clause was inserted so that Canada would comply with the OECD anti-bribery convention.

Wernick testified at the justice committee last week that the clause “is to distinguish national economic interest from the interest of other countries,” meaning that it was proper for officials like him to pressure Jody Wilson-Raybould on the grounds that a prosecution might cost Canadian jobs.

In a statement Monday, the OECD took the trouble to contradict that narrower interpretation, which suggests Wernick’s understanding of the law was faulty.

It is possible that Trudeau and his people let their thinking be swayed by powerful lobbyists, that they didn’t realize what they were doing was wrong because they failed to understand the law. But Trudeau chose his clerk, and the other senior aides who badgered Wilson-Raybould and ignored her when she tried to warn them off.

Their errors are his errors, and his inept management of the political fallout—his refusal to admit that his people were wrong—raises a nasty question: Does he know what he is doing?

One of the Prime Minister’s biggest challenges as he spends this week in Florida, plotting his comeback, is how he is going to get things done in a town where everyone is wondering that.

The departure of Jane Philpott, who gave up her seat at the cabinet table because she no longer had confidence in the way Trudeau handled this matter, is especially disquieting, because she is held in such high regard. Philpott, who spent a decade doing admirable medical work in Niger, won praise from Indigenous leaders for her no-nonsense approach to improving service delivery, and from opposition politicians, bureaucrats and journalists.

She worked closely with Trudeau for years and no longer has faith in him.

And the Prime Minister seems to have lost his sangfroid. He lost his cool with Celina Caesar-Chavannes, the MP for Whitby and his former parliamentary secretary. She says that when she called him to tell him she had decided not to run again, he accused her of disloyalty, asked her to delay her announcement and lost his temper on their next meeting, storming out of the room.

The departure of three impressive women sends a more damaging message about Trudeau than anything the ethics commissioner will rule about this affair. The fact that we don’t know exactly what he did to irk them does nothing to improve his image. They know him, and they have lost faith in him.

Trudeau has an unusual advantage in politics because he has been around it all his life. In opposition, he seemed decisive and ethical, dealing aggressively with sexual misconduct by two of his MPs, expelling Liberal senators from his caucus and proactively releasing information about his finances.

But his princely confidence seems to come with a princely sense of entitlement. He has, after all, spent his life having strangers fawn over him. His ill-conceived trips to the Aga Khan’s island and India suggest that he forgets that a prime minister is the chairman of a committee, not a prince.

His capricious decision to break his promise about electoral reform—after thousands of Canadians wasted their time attending consultation meetings—fits the same pattern.

At the Charlottetown Conference where Canada was assembled, Sir John A. Macdonald put down his occupation in the guest book as “cabinet maker.” Trudeau is an international symbol of liberalism, a Disney prince striding on the world stage, speaking up for feminism, diversity and human rights. He won’t be doing much more of that unless he can show that he knows how to put together a cabinet.

So now not only is Trudeau's competence increasingly in question, but now we're seeing those allegedly left-wing outlets saying the same thing about Trudeau's princely entitlement that conservatives were saying years ago.

[JaredMilne]

And then there's otherwise staunch red-blooded Liberal Warren Kinsella saying many of the same things, and taking a lot of heat on social media for it:

$1:

It was vintage Justin Trudeau.

There he stood at the prime ministerial podium at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa, a battery of Canadian flags behind him, a throng of journalists in front of him. He blinked, all dewy-eyed sincerity.

It was Thursday morning, early. He’d just been asked if he planned to apologize for the metastasizing Lavscam scandal. It wasn’t a crazy question: Trudeau’s own press minions had been leaking that the prime minister was considering doing precisely that.

But, no. Said Trudeau: “I will be making an Inuit apology later today,” he said. Blink, blink.

And so it went. Not the worst press encounter of the week — R. Kelly won that prize, hands down — but close. Made a bad situation way, way worse.

For starters, as noted, the Liberal leader didn’t apologize — for what he had done to Jody Wilson-Raybould. For trying to cook up a sweetheart deal for a rotten Quebec engineering firm. For wiping his feet on the rule of law.

Apologies cost nothing, Justin. If done right, they pay lots of dividends.

That’s not all: The deflector-in-chief didn’t take responsibility. Not even a bit.

Even if you don’t apologize, Justin — even if you don’t express the smallest amount of regret, which you didn’t do either — it’s important that you accept that the proverbial buck stops with you. Instead, you whinged (yet again) that it’s all Wilson-Raybould’s fault.

“She didn’t come to me,” you wheezed. (Actually, she did. You just wouldn’t listen.) The worst of it: Trudeau sounded as sincere as a two-bit carnival barker.

That’s a surprise. Trudeau’s greatest talent, you see, is acting. He is an expert at radiating sincerity and emotion. But at his press conference, he had all the conviction of an al-Qaida hostage reading a statement about the evils of the West. This was a historic moment, and Trudeau needed to convince us. He didn’t.

He didn’t acknowledge the seriousness of this scandal, either. Lavscam is a raging five-alarm fire; Trudeau brought a squirt gun. He said nothing that will extinguish Canadians’ growing belief that Trudeau and his staff may have obstructed justice.

Also: Trudeau didn’t rebut the allegations that have been made against him. In fact, he did the reverse. He confirmed all of Wilson-Raybould’s evidence: That she was pressured to give SNC-Lavalin a judicial high-five. That he and his officials — 11 of them, more than 20 times, over a four-month period in fall 2018 — did what the former attorney general said they did. Guilty as charged, Your Honour.

At one point, Trudeau looked up from his focus-grouped talking points. He looked a bit weepy. Was an apology about to arrive?

Nope.

Instead, Trudeau gave us every indication that the pressure is getting to him. Without warning, he launched into a bizarre exposition about his dead father. How he and Pierre liked justice. And stuff.

Pro tip, Justin: Hauling dead relatives out of the crypt to buttress your argument isn’t convincing. It’s creepy.

And so it went. Trudeau just didn’t get how bad this is. You know: That, in a functioning democracy, politicians cannot ever, ever tell judges and prosecutors what to do. When that happens enough, you are a democracy no more. You’re a banana republic.

As he departed to “make an Inuit apology,” he was right about one thing, however. An “erosion of trust” had happened, as he said.

But the “erosion of trust” wasn’t between him and Wilson-Raybould.

It’s between him and us.

For reference, Kinsella was a full participant in the Chretien Liberals' election campaigns and government, and was also a staunch support of Dalton McGuinty when he ran Ontario. So it's not like this guy's a conservative in liberal clothing.

[PluggyRug]

More stinky stuff...