Mr. Speaker, I am rising further to the question of privilege that was raised on Monday by the NDP House leader from New Westminster—Burnaby regarding members misleading the House.
I can assure the chair I will not be repeating the interventions that were heard on Monday afternoon. I will be addressing two themes. I will be brief and concise. The first will be to offer additional evidence of the contradictions on the parliamentary record. The second will be to elaborate on an alternative angle mentioned by my own House leader.
As we heard previously on February 7, the Attorney General told the House:
As the Prime Minister has said, earlier today, these allegations in The Globe and Mail are false.
There were of course several variants on that answer through question period that day.
Then on February 8, the Attorney General's parliamentary secretary told the House, among other things:
As the Prime Minister said very clearly yesterday to the journalists gathered, the allegations contained in The Globe and Mail article are false.
I want to now turn to the actual allegations incorporated by the reference into these blanket denials given to the House and now part of the contradictory evidence before the House. There are a few quotations here, for which I apologize in advance; they are, however, critical to establishing the contradictions given to the House.
The Globe and Mail headline was, “PMO pressed justice minister to abandon prosecution of SNC-Lavalin”. It was written by Robert Fife, Steven Chase and Sean Fine, and it was printed on page A1 in the February 7, 2019 edition of the newspaper.
In the article's first paragraph, we learn:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office attempted to press Jody Wilson-Raybould when she was justice minister to intervene in the corruption and fraud prosecution of Montreal engineering and construction giant SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., sources say, but she refused to ask federal prosecutors to make a deal with the company that could prevent a costly trial.
The most eloquent rebuttal here would be simply to quote the former attorney general's own words at the justice committee on February 27, which are at page 2 of the evidence. She said:
For a period of approximately four months, between September and December of 2018, I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the Attorney General of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin.
These events involved 11 people, excluding myself and my political staff, from the Prime Minister's Office, the Privy Council Office and the office of the Minister of Finance. This included in-person conversations, telephone calls, emails and text messages. There were approximately 10 phone calls and 10 meetings specifically about SNC, and I and/or my staff were a part of these meetings.
Within these conversations, there were express statements regarding the necessity of interference in the SNC-Lavalin matter, the potential for consequences and veiled threats if a DPA was not made available to SNC. These conversations culminated on December 19, 2018, with a conversation I had with the Clerk of the Privy Council.
For his part, the Prime Minister's longest-serving and closest adviser, Gerald Butts, told the justice committee on the morning of March 6, at page 22 of the evidence, “Well, I think that 20 points of contact over four months are not a lot of contact”.
However, the former president of the Treasury Board, the hon. member for Markham—Stouffville, had a different view in her recent sensational Maclean's interview. She said, “Whether there is one attempt to interfere or whether there are 20 attempts to interfere, that crosses ethical and constitutional lines.”
Members may recall what the Attorney General told the House on February 7:
[T]he Prime Minister dealt with this matter very clearly earlier today. He stated that neither he nor anyone in his office pressured my predecessor or myself to come to any particular decision in this matter.
As the Prime Minister stated earlier today, the allegations contained in The Globe and Mail article are false.
The following day, his parliamentary secretary told the House, “at no point has the current Minister of Justice or the former minister of justice been pressured or directed by the Prime Minister or anyone in the Prime Minister's Office, including the individual just mentioned”. He was referring to Gerry Butts.
We now know that these denials were outright wrong. Either the Attorney General and his parliamentary secretary misled the House or someone misled them to that end.
Turning to the Globe and Mail article, at the sixth paragraph we read:
Sources say [the member for Vancouver Granville], who was justice minister and attorney-general until she was shuffled to Veterans Affairs early this year, came under heavy pressure to persuade the Public Prosecution Service of Canada to change its mind.
At page 3 of the evidence from the former attorney general's justice committee appearance, she outlined the September 17 conversation with the Prime Minister. It was a back-and-forth exchange of at least four rounds, which culminated in a statement that produced goosebumps. She said, “I was quite taken aback. My response—and I vividly remember this as well”—