Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister said twice on September 17 to the former attorney general that either she should shelve the charges against SNC-Lavalin or its headquarters would leave Montreal.
This week, Business News Network asked the CEO of SNC-Lavalin, “Did you threaten to move your headquarters from Montreal?" CEO Neil Bruce replied, “No.” He was asked, “Never?” and again he replied, “No.” The interviewer then asked, “Where did this issue come up that it was a possibility for SNC?” The CEO replied, “I don't know what people make up, or what they have in their minds.”
When he said people, he was referencing the Prime Minister. It was the Prime Minister who said twice on September 17 to the former attorney general and then once a few weeks ago at a press conference that SNC would move out of Canada altogether if the criminal charges went ahead.
Now that we know the Prime Minister's claim to the former attorney general was false, this raises a number of important questions.
Section 139 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for anyone to attempt to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice. The course of justice at the time the Prime Minister met with the former attorney general was for SNC-Lavalin's fraud and bribery charges to go to trial. That is where the course of justice was leading. He was attempting to interrupt that course of justice by persuading his attorney general to sign a deal with the company, or have the prosecutor do so, that would shelve those charges. If he deliberately stated a falsehood to the top law officer to have charges shelved, his own criminal culpability may be at stake, and we will examine that issue more as the days go on.
That is the issue of the headquarters, but the other half of the Prime Minister's jobs claim is that, according to him and to testimony by his top adviser, Gerald Butts, “9,000 people's jobs are at stake”. I am quoting Mr. Butts in his testimony.
Earlier this week a reporter for BNN asked the CEO of SNC-Lavalin about the claim. She said, “The inference is that if you do not get to go the way of deferred prosecution agreement, 9,000 jobs disappear.” The CEO answered, “That's incorrect, and we've never said that.”
The CEO was asked directly about the Prime Minister's claim that 9,000 jobs would vanish if the charges proceeded, and he replied, “That's incorrect, and we've never said that.”
The Prime Minister suggested he got that information from the company. Who else would have told him that 9,000 jobs would up and vanish if charges were to go ahead? Now we know that his 9,000 jobs claim was a falsehood; we know that he looked Canadians in the eye and told them something that was not true. Not only do we have the mendacity around the Prime Minister's defence, but we also have a broader and bigger question that has not been answered or even explored.
If the Prime Minister was not protecting jobs when he tried to shelve the fraud and bribery charges for SNC-Lavalin, then who was he protecting? What motivated him to personally interfere with the former attorney general and to direct his staff and ministers to contact her 20 times in order to shelve these charges? That is an extraordinary amount of activity for a prime minister and his team under any circumstances. In the interest of dropping charges on a corporation accused of a serious crime, it is spectacular in its weirdness.
In all my years I have never heard of a prime minister or any politician trying to interfere to have charges dropped. However, to personally interact with an attorney general in order to do so is maybe a once in history event in Canada, and that is the source of this massive scandal.
I will conclude now by saying that the Conservatives will use every tool in the parliamentary tool kit to find out why the Prime Minister interfered and whether such interference may have been a criminal offence.