Mr. Speaker, we have the five conditions that the former attorney general set.
There are two that have been met. One is that the disgraced principal secretary, Gerry Butts, has resigned. The other is that the disgraced Privy Council clerk, Michael Wernick, has resigned.
However, there remain three conditions that have not been met: one, senior adviser Mathieu Bouchard remains and has not left, which was one of the purported conditions; two, apparently she does not yet have any commitment from the Prime Minister that the new Attorney General will not interfere and provide a deferred prosecution agreement to SNC-Lavalin; and three, the Prime Minister has not taken responsibility for his actions in this affair.
Let us go through those conditions and analyze further what remains and why they remain conditions in the current government.
We will start with Mathieu Bouchard. His role in this has been little noticed, but it is one of great importance.
We are all aware that Gerry Butts inappropriately pressured the former attorney general. We all have the audio recordings of Michael Wernick doing the same. What we do not have and have not discussed here is the relentless drive of the Prime Minister's senior policy adviser, Mathieu Bouchard, to try to tamper with the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.
Let me read from the former attorney general's testimony before the committee. She stated:
My chief of staff had a phone call with Mathieu Bouchard and Elder Marques from the Prime Minister's Office. They wanted to discuss SNC. They told her that SNC had made further submissions to the Crown and that “there is some softening, but not much”. They said that they understand that the individual Crown prosecutor wants to negotiate an agreement, but the director does not.
This is very important information. How is it that a senior policy adviser to the current Liberal Prime Minister would be aware of any disagreement between an individual Crown prosecutor and the director of public prosecutions? Under the Federal Accountability Act, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions is made separate and self-contained. It is apolitical and out of reach of political interference by the Prime Minister and even the Attorney General. Its decisions are made in total isolation from the political process, with the sole exception that an attorney general may issue a written directive. However, that directive would have to be published for all eyes to see in the Canada Gazette, which is like a news magazine telling the Canadian people the regulatory and administrative decisions of the government. In other words, it would be absolutely inappropriate for the senior adviser to the Prime Minister to have intimate knowledge about the disagreements and conversations within the office of the director of public prosecutions.
This is precisely why we need the senior adviser to come before the ethics committee when it begins its investigation into this matter next Tuesday. We have asked for him to appear. I have said very clearly that if this senior prime ministerial adviser, along with other witnesses alleged to have interfered in this criminal prosecution, are called before the committee, I will end my marathon speech immediately. I await a member of government rising to his or her feet to tell me that, at which point I will take the government's word and end my remarks so it can speak on other matters before this House.
She goes on in this intervention:
They also mention the Quebec election. They asked my chief if someone had suggested the outside advice idea to the PPSC and asked whether we are open to this suggestion. They wanted to know if my deputy could do it.
She went on to state:
In response, my chief of staff stressed to them prosecutorial independence and potential concerns about the interference in the independence of the prosecutorial functions. Mr. Bouchard and Mr. Marques
—two senior advisers to the Prime Minister—
kept telling her that they didn't want to cross any lines, but they asked my chief of staff to follow up with me directly on this matter.
She goes on to state:
Later that day, my chief of staff had a phone call with Elder Marques and Mathieu Bouchard from the Prime Minister's Office. They wanted an update on what was going on regarding the DPAs since “we don't have a ton of time”. She relayed my summary of the meeting with the Clerk and the Prime Minister.
Two senior prime ministerial advisers, Mathieu and Elder, also raised the idea of an informal outreach to the director of public prosecutions. Why not? Why not just have someone in the Attorney General's office or the PMO informally reach out to maybe have a beer and talk about how this criminal prosecution could be squashed? That is how our legal system is supposed to work—informal outreach, which in reality means backroom dealings.
The former attorney general goes on to state:
My chief of staff said that she knew I was not comfortable with that, as it looked like and probably did constitute political interference. They asked whether that was true if it wasn't the Attorney General herself, but if it was her staff or the deputy minister. My chief of staff said “yes”, it would, and offered a call with me directly.
These are the early interventions of Mr. Bouchard, senior PMO adviser, in mid-September.
She then goes on to state:
At this point, after September 20, there was an apparent pause in communicating with myself or my chief of staff on the SNC matter. We did not hear from anyone again until October 18 when Mathieu Bouchard called my chief of staff and asked that we—I—look at the option of my seeking an external legal opinion on the DPP's decision not to extend an invitation to negotiate a DPA.
Of course, that would not have been necessary, because the former attorney general had already made her decision clear: She was not going to intervene and overturn the decision of the prosecutor, regardless of some outside opinion the Prime Minister cooked up with a friendly lawyer. This call constituted further and unnecessary political interference.
The former attorney general went on to state:
...on October 26, 2018, when my chief of staff spoke to [PMO adviser] Mathieu Bouchard and communicated to him that, given that SNC had now filed in Federal Court seeking to review the DPP's decision, surely we had moved past the idea of the Attorney General intervening or getting an opinion on the same question. Mathieu replied that he was still interested in an external legal opinion idea. Could she not get an external legal opinion on whether the DPP had exercised their discretion properly, and then on the application itself, the Attorney General could intervene and seek to stay the proceedings, given that she was awaiting a legal opinion?
In other words, Mr. Bouchard, operating on behalf of the Prime Minister, suggested that the former attorney general slam the brakes on the trial itself by seeking a stay. A stay means that the Attorney General would go to the court and ask if the whole trial could be put on hold, that the PMO has hooked the AG up with a legal opinion from a Liberal legal mind who would offer an opinion shortly about whether the company should get a settlement instead of a criminal trial. In the meantime, the court would just hit the pause button and delay justice. That is absolutely inappropriate.
The former attorney general wrote further:
My chief of staff said that this would obviously be perceived as interference and her boss questioning the DPP's decision. Mathieu
—again, one of the top PMO advisers—
said that if six months from the election SNC announces they're moving their headquarters out of Canada, that is bad. He said, “We can have the best policy in the world but we need to get re-elected.”
That does not sound political at all, does it?
There are two things here that we need to address.
First, Monsieur Bouchard was stating a patent falsehood. He was saying here that SNC could move its office within six months. We know that is impossible. This intervention, by the way, was made in October. There was November, December, January, February, March and we are now in April, which is six months, and so far there is no announcement of the headquarters move, and we know why: SNC has already signed a $1.5-billion loan agreement with the Quebec pension plan that requires its headquarters to stay in Canada. It has just signed a 20-year lease on its Montreal headquarters. It announced a multi-million-dollar renovation of that headquarters to accommodate its employees. All of this is publicly available if someone consults with Mr. Google.
Despite this publicly available evidence to the contrary, this senior PMO adviser was stating that the former attorney general had to immediately find a way to shelve the criminal prosecution of this company or the headquarters would move.
It is one thing to interfere in a criminal prosecution. It is another thing, and even more significant, to lie in order to shelve a criminal prosecution. Section 139 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for anyone to attempt to defeat, pervert or obstruct the course of justice. If the course of justice was for SNC-Lavalin to face its fraud and bribery charges in court, then lying to interrupt that process would certainly have constituted an attempt to defeat, pervert or obstruct the course of justice. As a result, I hope the RCMP will investigate whether this lie constituted a criminal offence.
The second part I will focus on is this. It is hard to believe that in one sentence we have two things that are so spectacularly inappropriate, the first being the aforementioned lie and the second being the overt politicization of the prosecutorial and criminal process in saying, “We can have the best policy in the world but we need to get re-elected.” Excuse me? Is this how the Prime Minister's Office treats criminal trials? We literally have a top adviser who is still on the payroll in the PMO who called up the attorney general's office, spoke to the chief of staff and said that she had to interfere in the criminal prosecution of a massive Liberal-linked corporation because they need—I am quoting—to get re-elected. This is astonishing. It is absolutely astonishing that this guy is still on the payroll.
The fact that the Prime Minister has had this information, as we all have now, for over a month since the former attorney general appeared and testified, and has not fired this man, is astonishing. What is worse—