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Indeed. It is one thing for the AG to personally instruct the DPP in the manner the law prescribes: by a written directive, published in the Canada Gazette. “Informal reach outs” by political staff to the DPP and to other prosecutors are just wildly out of bounds.

The impression left is of a mass swarming of the attorney general’s office and that of the PPSC. If so it would mirror SNC-Lavalin’s swarming of the upper reaches of government. We have heard much, again, of the many visits by lobbyists to various ministers and other officials, all of them recorded in the lobbyist registry. We are only lately hearing about rather more direct, and unregistered interventions.

There are two layers of insulation protecting prosecutorial discretion. Astonishingly, Trudeau’s people appear to have tried to penetrate both

One is an extraordinary phone call from the chairman of SNC-Lavalin, Kevin Lynch, to the clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, on Oct. 15. The phone call was extraordinary in two respects. One, Lynch is a former clerk himself, hired as chairman in 2017, by which time the company’s assault on Ottawa was well under way. Two, Wernick, by his own account, had to explain to the former clerk that “he would have to go through the attorney general and the director of public prosecutions through his counsel.”

Then there is the letter from the company president, Neil Bruce, to the prime minister, dated the same day, complaining of the company’s inability to make the prosecutor see things their way. Why, she had even declined to meet with the former Supreme Court judge, Frank Iacobucci, whom the company had retained as counsel, the man Wernick pointedly described to Wilson-Raybould as “no shrinking violet.”

It says a great deal that the company’s response to being charged with serious crimes was not to fight the charges in court, but to fight them in government: to lobby the politicians, to attempt to intimidate the prosecutors, to arrange calls between old civil service chums. They did so, it is logical to conclude, because they thought it would work — because they were given reason to believe it would work.