If Jody Wilson-Raybould felt she was suffering “undue pressure” before in her spat with the Prime Minister’s Office, it is looking like a walk in the park compared to what the former minister in Justin Trudeau’s government must be feeling now.

Thanks to an extraordinary intervention on Thursday by Michael Wernick, Canada’s top civil servant, Wilson-Raybould is now essentially being dared to come out from under the murky cloud of anonymous media leaks, cryptic gestures and non-answers that have fuelled the story we’re now calling the “SNC-Lavalin scandal.”

“There was no inappropriate pressure put on the minister at any time,” Wernick flatly declared at the Commons justice committee, in an appearance that could have been titled: “Enough of this b.s.”

Wilson-Raybould, who is due to appear at the committee next week, now has to decide whether she wants to call Wernick — and by extension, none other than the prime minister himself — a liar.

She stood in the Commons earlier this week and said she was keen to speak “her truth.” However, it’s not Wilson-Raybould’s truth we urgently need to hear now, but just the plain old truth.

Wernick, who prefaced his testimony with a cri de coeur about the toxicity of politics, is clearly exasperated with the ways in which this tale has unfolded in what he called the “vomitorium” of social media. It’s hard to disagree with him on that; one gets the sense he was also speaking for his boss, the prime minister, who lost his right-hand man, Gerald Butts, amid the wreckage of this 2-week-old controversy.

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Wernick has even argued that Wilson-Raybould can no longer hide behind the solicitor-client cloak she’s been using to avoid confirming or denying what’s being said about her differences with the PMO on making a plea deal with SNC-Lavalin in its fraud and corruption case. Stakes are now upped, so is the pressure.

Whatever else was accomplished by Wernick’s forceful words on Thursday, the bizarre imbalance in this story — anonymous allegations and on-the-record denials — is rapidly coming to an end.

Yet another leak to The Globe and Mail on Thursday reported that Wilson-Raybould told cabinet this week she had faced undue pressure from the PMO to make that plea deal.

Leaving aside the details of this newest report, the very fact of that leak showed that Wilson-Raybould’s war with the PMO is not over, however conciliatory (and strange) it was to see the former minister sitting down with her colleagues on Tuesday.

If she indeed did tell her former fellow ministers that the PMO had been trying to force her to make a deal with SNC-Lavalin, it is a story opposite to what Wernick told, in some detail, to the justice committee on Thursday.

Opposition members of the committee and no doubt some supporters of Wilson-Raybould seem to favour the version of this scandal that they’ve only been able to cobble together between the lines of this story. In that version, a principled Wilson-Raybould stood up to the PMO’s corporate cosiness with SNC-Lavalin and got demoted from justice to veterans’ affairs minister as punishment.

Wernick didn’t dispute that conversations took place — he even laid them out in some detail, including how he told Wilson-Raybould of how her colleagues in government were reading the business pages and worried about SNC-Lavalin’s future. Was that pressure? He doesn’t think it was, but he said the ethics inquiry will help sort that out.

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So will Wilson-Raybould. Over the weekend, as she mulls what she can or will say to the justice committee, her choices will be to side with Wernick or the opposition’s version of events. Now that is pressure.

Earlier this week, it was looking like efforts were being made to bring Wilson-Raybould back into the fold. Everyone was smiling after she spoke to cabinet and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale even said he was “satisfied.” Wilson-Raybould walked back into the friendly fold of Liberal caucus and told reporters she still intended to run as a Liberal in the next election. Trudeau even told reporters that he was sorry for not apologizing to her sooner and condemning what has been said about her.

Wernick’s testimony was not at all conciliatory toward the Wilson-Raybould story being told in the shadows to date. It was in fact a dare and a challenge. It might even be pressure. Undue? We’ll have to see.

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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