OTTAWA—In a move denounced by opposition parties as an unprecedented breach of parliamentary practice, the Liberal majority on the House of Commons ethics committee shot down an attempt Wednesday to call Canada’s ethics commissioner to testify about his damning report on the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Mario Dion’s office had already said the commissioner was willing to appear “on short notice” before the committee to discuss his report, which concluded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke Canada’s conflict-of-interest law by improperly pressuring then-attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to stop the ongoing criminal prosecution against the Montreal-based corporation.

But during a two-hour meeting Wednesday, five Liberal MPs voted to block Dion’s appearance, dismissing the attempt to call an officer of Parliament to testify at a committee — a routine practice in both the Senate and House of Commons — as a partisan ploy.

Charlie Angus, an NDP MP and longtime member of the committee, painted the move as one not even seen during 10 years of Conservative government.

“I have never seen an effort to restrict the ability of an officer of Parliament from reporting to the ethics committee,” Angus told reporters.

“What we saw today is obstruction,” Angus said. “What were the Liberals so frightened off that they shut down the ethics commissioner?”

Peter Kent, the Conservative MP for Thornhill, noted during the meeting that the previous ethics commissioner testified at the committee for two hours in 2018 about her report that found Trudeau broke the conflict-of-interest law for a first time when he went on vacation to the Aga Khan’s private island in the Bahamas.

Following the 5-4 defeat of the motion to call Dion, Kent condemned Liberal Steven MacKinnon — a Quebec MP who is not a regular member of the committee — as a “hit man” for the Prime Minister’s Office and “a stranger to this committee who didn’t understand ... the responsibility of the ethics committee to call and to dialogue with officers of Parliament.”

The Liberals also blocked a motion to have Trudeau, Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Morneau’s former chief of staff, Ben Chin, testify about their roles in the affair.

MacKinnon was unrepentant as he defended the prime minister’s role in the controversy and accused the opposition MPs of playing political games in trying to drag out the issue in the public eye in the run-up to this fall’s election.

“It is the responsibility of any prime minister to stand up for people’s jobs,” MacKinnon told the committee.

“The prime minister’s objective throughout ... was to protect thousands of jobs in Canada all the while ensuring the integrity and the independence of the justice system,” he said.

Speaking after the committee meeting wrapped up, MacKinnon justified the Liberal move to block the commissioner’s testimony, saying the issue has already been studied “quite extensively.”

He denied that the Prime Minister’s Office gave any direction to the Liberal MPs, insisting that they had their own “independent” view that the hearing was an “abject exercise in partisanship.”

In a scathing report released this month, Dion detailed what he branded as “troubling” tactics by the prime minister to change Wilson-Raybould’s mind on giving SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement.

“The evidence abundantly shows that Mr. Trudeau knowingly sought to influence Ms. Wilson-Raybould both directly and through the actions of his agents,” Dion said.

Dion concluded that those interventions were “tantamount to political direction” and contrary to the principles of prosecutorial independence.

The ethics watchdog rejected Trudeau’s argument he was acting only in the public interest, saying that “private, political” reasons were cited to Wilson-Raybould as the reasons to intervene.

Trudeau has since said he disagrees with Dion’s conclusion and won’t apologize for striving to protect thousands of Canadians who work for the company, which would be barred from federal contracts if convicted on fraud and bribery charges.

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Conservative MP Lisa Raitt (Milton), who sat in on the committee Wednesday, said Dion should be given the chance to respond to Trudeau and defend his report. Her Conservative colleague, Pierre Poilievre (Carleton), added that Dion’s report brought up questions about how many jobs would really be in jeopardy if SNC-Lavalin was convicted.

Morneau told Dion during his investigation that his department did not conduct an analysis of the economic impacts of a conviction, though SNC-Lavalin has warned publicly that it could force the company — a major corporation in Quebec — to uproot its headquarters to another country.

“We know that SNC-Lavalin gave $100,000 in illegal donations to the Liberal Party,” Poilievre said, referring to the company’s 2016 admission of illegal contributions between 2004 and 2011.

“We need to know the real motive for helping to protect this company,” he said.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said she was “shaken” by accounts of SNC-Lavalin’s extensive lobbying efforts in Dion’s report, both to push the Liberals to change the Criminal Code and give the company a settlement deal for its fraud and bribery charges.

“This is really scandalous. The prime minister is guilty here of the kind of offence for which resignation is appropriate,” May said during the committee, stressing that decision is in Trudeau’s hands alone.

“It does strike me as beyond belief that this kind of thing could go on. It’s not a small matter. It shouldn’t be covered up.”

In an email Wednesday, Dion’s spokesperson Mélanie Rushworth says the commissioner respects the committee’s decision not to call him to testify.

“His report speaks for itself in terms of the findings contained in the (report) and he will not be giving interviews on this matter,” Rushworth said.

One Liberal MP broke with his party to join the call for Dion to testify, but for different reasons than the opposition.

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, the MP for Beaches—East York, said he believes that while Dion was correct to underscore there was improper pressure on Wilson-Raybould, the commissioner was wrong to conclude this intervention was sought on behalf of the company’s financial interest rather than to protect jobs.

“The public interest was pursued improperly, but at no time did the prime minister improperly further a private interest,” Erskine-Smith said during the meeting.

“The commissioner is legally wrong, and I would like him to sit right there so he could answer questions about how he got this analysis so completely, completely wrong.”

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