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The DPP was not only within her rights, then, to refuse to negotiate a remediation agreement.. She would arguably be breaking the law if she did.

Suppose that were not true. Could the attorney general order her to? That, too, is far from clear. Under the law the attorney general is required to sign off on a prosecutor’s decision to negotiate a remediation agreement. But the prosecutor needs no such consent to decline to negotiate; neither is there anything in the law that says the attorney general can order her to.

This is not contradicted, as another lawyer friend points out, by that much-quoted provision in the Director of Public Prosecutions Act — the one obliging the attorney general to make public any order “with respect to the initiation or conduct” of “any specific prosecution.” Whatever limits that places on the AG’s ability to influence the “conduct” of a prosecution, it would seem to grant no power to stop one after it has started, still less to order a remediation agreement be pursued in its place.

If the attorney general can’t instruct the DPP to go easy on SNC-Lavalin, and if the DPP declines to do so on her own, what on earth was there for the prime minister and the attorney general to discuss? This is especially pertinent in light of the general obligation on all public office-holders, as described in the federal Conflict of Interest and Post-Employment Code: that they should not merely obey the law, but “perform their official duties … in a manner that will bear the closest scrutiny.”

The public should not be put in the position of having to parse the precise meaning of the prime minister’s words, or those of his staff, to know if they stayed within legal or ethical bounds. Whether they crossed the line, or just tiptoed up to it, isn’t really the issue: they shouldn’t have come anywhere near it.