'The decision on whether a criminal case against a company gets sent to trial should rest with independent, apolitical prosecutors. Unless a prosecutors is acting irresponsibly, cabinet ministers or powerful aides to the prime minister should be nowhere near those decisions. The integrity of our justice system is at stake.'

We now know it, directly from the mouth of the prime minister. When it comes to our criminal justice system, if you’re a big enough company, the government will hear you out and try its darnedest to make things right for you.

Justin Trudeau made plain last week what lots of people have been suspecting ever since The Globe and Mail reported that Attorney-General Jody Raybould had lost her job and was demoted because she didn’t play ball with efforts by SNC-Lavalin to get a deferred prosecution agreement on criminal corruption charges that are about to come to trial.

Wilson-Raybould has since quit the cabinet and a political sandstorm (memories of Libya) has ensued.

What Trudeau told reporters was that his government takes seriously its “responsibility of standing up for jobs, of protecting jobs, of growing the economy, of making sure there are good jobs across the country, as there are with SNC-Lavalin.” Then, he added, that “we always need to make sure we’re standing up for the rule of law and the independence of our justice system.”

Interesting turn of phrase.

Of course, that’s not what Parliament had in mind back in 2006 when it established the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. Saving jobs or protecting big companies is not part of its legislative mandate. In fact, the service is supposed to be above politics and economics. What ‘s essential is its independence to make prosecutorial decisions.

“The Director of Public Prosecutions has the power to make binding and final decisions to prosecute offences under federal jurisdiction,” according to the service’s website. If the Attorney-General wants to step in with a specific directive on a case, it must be put in writing and published in the Canada Gazette.

In the dozen years since the law was passed, this has never been done. And my assumption is that Jody Wilson-Raybould didn’t want be the attorney-general to overrule the director, Kathleen Roussel, who had decided that a deferred prosecution agreement wasn’t appropriate in the case of SNC-Lavalin.

By the time Roussel was named to her job in 2017, the fix was clearly in to let SNC-Lavalin get a deferred prosecution agreement, whether she thought it appropriate or not. The company had been hit for years by an avalanche of bad publicity and financial hits as the scope of allegations of bribery and corruption implicating the company and its employees around the globe became evident.

Even before the corruption charges in the Libya case were filed in 2015, the company was lobbying heavily, warning of the threat to the company if prosecutors filed charges. When prosecutors ignored those entreaties and did their job, SNC-Lavalin began a full-court press on government, starting in February 2016.

According to the CBC, SNC-Lavalin was relentless in its lobbying efforts, which were focused on a range of federal economic departments plus no fewer than 18 communications with the Prime Minister’s Office. According to the lobbyist registry, these discussions were arranged to discuss justice and law enforcement.

This effort was particularly shameless. Why in the world was SNC-Lavalin meeting Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains and an aide to Heritage Minister Melanie Joly to discuss a legal issue far from their jurisdictions? It’s questionable why all these departments even took the meetings when it was obvious SNC-Lavalin wanted to talk about its legal problems. Even when the deferred prosecution agreement law was shoehorned into the budget bill this year, the lobbying continued.

SNC-Lavalin felt they needed other high-priced help with intimate Ottawa knowledge. So in 2017, Kevin Lynch, a former clerk of the Privy Council and a former deputy minister of finance joined SNC-Lavalin’s board. He took over as chair in January of 2018. I can’t think of a better person to explain to the company how Ottawa works.

Yet sometimes, you have to wonder whether the company and its shareholders would be better off if management spent less time and effort leaning on politicians and more time taking care of its own business.

In recent weeks, the company has twice slashed its profit forecasts and had its credit rating cut by Standard & Poor’s. Of course, it initially blamed others, namely the Canadian government, for its woes. If only Ottawa didn’t defend human rights in Saudi Arabia, we’d get lots more business, the company complained. If only Ottawa would forget about those criminal charges related to the corruption and bribery scandal in Libya, we’d be off to the races, the company whinged.

But what executive leadership doesn’t like to talk about as much is the company’s own major problems. In Chile, a large mining project has gone particularly badly, leading to a contract dispute that may cost the company as much as $350-million.

Of course, it’s been termed an “isolated incident.” Yet the situation is so serious that the company announced it had stopped bidding on any new mining contracts. At least one analyst says the company should get out of its mining and oil and gas businesses, which it has invested in heavily in recent years.

Protecting jobs is a laudable goal and a responsibility of government. But protecting an independent legal system comes first. When it comes to individuals, if somebody is charged with a serious crime, the justice system goes ahead regardless of whether the alleged perpetrator is a millionaire or a homeless person who has had terrible luck in life.

When corporations are charged under the Criminal Code, whether it’s for corruption or fraud or tax evasion, they should get a fair hearing. Yet no company should be too big to prosecute. It’s too easy to go after the little guys and let the big fish go free, as we see all too often in our tax system.

The decision on whether a criminal case against a company gets sent to trial should rest with independent, apolitical prosecutors. Unless a prosecutors is acting irresponsibly, cabinet ministers or powerful aides to the prime minister should be nowhere near those decisions. The integrity of our justice system is at stake.

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