OTTAWA—The Liberals have again blocked an investigation into the SNC-Lavalin controversy, raising opposition concerns that parliamentary inquiries to probe allegations of judicial interference are at a dead end.

Liberal MPs on the House of Commons ethics committee opposed a move by the Conservatives and New Democrats on Tuesday afternoon to hold a second set of hearings into allegations that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and senior officials put “inappropriate” pressure on Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister, to intervene in the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

“This is a cavalcade of contradictions and coverup. The prime minister clearly has something to hide,” Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre said after the meeting.

“They’ve shut every opportunity down that the opposition has brought before them to bring this to Parliament in a way that we think would get to the truth,” New Democrat MP Tracey Ramsey said.

The story could still create headlines and headaches for the Liberal government in the days ahead. On Tuesday, Wilson-Raybould told the Star she intended to submit her written brief to the justice committee with the promised emails and texts by the end of the day. It will then need to be translated before the package is distributed to committee members.

Justice committee chair Anthony Housefather said in an email that once the documents are distributed to MPs, the committee’s legislative counsel “will suggest any redactions required under the Privacy Act,” and that “once the committee agrees, they will be posted on the website.”

The committee had not received the documents as of early evening, making it unlikely that they would be publicly available before Wednesday.

The Conservatives and New Democrats had been hoping to sway Liberals on the ethics committee to support the inquiry, given recent calls by some in the government caucus that the two former ministers should speak out about what they know.

Conservative MP Peter Kent had wanted the committee to approve a new study into the controversy, and for the committee chair to ask the prime minister to remove “all constraints” on witnesses.

“I think that Canadians deserve to hear the full truth,” Kent said, adding it was “entirely proper and entirely appropriate” for the ethics committee to initiate its own hearings.

But in the end, the Liberals refused.

Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, a vice-chair of the committee, acknowledged he had voted in the Commons in favour of a “more public-facing inquiry to get at the truth,” a goal he claimed was shared by his fellow Liberal MPs. “It’s just a question of how best we can do that.”

But he said it would be “premature” for the ethics committee to launch its own proceedings given that Wilson-Raybould intends to file a written submission including copies of emails and texts to the justice committee, and that committee could still act on the information she provides.

“This is appropriately before justice and we ought to see what justice does in the wake of information that is provided,” said Erskine-Smith, who was the only Liberal to speak at the meeting.

Pointing to its earlier investigation of the Cambridge Analytica affair, he said committees are not best placed to do investigations.

“We ran into roadblocks and were unable to proceed based on our inability to compel document production in the same way, revisit previous testimony in the same way,” he said. “Frankly, the tools we have at our disposal are more cumbersome.”

Still, Erskine-Smith broke with many of his Liberal colleagues by saying that if Wilson-Raybould and Philpott feel they cannot speak fully on the issue, the prime minister should act to ensure they can.

He also agreed with the Conservatives and denounced what seemed to be a deliberate leak to CTV and The Canadian Press aimed at showing relations between the prime minister and Wilson-Raybould had soured as early as 2017, when they disagreed about whether a conservative Manitoba judge should be named to a western vacancy on the Supreme Court. The reports named the judge, Glenn Joyal, who responded to the reports by saying he withdrew his name from consideration because his wife had cancer.

“It is outrageous that there’s a leak with respect to the Supreme Court judicial appointment process and without question that kind of leak undermines the confidence in the judicial selection process and appointment process,” Erskine-Smith said. “I think people from all parties ought to condemn that kind of thing.”

Wilson-Raybould told the justice committee last month that she faced “inappropriate” and “sustained” political pressure from Trudeau and senior officials last fall to mediate criminal charges against the Quebec construction and engineering company.

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Trudeau and his team deny they pressured her, and said they only urged her to consider a second outside legal opinion. A mediated agreement would allow the company to avoid a criminal prosecution and with it, a 10-year ban on federal contracts, which had sparked fears within government of job losses.

Ramsey, who is a vice-chair of the justice committee, said there is little hope that it will resume its hearings into the affair.

And she said Housefather has publicly declared there’s nothing more to be studied.

In an opinion piece in the National Post last week, Housefather wrote that in his view it is the “duty” of an attorney general to consider new facts relative to a possible remediation agreement “seriously and on an ongoing basis.”

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David Moscrop, a political scientist with the department of communication at the University of Ottawa, said the day’s proceedings left him “frustrated.” He said he doesn’t believe the office of the federal ethics commissioner is well suited for this sort of inquiry. And he said the shutdown of the justice committee and now the refusal of the ethics committee to launch an inquiry means a public inquiry is the only forum to get at the facts.

“This is the sort of information that Canadians would like to have ideally before the election, so it was frustrating to watch,” Moscrop said an interview.

“It raises the broader question: can the House and its committees effectively hold the government to account in the current system? I think the answer is not really,” he said.

“The only thing that’s going to ultimately, I think, result in fundamental changes is if voters decide they’re not going to have any of it.”

Correction: This article has been updated from a previous version in which the surname of New Democrat MP Tracey Ramsey was misspelled.

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