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Beautiful. The PM’s spin doctors have managed to turn a story about their own alleged attempts to interfere in the prosecution of a Liberal-friendly firm (from 1993 to 2003 SNC-Lavalin contributed over a half a million dollars to the party, Elections Canada records show, plus another hundred thousand and change in illegal donations, as the company has acknowledged, in 2004-2011) into a story about whether a “difficult” minister was harming the government with her silence.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Very well. Let’s take the government’s emerging defence on its merits. Is this all perfectly normal? Is it quite all right, first, for a government to want to spare a corporation from criminal charges because it might go out of business? Let’s be clear: this would not be an issue if the corporation employed nine people, rather than nine thousand. The argument — the official story, that is, never mind questions of political connections or how it would all play in Quebec — is that SNC-Lavalin deserves preferential treatment because it is so big: because of the “thousands of jobs” that would allegedly be lost if it were to be submitted to the ordinary processes of law. As an argument for two-tiered justice, this at least has the virtue of being frank.

The company claims it should be spared prosecution because it has changed personnel and overhauled its corporate culture since the days when it was notorious for bribing public officials to win contracts, around the world and in Canada. But it’s surely worth noting that it was under the bad old corporate culture that the company grew into the colossus it is today. The practices for which it now asks to avoid charges, on the grounds that it is too big to fail, are the very sorts of practices that helped make it so big. Is there a more literal application of the old joke about the kid who kills his parents, then asks for leniency on the grounds that he’s an orphan?