No question: the report delivered on Wednesday by federal Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion is a punch in the gut for the Liberal party and for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in particular.

The office of the ethics commissioner, like that of similar officers of Parliament, comes with a special halo that makes it very difficult to contest its conclusions. It’s not a good look to be seen arguing with a man who has “ethics” in his very title.

And it was clear long before Dion delivered his report that the government had bungled the SNC-Lavalin file in a host of ways. Having two high-profile ministers quit your cabinet amid accusations of improper influence is a political disaster by definition.

Yet the prime minister pointedly made clear that he did not agree with everything that Dion had to say about how his government handled the SNC-Lavalin affair. And he was right to do so.

The commissioner’s conclusion is damning on its face. He found that Trudeau violated Section 9 of the federal Conflict of Interest Act by seeking to influence former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould on whether she should overrule the Director of Public Prosecutions and offer SNC-Lavalin a way to avoid criminal prosecution.

As Dion sets out at length in his report, however, it wasn’t wrong under the law for Trudeau and his officials simply to try and influence the minister.

To find that the PM violated Section 9 in this case, it’s necessary to show that he sought “to improperly further another person’s private interests.”

Dion found that the way Wilson-Raybould was influenced was indeed “improper,” because it went counter to established rules and conventions about the independence of the attorney general.

More controversially, though, he also found that the interventions by Trudeau and Co. were made in order to further the private interest of SNC-Lavalin — as opposed to the public interest involved if the engineering giant had been crippled by a criminal trial and forced to shed thousands of jobs.

This is, at the very least, a debatable conclusion. There is no evidence, and none was brought forth in Dion’s report, that Trudeau personally or the Liberals in general would benefit in a direct way (financially, for example) by shielding SNC-Lavalin from criminal prosecution and making sure it was offered a deferred prosecution agreement instead.

On the contrary, the government maintained forcefully that it was seeking to protect the public interest, not SNC-Lavalin’s private interest. And it’s hard to argue that the fate of a company as big as SNC, with many thousands of employees, does not impinge in a major way on the public interest. Similar arguments could and have been made for General Motors, Bombardier and others.

In hindsight, it’s clear that it would have made better sense — economically, politically and legally — for the government to have disregarded the intense lobbying for a deal from SNC and the warnings about possible job losses coming out of Quebec. Those were highly exaggerated, and the government was wrong to take them as seriously as it did.

But being wrong, or even foolish, in such a matter is not illegal. And, despite Dion’s arguments, it is quite possible to accept Trudeau’s argument that he was out to do what he could to make sure SNC-Lavalin was not destroyed by the charges of fraud and bribery it faces from its involvement in Libya a decade or so ago.

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In other words, he was defending the public interest, not the private interest of one company. And if so, he would not have violated Section 9.

That’s a defensible argument, though it will no doubt be drowned out as Trudeau’s opponents seize on Dion’s report to inflict maximum damage on the Liberals. But even as that plays out, it’s worth keeping in mind that the issue isn’t necessarily as clear-cut as the commissioner makes it seem.

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