'The message is obvious. If you’re a large financial institution charged with systematic money laundering or foreign bribery, hire a lobbyist, get an appointment with Katie Telford or Michael Wernick, and remind them that if your company gets convicted criminally, all sorts of innocent employees will be penalized.'

It’s the jobs that made me do it. Good jobs. Middle-class jobs. That’s the crux of Prime Minister Trudeau’s defence for having spent so much effort trying to convince Jody Wilson-Raybould to overrule the director of public prosecutions and stop a criminal trial against SNC-Lavalin Inc. on corruption and fraud charges and risking his political future on it.

For a politician who got elected in 2015 in part by promising to defend jobs and the middle class, it sounds like a good line.

“SNC-Lavalin is a company that employs 9,000 Canadians across this country,” the prime minister said at his failed effort Thursday to explain his actions and shut down the scandal. “They create many thousands of spinoff jobs and peripheral industries. They directly or indirectly put food on the table for countless families as one of Canada’s major employers … The context is a tough one, with potential job losses in the thousands.”

There are two problems with this line. There’s no reasonable argument that the 9,000 jobs purportedly at

risk at SNC-Lavalin are actually threatened, and apparently no independent analysis of those claims.

And even if some jobs maybe at risk, accepting employment as a consideration in these kinds of cases means that Canada’s criminal justice system will in future be stymied in efforts to go after corporate crime of any kind, from corruption to money laundering, if somehow jobs are at stake.

The message is obvious. If you’re a large financial institution charged with systematic money laundering or foreign bribery, hire a lobbyist, get an appointment with Katie Telford or Michael Wernick, and remind them that if your company gets convicted criminally, all sorts of innocent employees will be penalized.

Expectations will be that a quiet call will be made to a compliant attorney general and an order made to stop the prosecution or negotiate a quick deferred prosecution agreement. Presto, a brief letter appears in the Canada Gazette and the problem disappears.

First off, I’ll admit that after watching this scandal unfold over the past few weeks, I still believe Wilson-Raybould when she says she was the target of an unceasing lobbying effort by Trudeau and company, aided and abetted by the clerk of the Privy Council, to get her to overrule the director of public prosecutions. Whether it was inappropriate or not is a question of judgment but it was certainly persistent and went on for months.

Another fact is clear. When Wilson-Raybould didn’t do what she was urged to do, she was fired as justice minister and attorney general and demoted.

All these efforts by Trudeau, Butts, etc. to twist the story into a pretzel about how Scott Brison quitting politics somehow forced Trudeau to remove Wilson-Raybould from a senior position in cabinet make no sense.

Why didn’t Trudeau remove Bill Morneau from finance or Marc Garneau from transport if it was simply a question of moving people around? The key goal of the shuffle was to get Wilson-Raybould out of justice and put a more cooperative “team player” in place.

I don’t know what prompted Wilson-Raybould to hang on in cabinet even after her humiliating demotion and what role she had in the leak to The Globe and Mail but when it comes to the SNC-Lavalin business, there’s no doubt. Trudeau wanted the SNC-Lavalin situation fixed and the deferred prosecution agreement approved so a full-court press on her ensued. And she proved to be an impossible nut to crack.

In trotting out the 9,000 jobs purportedly at risk, and their families about to join the bread lines, Trudeau and company were parroting the PR lines from SNC-Lavalin. The company’s stock price may have been beaten up on the market because of the current controversy and its own missteps in its mining and oil and gas business leading to a massive loss, but it’s not about to close. This isn’t Sears Canada or a Cape Breton coal mine.

SNC has a powerful large shareholder, Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, which has stated its faith in the company and has an agreement forcing it to remain headquartered in Montreal until 2024. I still think a major reorganization at SNC is a possibility, including asset sales, a split of its Canadian and international operations, even a name change to get out from the continuing reputational damage done to the company by the unresolved Libya corruption case. Or the company could always plead guilty and hope that Ottawa will relax its automatic 10-year ban on new contracts for guilty companies.

But even if a reorganization happens, there’s a good possibility that job losses would be minimal. SNC has major multi-year contracts involving with refurbishment of the Darlington nuclear reactor in Ontario, for example.

If SNC sells its nuclear division, the work will continue and the jobs will still be there but the corporate ownership will change. It happens all the time. If there is a threat, perhaps it’s at the Montreal head office and its 700 employees. There again, if the company is reorganized, employees may end up getting shuffled around but the overall job losses could be minimal.

And what is the measure used that justifies calling for PMO intervention in a criminal case, an extraordinary action in a country that touts its belief in the rule of law. 9,000 jobs? 900 jobs? 90 jobs?

I’ll give you a hypothetical situation. If a Canadian sub-contractor for SNC-Lavalin in Libya or Bangladesh were charged with foreign bribery, say a company with 50 employees, what are the chances you think that its president would get a one-to-one meeting with the country’s top public servant to plead its case for a deferred prosecution agreement?

Or get the prime minister’s principal secretary to consider hiring a retired Supreme Court justice to craft a second opinion on the decision of an attorney general to back her director of public prosecutions. I’d say less than zero.

What we’re in danger of setting up in Canada is a two-tier criminal justice system, with one set of rules for big companies and another set for everybody else. If Wilson-Raybould has stopped that from happening in the future, we should all be grateful for her actions, no matter what motivated her actual resignation.

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