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Photo by DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Beijing does not accept that Canadian politicians cannot simply issue orders to any part of the state’s machinery, including the police, prosecution and judiciary. In China the Communist Party is above the law. In Canada, happily, no one is.

Or at least so many of us thought. The reason to question this assumption, and why we can be sure the Chinese are gleefully going to double down on their campaign against us, is because of the stories leaking out of Ottawa to the effect that officials at the very highest level of government, the Prime Minister’s Office, may have intervened in a proposed prosecution of a Canadian company, SNC-Lavalin.

Very quickly, the story is this: SNC got into trouble nearly a decade ago for bribery and corruption in some of its foreign dealings and this behaviour has been alleged by federal prosecutors to violate Canadian law. Because conviction on these charges would result in a 10-year ban on the company bidding on federal projects, the chief source of SNC revenue, the company has been waging an energetic campaign to replace a court prosecution with a negotiated “remediation agreement.” Such an agreement would cost the company some money but avoid the bidding ban, thus safeguarding SNC’s business model.

Photo by John Mahoney/Postmedia News

To the company’s consternation, federal prosecutors were not interested in playing ball but rather rejected the remediation route and planned to proceed with a prosecution. The potential scandal brewing in Ottawa revolves around the question of whether the Prime Minister’s Office attempted to intervene with Wilson-Raybould, to press her, either directly or indirectly, to order the prosecution to stand down in favour of remediation.