Article content continued

But in this universe — this time-space continuum, as the governor-general might say — the extraordinarily self-defeating efforts the Liberals went through to arrange a sweetheart deferred prosecution agreement (or DPA, which is an acronym few of us knew a year ago) for Quebec-based SNC seem absolutely preposterous now. The company will pay its fine. It will pledge to do better. And we’ll all go on with our lives. The final result seems exactly like the sort of ending this process would have eventually come to anyway.

What the hell was all of it for? Absolutely none of the worst-case scenarios that the Liberals wanted us all to think they were striving to avoid has come to pass. The DPA went unissued, but wouldn’t you know it, the company is not relocating its headquarters. Thousands of highly skilled Canadian workers are not being thrown out of work as the hammer of righteous justice smashes their employing conglomerate to bits. Instead, SNC will cut a cheque and suffer some observers. It is a remarkably banal ending to this affair, but it’s damn hard to imagine that this wouldn’t have been about the outcome we’d have come to anyway if JWR had told Trudeau her decision to not issue a DPA and he’d said, “OK, your call. Thanks.”

Hard to imagine, but not impossible. Maybe it took the entire scandal going public to not only curtail the Liberal zeal to move heaven and Earth for SNC-Lavalin, but also for the company to finally stop lobbying and start accepting that it was going to need to plea for mercy.

But this way out was there all along. The Liberals didn’t need to drive two of their own ministers out of cabinet. They didn’t need to task Anne McLellan with writing a report on the Shawcross Doctrine (another term few of us knew 12 months ago). They didn’t need to embarrass their caucus members with their obvious and unseemly haste to bury the scandal in committee. They could have just let the system work.

But they didn’t. And they don’t give much sign of having learned much, do they?

Financial Post

• Email: magurney@postmedia.com | Twitter: MattGurney