OTTAWA—In the face of calls from opposition parties for a public inquiry and police investigation, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is sticking to his claim that a probe by the House of Commons’ ethics commissioner — alongside hearings at the Commons justice committee — is all that’s needed to resolve outstanding questions of alleged political interference in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

“We have confidence in the processes in place,” Trudeau said Thursday, the morning after his former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, publicly accused the prime minister and top officials in his government of putting inappropriate pressure on her to stop a criminal prosecution and let the Montreal-based construction giant admit wrongdoing and pay a fine.

“We will also look very closely and participate fully in the ethics commissioner’s investigation into this,” Trudeau said. “Canadians need to know that we have an officer of parliament who is tasked with a specific role to make sure that, in questions where there are disagreements amongst politicians (and) amongst elected officials, there is an arbiter who is empowered to be like a judge, who is an officer of parliament, who will make a determination in this issue.”

That much is clear, since the commissioner agreed to investigate the matter earlier this month. The question being raised by experts and opposition parties is: will that probe be enough?

Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion started the investigation after the group Democracy Watch and two NDP MPs flagged concerns about allegations of political interference first reported by the Globe and Mail Feb. 7. Dion agreed to investigate, saying in a letter to New Democrats Nathan Cullen and Charlie Angus that he has “reason to believe” section nine of the Conflict of Interest Act “may” have been violated.

That section says no public office holder can use their position to “improperly further another person’s private interests.”

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Duff Conacher, the co-founder of Democracy Watch who alleged in his letter to Dion that section nine may have been breached, said Thursday that Dion should be able to investigate the central question in the affair — whether Trudeau and his officials “improperly” pushed Wilson-Raybould to advance SNC-Lavalin’s interests by stopping the corruption and fraud prosecution against the company.

The limit Dion faces, Conacher said, is that he can’t investigate whether pressure on Wilson-Raybould crossed a threshold into criminal conduct — such as obstruction of justice, which Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer suggested in a public letter to the RCMP Thursday calling for a police investigation.

Emmett Macfarlane, an associate professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, was less certain that Dion’s investigation can address the key issue of whether the pressure Wilson-Raybould described contravened the so-called Shawcross Doctrine, the principle that attorneys general alone can decide when and when not to prosecute.

Macfarlane said the ethics commissioner only has the authority to determine whether the Conflict of Interest Act was breached — not to weigh in on the broader “ethical” issue of whether there was improper political pressure on Wilson-Raybould to stop the SNC-Lavalin prosecution.

“There’s not really a mandate to explore broadly whether a lot of the type of behaviour we’re watching, in terms of the testimony, was improper,” he said. “The mandate is entirely about conflicts of interests.”

The NDP and Green party are calling for a public inquiry because of similar concerns. Matthew Dubé, a Quebec MP who is the NDP’s caucus chair, told the Star Thursday that his party also wants key figures in the drama to be interviewed publicly — which would happen with an inquiry — instead of behind closed doors by the ethics commissioner. The only requirement for transparency Dion faces is to table his conclusions in Parliament, and there’s no deadline to do so before the general election this fall.

“I don’t know what planet they’re living on if they think the processes that are going on are sufficient,” Dubé said of the Liberals’ position that the justice committee hearings and ethics commissioner probe are sufficient.

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“The ethics commissioner certainly has a mandate to do his work, but it’s far from enough. There’s obviously more that needs to be done, and in a public forum,” he said.

But, at least for now, the government doesn’t appear willing to entertain an inquiry.

“We have all the tools in our parliament to deal with these issues,” Infrastructure Minister François-Philippe Champagne told reporters Thursday. “What I like in particular from the ethics commissioner is he’s impartial, independent, he’s an officer of parliament, so I think we can trust (him) on his work to bring light to this.”

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