So the jobs are safe, then? The Canadian jobs?
Remember those? How could you not? “Protecting Canadian jobs” became the default talking point for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and any other Liberal sent out as tribute during the depths of the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The desire to protect jobs was the explanation (excuse?) offered for the extraordinary pressure campaign that was mounted against the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould.
It made for a trite little story. Any excesses, illegal or otherwise, were sold to the public as simply an error of judgment born of the purest intentions. Twisting JWR’s arm, and eventually demoting her in a cabinet shuffle, clearly to get her out of the way, wasn’t an abuse of power, a trampling of a powerful Indigenous woman by a more powerful self-styled feminist reconciliation champion. Heavens no! It was just a super unfortunate miscommunication, and even then, it was all in the name of getting the company some kind of deal that would preserve this jewel of Canadian commerce. At any cost.
The entire affair now seems to have wrapped up, a parliamentary office assignment or two not withstanding. And what was that cost in the end? In pleading guilty to one count of fraud, SNC-Lavalin will pay $280 million. It will not be barred from bidding on federal contracts, but will submit to some sort of probationary supervision for three years. The remaining charges against the company were dismissed.
Oh, and Jane Philpott lost her seat in Parliament, and Trudeau lost his principal secretary, top civil servant, and, ahem, a million votes and his majority. Those costs should be counted, too.
If you’re a Liberal, or former Liberal, in the case of Philpott and JWR, the price must seem a little steep. The scandal consumed the country’s news cycles for months. It began the erosion of Liberal support that was never really reversed. It badly damaged the prime minister’s reputation and deprived him of the services of two competent cabinet ministers, and undoubtedly contributed to his greatly reduced showing in October’s election. True, it’s hard to separate the impact of the black- and brown-face scandals from the already heavy toll taken by SNC on Liberal support. Who knows how things would’ve unfolded in a universe where the Liberals faced one or the other but not both. We’ll never know.
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
