Good morning,
More than half of Canadians believe SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. should face a criminal trial on fraud and corruption charges.
That’s according to a Nanos poll provided exclusively to The Globe and Mail and CTV News. The poll surveyed 750 Canadians last week following the testimony of former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould, who said she faced "consistent and sustained” political pressure from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other senior officials to shelve the criminal prosecution of the Quebec-based engineering giant.
Speaking before a parliamentary justice committee, Ms. Wilson-Raybould alleged inappropriate conduct on the part of Mr. Trudeau and 11 people in the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office and the Office of the Minister of Finance. This included Mr. Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, and former principal secretary Gerald Butts, who is set to testify at the committee this week.
As attorney-general, Ms. Wilson-Raybould could have directed federal director of public prosecutions Kathleen Roussel to settle the charges against SNC and allow a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA). She chose not to, despite what she characterized as pressure from the PMO.
Most Canadians agree with Ms. Roussel’s decision to prosecute, according to the Nanos poll.
Fifty-five per cent of Canadians nationally think SNC-Lavalin should face a criminal trial, while 35 per cent said they prefer remediation and 10 per cent said they were unsure.
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TODAY’S HEADLINES
China accused detained Canadian citizen Michael Kovrig of stealing state secrets that were passed on to him from another detained Canadian, Michael Spavor, in what is likely to further ramp up tension between Ottawa and Beijing.
Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou has filed a civil claim that alleges members of the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency breached her constitutional rights.
Huawei plans to announce a lawsuit against the United States government.
Facebook executives dangled the promise of building a massive data centre in Canada in exchange for guarantees that the federal government would not seek authority over data on non-Canadians.
The federal Liberal government spent $60,000 to defend a cabinet minister against a $25,000 defamation case launched against him by a disabled veterans’ rights activist.
Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes says she will not be seeking re-election in October.
The same goes for veteran NDP MP Nathan Cullen.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will try to shift the focus from the SNC-Lavalin affair to his preferred campaign battleground – climate change – with the release this week of the Liberal party’s first election-year ads.
Canada’s export agency has won the right to sell a notorious Canadian-funded airplane that played a highly visible role in the corruption scandal that toppled South Africa’s former president, Jacob Zuma.
Mexico says it won’t ratify the new North American free-trade pact if U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs remain in place.
John Ibbitson (The Globe and Mail) on Gerald Butts’s testimony on SNC-Lavalin: “Fresh testimony, even if it bolsters their case, will only drag things on, increasing the risk that Mr. Trudeau himself might be forced to testify, requiring him to do something he has refused to do for three straight weeks: ”
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on Gerald Butts’s resignation: “... he knew he would be one of Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s chief “targets” and wanted a free hand to respond – not as someone still working in the PMO or newly forced out by Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s revelations.”
Andrew Coyne (National Post) on the SNC-Lavalin affair: “Whether or not any laws were broken is not the issue. The standard expected of public officials is not that they should merely avoid committing crimes.”
Paul Wells (Maclean’s) on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “If Trudeau is now saying his only priority was to save jobs, it’s because he got caught. If he refuses to say out loud what a majestic procession of Liberal minions kept telling Wilson-Raybould behind closed doors—that he was especially interested in saving Liberal jobs in back-to-back election years—it’s because that’s the kind of guy he is.”
John Geddes (Maclean’s) on the PMO: “Any remaining aura of West Wing-like idealism, acumen and esprit de corps around Trudeau’s PMO was obliterated by Wilson-Raybould’s testimony. If there was a Washington reference point for this fiasco now, it wasn’t a touchstone TV fantasy from the Trudeau gang’s formative years; it was the scandal that dominated their parents’ view of U.S. politics.”
David Shribman (The Globe and Mail) on political gridlock in Washington: “... the two parties are so far apart in their perspectives and profiles — and the Democrat’s seizure of the House has so profoundly changed the political calculus in Washington—that little can be expected to be accomplished on Capitol Hill for the next two years except deadlock.”
David Leonhardt (The New York Times) on why U.S. Democrats must move toward the centre: “Ideological purity doesn’t tend to play well in general elections, however. Every modern president has found ways to appeal to Americans’ fondness for consensus — even if that fondness is based partly on a naïve view of politics and even if the candidates’ appeals have sometimes been more stylistic than substantive.”
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