Well I certainly am victimized. How about you pick up some of my tax burden if you don't care about your money?
Trudeau 'welcomes' ethics probe of alleged PMO interference in SNC-Lavalin case
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Andrew Coyne: The latest tactic to suppress Wilson-Raybould — smear a judge
Andrew Coyne March 25, 2019
Wait, I thought it was all Scott Brison’s fault.
The usual anonymous sources are now whispering to reporters that the reason Jody Wilson-Raybould was fired as minister of justice and attorney general in January had nothing to do with her refusal to kill the prosecution of a Liberal-friendly firm in a province critical to the party’s election chances, as the prime minister and a phalanx of top officials had pressured her to do. No, according to reports by Canadian Press and CTV, it was because of her pick for a judicial appointment.
It seems Wilson-Raybould, in 2017, recommended Glenn Joyal, chief justice of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, to replace the retiring Beverley McLachlin as chief justice of the Supreme Court — a recommendation Justin Trudeau ultimately rejected. Bilingual, Oxford-trained, a former Crown attorney with 20 years’ experience on the bench, Joyal was on a short-list prepared by the prime minister’s own “independent, non-partisan” advisory board for the occasion.
Alas, it seems he failed some other tests. According to CP’s sources, the pick “puzzled” Trudeau, who became “disturbed” after “doing some research into Joyal’s views on the charter.” It turned out he had given a speech to a conservative legal foundation earlier that year in which he had made some mildly critical comments about judicial activism (“With the ’constitutionalizing’ of more and more political and social issues into fundamental rights, the Canadian judiciary has all but removed those issues … from the realm of future civic engagement and future political debate” gives you the flavour).
This is a bog-standard statement of the conservative position on the relationship between courts and legislatures. It is utterly mainstream. But apparently this so “disturbed” Trudeau that, as CTV reports, it “caused (him) to question his justice minister’s judgment.”
Several points are worth noting about this obviously deliberate leak. One is the casual violation of the very confidentiality provisions that are supposedly so sacred to Trudeau that he cannot fully release Wilson-Raybould, even today, from their clutches.
The second is the willingness, in the service of undermining the credibility of the former attorney general, to smear not only her — apparently in addition to being “difficult” and “in it for Jody,” she’s a crazed social conservative — but a sitting judge. (In reponses, Joyal issued a statement noting that he had in fact withdrawn his name from the process, owing to “my wife’s metastatic cancer,” and protesting that “someone is using my previous candidacy to the Supreme Court of Canada to further an agenda unrelated to the appointment process.”)
The third is the extraordinarily narrow litmus test Trudeau applies, if the stories are accurate, to judicial appointments. It would appear to be enough to make one speech calling for “a true dialogue” between the judicial and legislative branches to mark a judge as beyond the pale.
Glenn Joyal, chief justice of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, in June 2014. Kevin King/Winnipeg Sun/Postmedia And fourth is its implausibility. If a prime minister were compelled, every time he disagreed with a ministerial recommendation, to replace that minister, there would be no one left in cabinet. In any case, notwithstanding Wilson-Raybould’s disturbing judgment, she remained minister of Justice for more than a year afterward, though the cabinet was extensively shuffled in the summer of 2018.
Indeed, she would “still be there today,” according to the prime minister’s previous statements, but for Brison’s abrupt departure from Treasury Board.
Still, it’s of a piece with a determined push by Liberal partisans to shift the focus from the prime minister’s efforts to interfere with a criminal prosecution to the character and motives of his accusers — not only Wilson-Raybould but Jane Philpott, the former president of Treasury Board. Even respectable surrogates, never mind the seething mobs online, have been brazen enough to suggest the two women are besotted with their own celebrity, or are conspiring in some strange and baseless vendetta against the prime minister.
Journalists — journalists! — compete to be the loudest in their calls for the prime minister to kick them out of caucus. They are tarnishing the party brand! They are tearing the government down! What’s their real agenda? Somehow it does not occur to anyone to ask: Is what they are saying true?
They are challenged to “put up or shut up,” as if the prime minister were not still refusing to waive privilege over important parts of the timeline, or as if the Liberal majority on the Commons justice committee had not voted to refuse to call Wilson-Raybould back to tell the rest of her story.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gets ready to leave a post-budget housing announcement in Maple Ridge, B.C., on March 25, 2019. Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press But they can speak elsewhere! Liberal partisans insist. They can ignore their confidentiality oaths, or say their piece in the Commons under cover of Parliamentary privilege. About that: Can they? As political science professor James Kelly of Concordia University has pointed out, their options for speaking in Parliament are in fact severely limited. They could make a one-minute member’s statement under Standing Order 31. Or they could speak for 10 minutes in debate on a bill — provided the Liberal whip lets them. Or the House could vote to let them speak in a special debate — if enough Liberals voted with the opposition to allow it. Catch 22!
In any case, this entirely misses the point. The issue is not, why don’t they speak outside the committee, but: why can’t they speak in committee? What possible argument can there be against it? Somehow the issue has become, not the prime minister’s obstructionist tactics, but their own alleged failure to find a way around his obstructions.
This has things back to front. It is up to public office-holders to allay all suspicion about their conduct, especially on such a serious matter. It is not up to the opposition, the press or the public to cut them some slack.
https://www.outline.com/4YkWtd
Andrew Coyne March 25, 2019
Wait, I thought it was all Scott Brison’s fault.
The usual anonymous sources are now whispering to reporters that the reason Jody Wilson-Raybould was fired as minister of justice and attorney general in January had nothing to do with her refusal to kill the prosecution of a Liberal-friendly firm in a province critical to the party’s election chances, as the prime minister and a phalanx of top officials had pressured her to do. No, according to reports by Canadian Press and CTV, it was because of her pick for a judicial appointment.
It seems Wilson-Raybould, in 2017, recommended Glenn Joyal, chief justice of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, to replace the retiring Beverley McLachlin as chief justice of the Supreme Court — a recommendation Justin Trudeau ultimately rejected. Bilingual, Oxford-trained, a former Crown attorney with 20 years’ experience on the bench, Joyal was on a short-list prepared by the prime minister’s own “independent, non-partisan” advisory board for the occasion.
Alas, it seems he failed some other tests. According to CP’s sources, the pick “puzzled” Trudeau, who became “disturbed” after “doing some research into Joyal’s views on the charter.” It turned out he had given a speech to a conservative legal foundation earlier that year in which he had made some mildly critical comments about judicial activism (“With the ’constitutionalizing’ of more and more political and social issues into fundamental rights, the Canadian judiciary has all but removed those issues … from the realm of future civic engagement and future political debate” gives you the flavour).
This is a bog-standard statement of the conservative position on the relationship between courts and legislatures. It is utterly mainstream. But apparently this so “disturbed” Trudeau that, as CTV reports, it “caused (him) to question his justice minister’s judgment.”
Several points are worth noting about this obviously deliberate leak. One is the casual violation of the very confidentiality provisions that are supposedly so sacred to Trudeau that he cannot fully release Wilson-Raybould, even today, from their clutches.
The second is the willingness, in the service of undermining the credibility of the former attorney general, to smear not only her — apparently in addition to being “difficult” and “in it for Jody,” she’s a crazed social conservative — but a sitting judge. (In reponses, Joyal issued a statement noting that he had in fact withdrawn his name from the process, owing to “my wife’s metastatic cancer,” and protesting that “someone is using my previous candidacy to the Supreme Court of Canada to further an agenda unrelated to the appointment process.”)
The third is the extraordinarily narrow litmus test Trudeau applies, if the stories are accurate, to judicial appointments. It would appear to be enough to make one speech calling for “a true dialogue” between the judicial and legislative branches to mark a judge as beyond the pale.
Indeed, she would “still be there today,” according to the prime minister’s previous statements, but for Brison’s abrupt departure from Treasury Board.
Still, it’s of a piece with a determined push by Liberal partisans to shift the focus from the prime minister’s efforts to interfere with a criminal prosecution to the character and motives of his accusers — not only Wilson-Raybould but Jane Philpott, the former president of Treasury Board. Even respectable surrogates, never mind the seething mobs online, have been brazen enough to suggest the two women are besotted with their own celebrity, or are conspiring in some strange and baseless vendetta against the prime minister.
Journalists — journalists! — compete to be the loudest in their calls for the prime minister to kick them out of caucus. They are tarnishing the party brand! They are tearing the government down! What’s their real agenda? Somehow it does not occur to anyone to ask: Is what they are saying true?
They are challenged to “put up or shut up,” as if the prime minister were not still refusing to waive privilege over important parts of the timeline, or as if the Liberal majority on the Commons justice committee had not voted to refuse to call Wilson-Raybould back to tell the rest of her story.
In any case, this entirely misses the point. The issue is not, why don’t they speak outside the committee, but: why can’t they speak in committee? What possible argument can there be against it? Somehow the issue has become, not the prime minister’s obstructionist tactics, but their own alleged failure to find a way around his obstructions.
This has things back to front. It is up to public office-holders to allay all suspicion about their conduct, especially on such a serious matter. It is not up to the opposition, the press or the public to cut them some slack.
https://www.outline.com/4YkWtd
Used it quite a bit in my younger days during the Ham and CB radio craze.....still use it sometimes when I have to give my postal code or email address over the phone....
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Here is a counter argument that makes sense as well
On the elimination of inconvenient Liberals
The judge thing is now trying to be used to push the narrative now to Trudeau is the true victim
At this point, the Philpott/Wilson-Raybould end game is obvious — destroy Trudeau
Remember the line spoke in the ethic hearing about op-eds formed to change the narrative well I think this is a prime example of the paid media in action
POLITICS
On the elimination of inconvenient Liberals
Paul Wells: Welcome to the Tet offensive of Charter rights—This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it.
by Paul Wells Mar 26, 2019
Philpott, right, with Jody Wilson-Raybould at Rideau Hall on the day of the cabinet shuiffle last month (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick)
We have learned so much. Within minutes Monday afternoon, two good reporters had stories (here and here) about the Chief Justice of Manitoba, who was a candidate to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and who, later, wasn’t. Both reporters unfurled similar yarns about a lone Prime Minister standing athwart the tide of conservatism by blocking—shudder—a Harper appointee from sitting on the top court. Jody Wilson-Raybould plays the role of villain in the piece.
Both reporters decorously neglect to mention that Trudeau’s choice for Chief Justice, Richard Wagner, was a Harper appointee.
There are many things we can say about this story, working outward in concentric rings from the thing itself. First, Glenn Joyal’s views, as expressed in speeches that were said to alarm the prime minister, are almost comically orthodox. I first became aware of the notion that Charter litigation systematically airlifts important matters from the parliamentary arena and into the realm of jurisprudence in a Chantal Hébert column in the late 1990s. If I had paid more attention to literally any of my Canadian public administration profs a decade earlier I would have caught the argument then, because it is canvassed in every Canadian political science class. This is not wild-eyed Hayekism.
Second, perhaps the many thousands of Canadians who have applied for federal government appointments under what they thought was a confidential process, introduced by this prime minister, will want to contemplate a class-action suit against him. Because it is now radiantly clear to each of them that their CV is being held hostage by a claque of embattled sorcerers’ apprentices who will cheerfully wheel it over the transom to any waiting scribe if anything about them—their opinions, a fallen political star’s unfortunate decision to argue for their advancement—becomes politically inconvenient. This is the very stuff of the police state.
It was immediately fashionable to wonder on social media how everyone would react if Stephen Harper had done such a thing. It’s germane to note that Stephen Harper never did. Because he had more class. Welcome to the Tet offensive of Charter rights: This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it.
If the Trudeau government is not the source of the leak, I assume we will see spectacular efforts deployed in the next 36 hours to find the leaker. Mark Norman-scale efforts. But I’m pretty sure that we needn’t hold our breath, because the government is the source of the leak; that the amiable chap who currently sits in the office once occupied by the Attorney General of Canada will not bestir himself to question Monday’s sickening attack on due process; and that the leak will actually be roundly applauded by the ambient cloud of Liberal and Liberal-adjacent opinion, which became self-aware this weekend and decided Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott are a virus endangering the party’s re-election chances and must therefore be stopped.
That’s right, it’s Judgment Day. As early as March 5, it was possible for Andrew Cohen to publish a column identifying Philpott and Wilson-Raybould as enemies of the (right-thinking) people. But not for the first time, Andrew was ahead of the moment, and when that column ran, he found few takers. The news that the Criminal Code had been amended in ways SNC-Lavalin found congenial as it faced a criminal trial for serious alleged misdeeds was interesting to millions of Canadians, including many Liberals. Justin Trudeau’s slow, tentative response was worrisome to lots of people who support the government, just as it was to many others. It was still possible for many minds to find room for both general support for Liberal re-election and general interest in what Wilson-Raybould and Philpott — recent Liberal rock stars, after all — had to say.
Then Maclean’s published my interview with Philpott last Thursday morning. On Thursday night’s At Issue panel, Chantal said that with Gerald Butts and Michael Wernick no longer working in government, Philpott and Wilson-Raybould were clearly looking for someone else to lose a job, and it must be Justin Trudeau. This interpretation became popular quickly (and probably would have even if Chantal hadn’t given it voice). By Saturday it was easy to find Liberals and friends of Liberals — pollsters, the odd political scientist, about half the party’s Ontario caucus — attributing the worst motives to the two former ministers. They were “infatuated with ephemeral attention,” said Frank Graves. They were committing “an attempted coup d’état,” wrote a lawyer with impressive credentials, Ishat Reza. This behaviour is, she added, “disqualifying.” This is understatement: Historical penalties for coup plotting have been harsher than exclusion from a governing caucus.
Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage, we say in Quebec. When you want to drown your dog you say it has rabies.
This SNC-Lavalin business has been bewildering — honestly bewildering, in ways that are surely easy to understand — for many Canadians with good hearts since it began. It is an odd scandal by many standards. No money changed hands illegally, or at least not after the Qaddafis were executed. None of the assorted Liberal staffers and high officials who came at Jody Wilson-Raybould was seeking personal advancement, except insofar as many of them wanted to be on the winning side in an election and, she asserts, kept telling her so. They kept asking whether she’d seek outside advice on a decision that was the public prosecutor’s to make and the AG’s to review. When they were done asking, the prosecutor’s decision held. That would have been the end of that, if she hadn’t been shuffled. Then it became a duel of assertions and interpretations.
It’s easy to understand why all of this would seem minor and technical. An interesting theological debating point, but surely not worth more than a month of headlines and anguished commentary. So it didn’t get real, for many people, until Conservatives took the lead from Liberals in the polls — and Jane Philpott, whom Trudeau had been busy promoting in cabinet, announced that she too doesn’t like whatever she says she knows.
This puts the stakes high indeed. Everything Trudeau advocates is endangered, not by his own increasingly conspicuous limitations as a public administrator, but by the shorter route of a possible Conservative election victory this autumn. So it is all Liberal hands on deck. All of this is easy to understand.
I felt something like this was coming when I wrote, near the bottom of a column I wrote last November that was published in December, that an election is “the crudest possible instrument” for fixing serious shortcomings in public administration. It’s simply not true that if you don’t like something a government does you must replace it. But nor should re-electing the Liberals mean endorsing Justin Trudeau’s increasingly obvious flaws. The issues raised by the SNC-Lavalin controversy shouldn’t be settled by an election. Some misdeeds are worth dealing with as themselves, when they come up. And then let the election settle the election.
What is at stake in this affair is whether you can get the rules changed in mid-stream if you have the right friends or can hire them. Whether the decisions of competent professionals — beginning with an experienced prosecutor and defence lawyer, Kathleen Roussel — should be trumped by appeals to a preferred electoral outcome. This sort of system-rigging has been at the heart of, for instance, Poland’s confrontation with the European Union over judicial “reforms” that systematically benefit associates of the current regime. Reforms that are immensely popular among people who agree with the ruling party that they tilt the balance back toward fairness in a confrontation against political opponents they judge to be moral failures. Because it’s not only in Canada that you can win many arguments by saying, “Of course this helps our side, but that’s okay because our side is right.”
There’s a neat symmetry here. Jody Wilson-Raybould claimed she was approached, again and again, by people who said things had to work out a certain way because it was an election year. The emerging Liberal argument this month has been, not that this claim was untrue, but that of course it is true and should be. Wilson-Raybould and Philpott have sinned against a higher virtue so sure of itself that it cannot be troubled with the fine print. This sin is deemed disqualifying. They will soon be disqualified by their fellow Liberals, for the (synonymous) good of the party and the nation. And if you’ve sent your CV to Ottawa, have no fear. It probably won’t get leaked until it needs to be.
On the elimination of inconvenient Liberals
Paul Wells: Welcome to the Tet offensive of Charter rights—This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it.
by Paul Wells Mar 26, 2019
Philpott, right, with Jody Wilson-Raybould at Rideau Hall on the day of the cabinet shuiffle last month (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick)
We have learned so much. Within minutes Monday afternoon, two good reporters had stories (here and here) about the Chief Justice of Manitoba, who was a candidate to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and who, later, wasn’t. Both reporters unfurled similar yarns about a lone Prime Minister standing athwart the tide of conservatism by blocking—shudder—a Harper appointee from sitting on the top court. Jody Wilson-Raybould plays the role of villain in the piece.
Both reporters decorously neglect to mention that Trudeau’s choice for Chief Justice, Richard Wagner, was a Harper appointee.
There are many things we can say about this story, working outward in concentric rings from the thing itself. First, Glenn Joyal’s views, as expressed in speeches that were said to alarm the prime minister, are almost comically orthodox. I first became aware of the notion that Charter litigation systematically airlifts important matters from the parliamentary arena and into the realm of jurisprudence in a Chantal Hébert column in the late 1990s. If I had paid more attention to literally any of my Canadian public administration profs a decade earlier I would have caught the argument then, because it is canvassed in every Canadian political science class. This is not wild-eyed Hayekism.
Second, perhaps the many thousands of Canadians who have applied for federal government appointments under what they thought was a confidential process, introduced by this prime minister, will want to contemplate a class-action suit against him. Because it is now radiantly clear to each of them that their CV is being held hostage by a claque of embattled sorcerers’ apprentices who will cheerfully wheel it over the transom to any waiting scribe if anything about them—their opinions, a fallen political star’s unfortunate decision to argue for their advancement—becomes politically inconvenient. This is the very stuff of the police state.
It was immediately fashionable to wonder on social media how everyone would react if Stephen Harper had done such a thing. It’s germane to note that Stephen Harper never did. Because he had more class. Welcome to the Tet offensive of Charter rights: This was the week it became necessary to destroy the village of good government in order to save it.
READ MORE: Canada, the show
Third, Justice Joyal’s wife was in poor health. Apparently we are to believe that 9,000 jobs depended on your knowing that.
If the Trudeau government is not the source of the leak, I assume we will see spectacular efforts deployed in the next 36 hours to find the leaker. Mark Norman-scale efforts. But I’m pretty sure that we needn’t hold our breath, because the government is the source of the leak; that the amiable chap who currently sits in the office once occupied by the Attorney General of Canada will not bestir himself to question Monday’s sickening attack on due process; and that the leak will actually be roundly applauded by the ambient cloud of Liberal and Liberal-adjacent opinion, which became self-aware this weekend and decided Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott are a virus endangering the party’s re-election chances and must therefore be stopped.
That’s right, it’s Judgment Day. As early as March 5, it was possible for Andrew Cohen to publish a column identifying Philpott and Wilson-Raybould as enemies of the (right-thinking) people. But not for the first time, Andrew was ahead of the moment, and when that column ran, he found few takers. The news that the Criminal Code had been amended in ways SNC-Lavalin found congenial as it faced a criminal trial for serious alleged misdeeds was interesting to millions of Canadians, including many Liberals. Justin Trudeau’s slow, tentative response was worrisome to lots of people who support the government, just as it was to many others. It was still possible for many minds to find room for both general support for Liberal re-election and general interest in what Wilson-Raybould and Philpott — recent Liberal rock stars, after all — had to say.
Then Maclean’s published my interview with Philpott last Thursday morning. On Thursday night’s At Issue panel, Chantal said that with Gerald Butts and Michael Wernick no longer working in government, Philpott and Wilson-Raybould were clearly looking for someone else to lose a job, and it must be Justin Trudeau. This interpretation became popular quickly (and probably would have even if Chantal hadn’t given it voice). By Saturday it was easy to find Liberals and friends of Liberals — pollsters, the odd political scientist, about half the party’s Ontario caucus — attributing the worst motives to the two former ministers. They were “infatuated with ephemeral attention,” said Frank Graves. They were committing “an attempted coup d’état,” wrote a lawyer with impressive credentials, Ishat Reza. This behaviour is, she added, “disqualifying.” This is understatement: Historical penalties for coup plotting have been harsher than exclusion from a governing caucus.
Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage, we say in Quebec. When you want to drown your dog you say it has rabies.
This SNC-Lavalin business has been bewildering — honestly bewildering, in ways that are surely easy to understand — for many Canadians with good hearts since it began. It is an odd scandal by many standards. No money changed hands illegally, or at least not after the Qaddafis were executed. None of the assorted Liberal staffers and high officials who came at Jody Wilson-Raybould was seeking personal advancement, except insofar as many of them wanted to be on the winning side in an election and, she asserts, kept telling her so. They kept asking whether she’d seek outside advice on a decision that was the public prosecutor’s to make and the AG’s to review. When they were done asking, the prosecutor’s decision held. That would have been the end of that, if she hadn’t been shuffled. Then it became a duel of assertions and interpretations.
It’s easy to understand why all of this would seem minor and technical. An interesting theological debating point, but surely not worth more than a month of headlines and anguished commentary. So it didn’t get real, for many people, until Conservatives took the lead from Liberals in the polls — and Jane Philpott, whom Trudeau had been busy promoting in cabinet, announced that she too doesn’t like whatever she says she knows.
This puts the stakes high indeed. Everything Trudeau advocates is endangered, not by his own increasingly conspicuous limitations as a public administrator, but by the shorter route of a possible Conservative election victory this autumn. So it is all Liberal hands on deck. All of this is easy to understand.
I felt something like this was coming when I wrote, near the bottom of a column I wrote last November that was published in December, that an election is “the crudest possible instrument” for fixing serious shortcomings in public administration. It’s simply not true that if you don’t like something a government does you must replace it. But nor should re-electing the Liberals mean endorsing Justin Trudeau’s increasingly obvious flaws. The issues raised by the SNC-Lavalin controversy shouldn’t be settled by an election. Some misdeeds are worth dealing with as themselves, when they come up. And then let the election settle the election.
What is at stake in this affair is whether you can get the rules changed in mid-stream if you have the right friends or can hire them. Whether the decisions of competent professionals — beginning with an experienced prosecutor and defence lawyer, Kathleen Roussel — should be trumped by appeals to a preferred electoral outcome. This sort of system-rigging has been at the heart of, for instance, Poland’s confrontation with the European Union over judicial “reforms” that systematically benefit associates of the current regime. Reforms that are immensely popular among people who agree with the ruling party that they tilt the balance back toward fairness in a confrontation against political opponents they judge to be moral failures. Because it’s not only in Canada that you can win many arguments by saying, “Of course this helps our side, but that’s okay because our side is right.”
There’s a neat symmetry here. Jody Wilson-Raybould claimed she was approached, again and again, by people who said things had to work out a certain way because it was an election year. The emerging Liberal argument this month has been, not that this claim was untrue, but that of course it is true and should be. Wilson-Raybould and Philpott have sinned against a higher virtue so sure of itself that it cannot be troubled with the fine print. This sin is deemed disqualifying. They will soon be disqualified by their fellow Liberals, for the (synonymous) good of the party and the nation. And if you’ve sent your CV to Ottawa, have no fear. It probably won’t get leaked until it needs to be.
Who Pressured Whom?
In the 1970s, when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau selected dirigiste Quebecker Marc Lalonde as his Finance Minister, the acid-tongued Conservative MP John Crosbie quipped, “It is like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank”. The same could be said of putting Wilson-Raybould anywhere near power in Ottawa. In the summer of 2017, she announced 10 principles that would guide her government’s “reconciliation agenda.” The very first was that, “All relations with Indigenous peoples need to be based on the recognition and implementation of their right to self-determination, including the inherent right of self-government.” But if Wilson-Raybould’s first loyalty is to a nation or nations other than Canada, how could she fairly represent Canada in its relations with those nations, whose leaders are openly seeking to implement an independent “nation-to-nation” arrangement with the federal government?
Under the circumstances, perhaps it was inevitable that Wilson-Raybould would find herself at loggerheads with Trudeau, despite his slavish rhetoric about the need for “reconciliation” with Indigenous people, which he described as his government’s top priority. For, when push came to shove between Liberal political objectives in vote-rich Quebec and the Indigenous Justice minister who stood in the way, Trudeau’s true priorities were revealed. But it may go far deeper than that. According to Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council (effectively, Canada’s top-most bureaucrat), during his first appearance at the Justice Committee, the estrangement between Wilson-Raybould and the Trudeau government was triggered months earlier. The cause was Trudeau’s showpiece Indigenous policy initiative, the so-called “rights and recognition framework”, unveiled by the prime minister himself in a speech to Parliament on February 14, 2018. This was a plan to expand and apply Indigenous rights asserted in Section 35 of the Constitution to all laws and functions of the government. Section 35 was a contentious last-minute addition to the Constitution Act, 1982, specifically limited (mainly at the insistence of then-Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed) to “existing” aboriginal rights. Canada’s courts, and governments, have shown little deference to this caveat ever since, and Indigenous rights have expanded exponentially. Trudeau’s promised “framework”, unveiled in February 2018, would go much farther still, making all Canadian law compliant with Section 35. This would satisfy a long-standing demand by Indigenous rights activists. It would also ratify the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, giving every Canadian First Nation the right to be consulted over any proposed new Canadian legislation.
Moreover, if enacted, this law could expand the only recently won aboriginal veto over resource development on or near Indian reserves or claimed “traditional territories”, to virtually any significant development of any kind, anywhere. This was still not good enough for the AFN and its allies, who were mostly critical of the document. A critique published by Ryerson University’s Yellowhead Institute last June complained that it offered a “narrow model of self-government outside of the Indian Act, premised on devolution of program and service delivery, fiscal mechanisms that do not address land rights but focus on accountability, a piecemeal approach to Aboriginal title, and an ongoing neglect of treaty obligations or expansive First Nation jurisdiction generally.” Be that as it may, somewhere along the way it seems Trudeau began to get cold feet. He may have been advised how profoundly destabilizing the legislation would be. Economic development and growth would be largely dictated by the country’s 600-odd First Nations. Not all of Trudeau’s cabinet apparently wanted to charge headlong down this road.
The dispute took place largely in the confidential settings of cabinet deliberations and senior bureaucratic discussions. But it burst into the open during a speech by Wilson-Raybould at the University of Saskatchewan last September 18. In a thinly veiled attack on a framework discussion paper issued by the office of Indigenous Services Minister Carolyn Bennett, Wilson-Raybould declared that “…words are also easy, cheap…too often we see the tendency – especially in politics – to use important words that have real meaning and importance, carelessly…We see ‘recognition’ applied to words that actually mean ‘denial’. We see ‘self government’ used to apply to ideas or processes that actually maintain control over others.” Wilson-Raybould was effectively channelling complaints levelled by the AFN, some of whose chiefs had publicly demanded that Wilson-Raybould take over the file. Also at his first Justice Committee appearance, Wernick testified that a meeting between Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould only one day before the University of Saskatchewan speech, which she had claimed was focused on SNC-Lavalin, was, in fact, called mainly to discuss her “very serious policy differences” with Bennett and other ministers over the Section 35 plan. At this meeting, Trudeau announced the bill would have to wait until after the next election. Instead, the federal government would proceed with Indigenous languages legislation.
It would be surprising if Wilson-Raybould did not feel let down or even betrayed. If she capitulated, she risked the ire of the AFN chiefs and other captains of the so-called “Indian Industry,” perhaps including her father, long-time Indigenous political firebrand Bill Wilson.
After all, his daughter as a child had been named “Puglaas” – “Born to a Noble People”. Wilson told a CBC interviewer she is “Indigenous royalty,” predestined for political greatness. The Globe and Mail reported last month that Wilson-Raybould even challenged the prime minister’s prerogative to appoint judges. No wonder the first instinct of Liberal spin doctors when Wilson-Raybould went rogue was to launch a whisper campaign about how difficult she was to work with.
The stage was set for a showdown between Wilson-Raybould and a prime minister who perhaps realized – belatedly – that his prized minister’s demands would exact far too high a price on the country. Her insistence on a “nation-to-nation” deal with Ottawa, including imposing obligations to fund 600-plus Indigenous nations in perpetuity and give them de facto command of the country’s economy, became too much even for him.
But Wilson-Raybould didn’t take no for an answer. Her last act as Justice Minister after she was informed of her demotion, as reported in the Ottawa Citizen on March 5, was to affirm her Practise Directives advising all Crown lawyers to cease adversarial arguments in all litigation involving Indigenous claims. At the end of his opening statement in his rocky second appearance before the Justice Committee last Wednesday, Wernick warned of this act’s dire consequences: “Finally, the Committee may wish to hold hearings on the Attorney General of Canada’s Directive on Civil Litigation Involving Indigenous Peoples, issued by the former Attorney General on January 11, 2019. The Directive to all Government of Canada litigators could mark a profound change in Canada’s legal landscape. However, it could be repealed or gutted at the stroke of a pen and turn to ashes. All political parties now need to be clear with Canadians on the future of this Directive.” It’s hard not to see Wilson-Raybould’s actions as an attempt to advance the Indigenous rights framework by other means. It also looks an awful lot like an attempted weakening of the rule of law as it applies to Indigenous litigation – precisely what the government allegedly tried to do for SNC-Lavalin. Viewed in this light, the extraordinary events of the last few weeks appear to have as much or more to do with Wilson-Raybould pressuring Trudeau’s office as with his office pressuring her.
Far from being the heroic defender of the rule of law in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution, she took steps to weaken the Crown’s ability to defend Canada’s interests in Indigenous rights cases and fought for implementation of the AFN’s “nation-to-nation” plan. Her evident determination to put the AFN’s agenda ahead of the government’s would certainly explain why Trudeau, senior bureaucrats and a good part of the Cabinet were so upset with her. The Wilson-Raybould saga is far from over, much is still to be learned, the Liberal government’s fate hangs in the balance, and its battleplan to survive the onslaught – if it has one – is unclear. Whatever the true political calculus of the PMO, Trudeau cabinet and senior bureaucrats may have been, Prime Minister Trudeau and all who still support him must rue the day he invited Jody Wilson-Raybould to join his team.
www.c2cjournal.ca/2019/03/who-pressured-whom/?fbclid=IwAR065NcUhXwqmS5_4igRskEpYbPdv8jagHqg2vBo1u4hUfpR6Tdsk85Cpas
www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2019/03/22/why-does-jane-philpott-keep-knifing-her-fellow-liberals.html
In the 1970s, when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau selected dirigiste Quebecker Marc Lalonde as his Finance Minister, the acid-tongued Conservative MP John Crosbie quipped, “It is like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank”. The same could be said of putting Wilson-Raybould anywhere near power in Ottawa. In the summer of 2017, she announced 10 principles that would guide her government’s “reconciliation agenda.” The very first was that, “All relations with Indigenous peoples need to be based on the recognition and implementation of their right to self-determination, including the inherent right of self-government.” But if Wilson-Raybould’s first loyalty is to a nation or nations other than Canada, how could she fairly represent Canada in its relations with those nations, whose leaders are openly seeking to implement an independent “nation-to-nation” arrangement with the federal government?
Under the circumstances, perhaps it was inevitable that Wilson-Raybould would find herself at loggerheads with Trudeau, despite his slavish rhetoric about the need for “reconciliation” with Indigenous people, which he described as his government’s top priority. For, when push came to shove between Liberal political objectives in vote-rich Quebec and the Indigenous Justice minister who stood in the way, Trudeau’s true priorities were revealed. But it may go far deeper than that. According to Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council (effectively, Canada’s top-most bureaucrat), during his first appearance at the Justice Committee, the estrangement between Wilson-Raybould and the Trudeau government was triggered months earlier. The cause was Trudeau’s showpiece Indigenous policy initiative, the so-called “rights and recognition framework”, unveiled by the prime minister himself in a speech to Parliament on February 14, 2018. This was a plan to expand and apply Indigenous rights asserted in Section 35 of the Constitution to all laws and functions of the government. Section 35 was a contentious last-minute addition to the Constitution Act, 1982, specifically limited (mainly at the insistence of then-Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed) to “existing” aboriginal rights. Canada’s courts, and governments, have shown little deference to this caveat ever since, and Indigenous rights have expanded exponentially. Trudeau’s promised “framework”, unveiled in February 2018, would go much farther still, making all Canadian law compliant with Section 35. This would satisfy a long-standing demand by Indigenous rights activists. It would also ratify the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, giving every Canadian First Nation the right to be consulted over any proposed new Canadian legislation.
Moreover, if enacted, this law could expand the only recently won aboriginal veto over resource development on or near Indian reserves or claimed “traditional territories”, to virtually any significant development of any kind, anywhere. This was still not good enough for the AFN and its allies, who were mostly critical of the document. A critique published by Ryerson University’s Yellowhead Institute last June complained that it offered a “narrow model of self-government outside of the Indian Act, premised on devolution of program and service delivery, fiscal mechanisms that do not address land rights but focus on accountability, a piecemeal approach to Aboriginal title, and an ongoing neglect of treaty obligations or expansive First Nation jurisdiction generally.” Be that as it may, somewhere along the way it seems Trudeau began to get cold feet. He may have been advised how profoundly destabilizing the legislation would be. Economic development and growth would be largely dictated by the country’s 600-odd First Nations. Not all of Trudeau’s cabinet apparently wanted to charge headlong down this road.
The dispute took place largely in the confidential settings of cabinet deliberations and senior bureaucratic discussions. But it burst into the open during a speech by Wilson-Raybould at the University of Saskatchewan last September 18. In a thinly veiled attack on a framework discussion paper issued by the office of Indigenous Services Minister Carolyn Bennett, Wilson-Raybould declared that “…words are also easy, cheap…too often we see the tendency – especially in politics – to use important words that have real meaning and importance, carelessly…We see ‘recognition’ applied to words that actually mean ‘denial’. We see ‘self government’ used to apply to ideas or processes that actually maintain control over others.” Wilson-Raybould was effectively channelling complaints levelled by the AFN, some of whose chiefs had publicly demanded that Wilson-Raybould take over the file. Also at his first Justice Committee appearance, Wernick testified that a meeting between Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould only one day before the University of Saskatchewan speech, which she had claimed was focused on SNC-Lavalin, was, in fact, called mainly to discuss her “very serious policy differences” with Bennett and other ministers over the Section 35 plan. At this meeting, Trudeau announced the bill would have to wait until after the next election. Instead, the federal government would proceed with Indigenous languages legislation.
It would be surprising if Wilson-Raybould did not feel let down or even betrayed. If she capitulated, she risked the ire of the AFN chiefs and other captains of the so-called “Indian Industry,” perhaps including her father, long-time Indigenous political firebrand Bill Wilson.
After all, his daughter as a child had been named “Puglaas” – “Born to a Noble People”. Wilson told a CBC interviewer she is “Indigenous royalty,” predestined for political greatness. The Globe and Mail reported last month that Wilson-Raybould even challenged the prime minister’s prerogative to appoint judges. No wonder the first instinct of Liberal spin doctors when Wilson-Raybould went rogue was to launch a whisper campaign about how difficult she was to work with.
The stage was set for a showdown between Wilson-Raybould and a prime minister who perhaps realized – belatedly – that his prized minister’s demands would exact far too high a price on the country. Her insistence on a “nation-to-nation” deal with Ottawa, including imposing obligations to fund 600-plus Indigenous nations in perpetuity and give them de facto command of the country’s economy, became too much even for him.
But Wilson-Raybould didn’t take no for an answer. Her last act as Justice Minister after she was informed of her demotion, as reported in the Ottawa Citizen on March 5, was to affirm her Practise Directives advising all Crown lawyers to cease adversarial arguments in all litigation involving Indigenous claims. At the end of his opening statement in his rocky second appearance before the Justice Committee last Wednesday, Wernick warned of this act’s dire consequences: “Finally, the Committee may wish to hold hearings on the Attorney General of Canada’s Directive on Civil Litigation Involving Indigenous Peoples, issued by the former Attorney General on January 11, 2019. The Directive to all Government of Canada litigators could mark a profound change in Canada’s legal landscape. However, it could be repealed or gutted at the stroke of a pen and turn to ashes. All political parties now need to be clear with Canadians on the future of this Directive.” It’s hard not to see Wilson-Raybould’s actions as an attempt to advance the Indigenous rights framework by other means. It also looks an awful lot like an attempted weakening of the rule of law as it applies to Indigenous litigation – precisely what the government allegedly tried to do for SNC-Lavalin. Viewed in this light, the extraordinary events of the last few weeks appear to have as much or more to do with Wilson-Raybould pressuring Trudeau’s office as with his office pressuring her.
Far from being the heroic defender of the rule of law in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution, she took steps to weaken the Crown’s ability to defend Canada’s interests in Indigenous rights cases and fought for implementation of the AFN’s “nation-to-nation” plan. Her evident determination to put the AFN’s agenda ahead of the government’s would certainly explain why Trudeau, senior bureaucrats and a good part of the Cabinet were so upset with her. The Wilson-Raybould saga is far from over, much is still to be learned, the Liberal government’s fate hangs in the balance, and its battleplan to survive the onslaught – if it has one – is unclear. Whatever the true political calculus of the PMO, Trudeau cabinet and senior bureaucrats may have been, Prime Minister Trudeau and all who still support him must rue the day he invited Jody Wilson-Raybould to join his team.
www.c2cjournal.ca/2019/03/who-pressured-whom/?fbclid=IwAR065NcUhXwqmS5_4igRskEpYbPdv8jagHqg2vBo1u4hUfpR6Tdsk85Cpas
www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2019/03/22/why-does-jane-philpott-keep-knifing-her-fellow-liberals.html
Boswell: Jody Wilson-Raybould's last act as justice minister a big step in Indigenous litigation reform
"Testimony involving Indigenous oral history, for example, is no longer to be argued against as inherently unreliable and inadmissible in principle; instead, it should be accepted as valid evidence, and only its “weight” — the degree of its significance in resolving the dispute — should be open to negotiation."
ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/boswell-jody-wilson-rayboulds-last-act-as-justice-minister-a-big-step-in-indigenous-litigation-reform
"Testimony involving Indigenous oral history, for example, is no longer to be argued against as inherently unreliable and inadmissible in principle; instead, it should be accepted as valid evidence, and only its “weight” — the degree of its significance in resolving the dispute — should be open to negotiation."
ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/boswell-jody-wilson-rayboulds-last-act-as-justice-minister-a-big-step-in-indigenous-litigation-reform
I'm sorry you feel such a victim. It obviously puts you in a bad mood.
How about you engage in some of your alleged free thinking and choose not to make sneeringly stupid suggestions to others just because they don't feel like victims too?
If both articles would hold true, why would she turn down the Indigenous file? One would think she would have welcomed it as a way to change it from the inside. There is no doubt that she had a private agenda, but some don't make sense
And the deflection IS NOT WORKING EITHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CBC our LIE-beral loving Communist Broadcasting Corporation is now saying that Lavalin is nothing but a smoke screen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Behind which Philpot and Raybould are destroying Our idiot Boy so the two women can take over the party!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So many schemes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So many excuses!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SO LITTLE TRUTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And SO MUCH speculation about guilt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
you are this close to having an actual normal thought.
How can she say she can't take the portfolio that used the Indian Act to hurt her people when she can take the portfolio under which all her people were victimized by the Indian Act
it makes no sense
Dammit all I am giving you a greenie.
