PMO tried to persuade Wilson-Raybould on SNC-Lavalin, not pressure her: Butts

OTTAWA — Jody Wilson-Raybould never complained about improper pressure to halt the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decided to move her out of her coveted cabinet role as justice minister and attorney general, the prime minister’s former principal secretary says.

Gerald Butts testified before the House of Commons justice committee Wednesday, offering what he characterized as a “very different” version of events from those described last week in explosive testimony from Wilson-Raybould.

Butts delivered a 33-minute opening statement and answered nearly two hours of questions from MPs on the committee. He repeatedly said he believed nobody from the Prime Minister’s Office had done anything wrong. Butts said several times that if Wilson-Raybould felt she’d been inappropriately pressured to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case, she had an obligation to let Trudeau know as it was happening.

“If this was wrong in the way that is alleged, why are we having conversation now and not in September or October or November?” he said.

He said Wilson-Raybould didn’t raise any concerns about what was happening with the prime minister until he told her he was shuffling her out of the justice portfolio, which she told him was her “dream job.”

Butts said he feels the law is very specific in not only allowing the government to continually provide Wilson-Raybould with information to inform her decision, but that she had an obligation to receive the information.

Last week, Wilson-Raybould told the committee she was subjected to relentless, inappropriate pressure — and even veiled threats about being removed as justice minister — to stop the trial of SNC-Lavalin on bribery and fraud charges related to contracts in Libya.

Wilson-Raybould testified that the pressure to interfere in the case came from Trudeau himself, Butts and other senior staff, the top federal public servant and Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s staff — all of whom wanted her to order the director of public prosecutions to negotiate a remediation agreement with the Montreal engineering giant.

Such an agreement would have forced the company to pay stiff penalties while avoiding a criminal conviction that could financially cripple it.

Butts said he feels the law is very specific in not only allowing the government to continually provide Wilson-Raybould with information to inform her decision on the prosecution, but that she had an obligation to receive the information.

In fact, Butts said, he has no opinion on whether SNC-Lavalin should get a remediation agreement to head off bribery and fraud charges and that he doesn’t envy Wilson-Raybould, or the current Attorney General David Lametti, having to make the decision.

Indeed, he said he and others did not push Wilson-Raybould to agree to a remediation agreement; they only wanted her to seek independent legal advice on the matter, given the potential impact on the company’s 9,000 employees and the fact that remediation agreements are a new, never-before-used feature in Canadian law.

“When you boil it all down, all we ever asked the attorney general to consider was a second opinion,” Butts said in a lengthy written statement tabled at the committee. “When 9,000 people’s jobs are at stake, it is a public policy problem of the highest order. It was our obligation to exhaustively consider options the law allows.”

Butts, a longtime friend who resigned as Trudeau’s most trusted adviser last month, insisted that staff in the Prime Minister’s Office always respected the fact that, as attorney general, it was up to Wilson-Raybould alone to decide whether to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case.

In one exchange with Conservative Deputy Leader Lisa Raitt, Butts suggested Wilson-Raybould — who testified she made a final decision not to intervene within 12 days of the director of public prosecution’s decision not to seek a remediation agreement — didn’t take sufficient time to consider her options.

“We know what it’s like to see a company or a community collapse,” Butts told Raitt, who, like him, is from Cape Breton. “And can you imagine if when we were kids and the coal mines closed or the steel mill closed, the best explanation someone could give us was that someone thought about it for 12 days in Ottawa? And that is what concerned us.”

Since resigning, Butts no longer has access to his work phone, but was able to get access to the communications with help from his lawyer. He said he reviewed all the emails and texts he received from Wilson-Raybould going back to the summer of 2013 and said “There is not a single mention of this file or anyone’s conduct on this file until during the cabinet shuffle.”

The first he or Trudeau heard about it was when the prime minister told Wilson-Raybould’s close friend and fellow cabinet minister Jane Philpott he was moving Philpott from Indigenous Services to Treasury Board, filling a gap left by Scott Brison’s surprise retirement from politics, he said.

(Philpott ultimately resigned from cabinet last Monday, saying she’d lost confidence in the government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin case. Her departure followed Wilson-Raybould’s resignation a month earlier.)

According to Butts, Trudeau told Philpott on Jan. 6 that he had decided to move Wilson-Raybould into the Indigenous Services slot because he wanted to “send a strong signal that the work (of reconciliation) would keep going at the same pace and that the file would have the same personal prominence for him.” Philpott worried that Wilson-Raybould would view the move as a demotion and might wonder if it was “connected to the ‘DPA’ issue” — a reference to deferred prosecution agreements, as remediation agreements are also known.

Wilson-Raybould refused the job, saying she had opposed the Indian Act her entire life, and wouldn’t be the one administering it. Butts said he advised Trudeau that he couldn’t set a precedent to allow a minister to refuse to be shuffled. They ultimately moved her to veterans affairs, before she resigned from cabinet altogether Feb. 12.

Butts said the shuffle decisions were being made quickly, that they had tried to convince Brison not to go, and that if he had more time to think it over he would have realized Wilson-Raybould would never have accepted Indigenous Services for exactly the reason she stated.

Wilson-Raybould characterized 11 meetings or phone calls with 11 different people over four months as relentless, “inappropriate” pressure to get her to change her mind on a remediation agreement with SNC-Lavalin.

Butts said 11 meetings over four months was a virtual blip, saying on matters like buying the Trans Mountain pipeline or NAFTA, the number of meeting was exponentially more. There were at least 100 meetings or calls on Trans Mountain before the purchase was announced last May.

“That would have been a week in NAFTA,” he said.

“It did not seem to me then, and does not now, that what we did was anything other than what those 9,000 people would have every right to expect of their prime minister.”

Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick and deputy justice minister Nathalie Drouin followed Butts, both appearing before the committee for a second time to clarify and answer additional questions that came up after Wilson-Raybould’s testimony last week.

Wernick told the committee he is still believes no unacceptable pressure was applied to Wilson-Raybould by him or anyone else. He disputed Wilson-Raybould’s allegation that he made “veiled threats” to her that if she didn’t agree to a remediation agreement her job was in jeopardy.

Wernick also said people have used social media to try to intimidate him as a witness in the SNC-Lavalin affair. He tabled a thick pile of papers he said are exchanges from social media, which he urged MPs to investigate as an attempt to intimidate a witness they had called.

After his first appearance, in which he said no improper influence was ever applied to Wilson-Raybould, he was accused of being partisan and the NDP went so far as to demand he resign or be fired for failing his duty to remain politically neutral.

Wernick says he is “profoundly disappointed” to be accused of partisanship by people who have never met him, citing his three decades of service to the government of Canada under four prime ministers.

Drouin explained her role in providing information to Wilson-Raybould about the remediation agreement decision, saying the advice from the department mainly outlined what the options are for her.

Wilson-Raybould mentioned that her former chief of Staff, Jessica Prince, was told just before the cabinet shuffle that the new justice minister was going to be briefed on SNC Lavalin immediately.

Drouin said she was asked to develop a briefing book for a new minister and that it included a number of issues, including Indigenous files, because the prime minister might ask the minister to attend a meeting with Indigenous leaders the following week. She said SNC Lavalin was considered a “live file” because the company was challenging in court prosecutors’ decision not to offer it a remediation agreement, and she said it made sense that it was among the things to brief the minister on.

After Butts’s testimony, Liberal MPs seemed satisfied that there was no wrongdoing.

“What we heard clearly today is there was not any inappropriate pressure,” said Edmonton MP Randy Boissonnault, calling Butts’s version of events “very revealing.”

Liberals used their majority on the committee to reject an opposition proposal to recall Wilson-Raybould to respond to Butts’s comments.

Raitt said that “Canadians are going to be pretty ticked off” if Wilson-Raybould doesn’t get to come back and rebut what the committee heard Wednesday.

“There are stark contradictions and one of them isn’t telling the full story and we need to find out which one it is,” she said. “The only way to do that is bring back Jody Wilson-Raybould.”

Raitt also said she thought Wilson-Raybould was “far more credible” than Butts.

Joan Bryden and Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press