He said he trimmed his statement slightly to fit into the 30-minute time slot he was allotted
Thank you for having me here today. I would like to acknowledge that we are on the ancestral lands of the Algonquin people.
Third, I believe that this is a story of two people who hold high office, the Prime Minister and the former Attorney-General, both of whom did their jobs to the best of their abilities, as did their respective staff. There was no malice directed toward anyone personally or professionally. However, a breakdown in the relationship between the former Attorney-General and the Prime Minister occurred.
Specifically, the 9000-plus people who could lose their jobs, as well as the many thousands more who work on the company’s supply chain. The heart of the matter is that the Prime Minister and those around him believed that this is a real and significant public policy challenge that deserves a robust and thoughtful response.
We also made clear that, if the Attorney-General accepted our proposal and took external advice, she was equally free to reject or accept that advice. We learned last week that the Director of Public Prosecutions made her decision not to pursue a remediation agreement on September 4th, and that the Attorney-General was out of the country until September 12th. In that version of events, the Attorney-General made the final decision after weighing all of the public interest matters involved in just twelve days.
It was in that spirit that Mathieu Bouchard and Elder Marques had a discussion with the former Attorney-General on November 22nd, 2018. They discussed a memo prepared by lawyers in the Department of Justice that described the option to seek counsel from an eminent jurist. It was also the subject of my and the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff’s one meeting on this file with the Attorney-General’s Chief of Staff, which I will happily answer questions about.
If the Attorney-General had made a decision, and communicated it to the Prime Minister and Clerk, why would there be a next step at all? Why would the Attorney-General take and solicit meetings on a closed matter? She raised it with me at the end of a two-hour dinner at the Château Laurier hotel. She asked for the meeting via text message. On November 26th, she wrote: “Hey there GB — do you want to chat? I have a number of things to bring up… maybe you do as well? Tomorrow after Cabinet perhaps? Thx Jod.” I replied “Sure. I’m heading to Toronto right after, but could delay 10 mins.” She replied “Happy to chat another time with you if heading to TO. Think this convo may be a bit longer than 10 mins.
The directive she is referring to is the Attorney-General’s directive on litigation matters involving Indigenous peoples, which was issued just before Ms. Wilson-Raybould became Minister of Veterans Affairs in January.I fully accept that two people can experience the same event differently.
That is the sum total of my personal interactions with the Attorney-General on this file. A brief conversation at the end of what I thought was a good dinner, and a meeting with her staff where I sought to understand her reticence to receive advice from an independent jurist.According to the former Minister’s testimony, eleven people made twenty points of contact with her or her office over a period of close to four months. Four of these people never met with the Attorney-General in person.
When you boil this all down, the only thing we ever asked the Attorney-General to do was to get a second opinion. And we also made it clear that she was free to accept that opinion, or not. On December 12th, the day of the caucus Christmas Party, Minister Brison approached me and Ms. Telford to tell us he was not running again, and that he would tell the Prime Minister later that day. The Minister said he didn’t have to leave Cabinet right away, but that he hoped we could manage a departure some time not too far into the New Year. He said he was going to tell his constituents 2 or 3 days later.
Neither the Prime Minister nor anyone around him wanted a Cabinet shuffle to happen at all. And we certainly didn’t want to do one the first week back after Christmas. We had done that in 2017 after the Trump election, but in that case we had over two months to plan it. This one would have to be done in a few days after Christmas, with ministers out of town and unavailable to meet in person.
So we came back after Christmas to the news that Minister Brison would indeed resign. He said he had thought long and hard about it, but that he and his husband Max had crossed the Rubicon and decided it was time to go. He wanted a person in Indigenous Services who would send a strong signal that the work would keep going at the same pace, and that the file would have the same personal prominence for him. He also wanted to move someone who could be replaced from outside of Cabinet, to keep the shuffle small and contained.The Prime Minister knew there were several capable and experienced lawyers in caucus who could be Justice Minister, but very few who could do Indigenous Services as well as she could.
It was a simple plan for a small, tidy shuffle. The Prime Minister was going to ask a couple of senior people do jobs they wouldn’t otherwise do, for the good of the team and the government. After that meeting, I spoke to the Prime Minister privately. He was clearly disturbed and surprised by what Minister Philpott had said. I said to him that he had to factor into his thinking the possibility that the assertion she made would be made publicly, however far-fetched it seemed. I advised him that he has to know in his heart that is not the reason he was moving Minister Wilson-Raybould. He replied that he knew that was not why he was moving her, and he would not change his mind.
He then said that would leave a large hole at Indigenous Services, and he didn’t want people to think he was relenting at all on the agenda. He said he knows how much she “loves being MOJAG” but that she was one of our top people, and moving her to Indigenous Services would “show Canadians how seriously we take this.” He said that “after the election, if we are successful, everything would be fresh again.
The obvious question is why did the Prime Minister not leave the Minister in her old job if she turned down a new one? My advice on that matter had nothing to do with the Minister personally, and nothing to do with any aspect of her old or new job. It was this: if you allow a minister to veto a Cabinet shuffle by refusing to move, you soon will not be able to manage Cabinet.
My point is that people may have a caricature in their mind based on media coverage about what a relationship between a minister and PMO staff looks like. This was certainly not that. In closing, I want to say that I deeply regret that the former Minister’s trust and faith in the many colleagues she served alongside for three and a half years has eroded so much. I take my fair share of responsibility for that tragic state of affairs.
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