Read Gerald Butts' opening statement in full here, via Medium cdnpoli
I want to say at the outset that I am not here to quarrel with the former Attorney-General, or to say a single negative word about her personally. Nor will I say a single negative word about any of my other former colleagues. They are good, honest people who do incredibly difficult jobs well. I am thankful for the many years I’ve spent working with them on so many important and complex issues.
The Prime Minister gave and maintained clear direction to the PMO and PCO on this file. That direction was to make sure the thousands of people whose jobs were, and it bears repeating,If anything could be done to protect those innocent people, we were told to work with the professional public service to make sure that option would be given every due consideration.
Second, we felt that outside advice was appropriate because of the extraordinary consequences of a conviction. The fact that the company involved employs so many people across the country heightened the public importance of the matter. This view was informed by counsel from the public service. That was the substance of the discussions that the PMO had with the Attorney-General and the Attorney-General’s office. When you boil it all down, all we ever asked the Attorney-General to consider was a second opinion.
There’s another important point here. I learned for the first time while watching the former Attorney-General’s testimony that she had made a final decision on the 16th of September. I believed this was a shared operating assumption with the Attorney-General and her office at the time. And I never received any legal or policy advice that contradicted that.
Yet, in all our texts and emails, which begin the summer of 2013, there is not a single mention of this file or anyone’s conduct on this file until during the Cabinet shuffle. We parted that meeting as friends and colleagues, and exchanged personal text messages a couple of hours later. I wrote: “Nice to see you.” She replied: “Nice to see you too. Thx for the convo. Please say alo to PM. Heard him speaking my language in his speech… Good luck in Montreal — we stick to our guns/plan we will be good.”
I also want to say that Ms. Telford’s comments were reported here last week badly out of context. Ms. Telford was simply saying what we say all the time when legal matters come up in the presence of lawyers: that we are not lawyers and cannot debate the law. On the op-ed point, she was simply saying that we would do our best to support the Minister, whatever decision she chose to make in this matter.
You now know that the subject of those interactions was whether she would take independent, external advice on the matter. However, the PMO’s interactions with the Attorney-General’s office were only called into question by the Attorney-General at the time of the Cabinet shuffle.I would like now to turn to my role in providing advice for the shuffle, and the reasons informing the Prime Minister’s decisions.
Complicating the matter further, both Minister Brison and Mr. Casey represent ridings where the Conservatives have traditionally been strong. In fact, both men were once Tory MPs. I also worried about the problem spreading into traditional Tory strongholds on the New Brunswick shore of the Bay of Fundy. A new Premier had just been sworn in after an election that divided along linguistic lines, and losing Minister Brison meant losing a recognized voice that could appeal to an important community.
Cabinet selections are among the most difficult tasks for any First Minister. I’ve advised two First Ministers on 13 of them. They are all unique. The media treats them like the political equivalent of the NHL trade deadline, but the Prime Minister treats them very, very seriously. He cares deeply about the people around that table, and usually spends months thinking about who is best for what job.
The Prime Minister agreed with this, but he was worried about the signal it would send to Indigenous people. This, to me, is the saddest part of this whole story. Indigenous people have been sent precisely the opposite message from the one the Prime Minister intended. That was the context in which the Prime Minister made the decision to move Minister Wilson-Raybould. Neither her move from Justice nor Minister Lametti’s move into it had anything whatsoever to do with SNC-Lavalin.
That was the first time I ever heard anyone suggest that this Cabinet shuffle was in any way related to the SNC-Lavalin file. The following is from a contemporaneous note I took during the conversation. I also have the text messages Ms. Wilson-Raybould and I exchanged afterward, and will summarize them. They are deeply personal in nature and reflect two people trying to grapple with a very difficult situation. We would have many conversations in the following week, and I am at liberty under the terms of the Order-in-Council to discuss and answer questions about them. I will do so to the best of my abilities.
After another pause, Minister Wilson-Raybould said “I feel I’m being shifted out of Justice for other reasons.” I could tell the Prime Minister was taken aback by this, but he simply replied that he was doing this shuffle because he had to, and because he thinks it’s the best thing for the government and the country. He repeated that he wouldn’t be doing it at all if it weren’t for Minister Brison’s departure. He said when you lose a team member, everyone else has to pitch in.
I have had some time on my hands for the first time in a long while. I have used that time to review all of my existing texts and emails with Ms. Wilson-Raybould since we met on October 3rd, 2013. To you, Chair, and to Members of the Committee, I want you to know this. I know it from long personal experience with the Prime Minister: if something improper had been happening, and that impropriety had been made known to him, the Prime Minister would have put a stop to it. Even if the impropriety were his own.
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