The former attorney general's recorded call with Michael Wernick referred to a cabinet-level decision that the DPA tool would not be used to override the prosecution service.
At the heart of the bitter dispute between Jody Wilson-Raybould and Justin Trudeau is the former justice minister’s claim that the Prime Minister and his officials were pressing her to do something that violated a clearly defined policy when they asked her to consider intervening to allow SNC-Lavalin avoid going to trial on bribery charges.
To Canadians trying to make sense of all this, Wilson-Raybould’s staunch position might seem hard to understand. After all, the government had passed a law just last year specifically to allow a DPA in cases where prosecuting a company for economic crimes would hurt innocent third parties like employees and shareholders.
This is the first time the possibility that when Trudeau’s cabinet considered the possibility of SNC-Lavalin getting a DPA, they agreed this would only happen if federal prosecutors decided that was the right approach—and not if the impetus had to be taken by the attorney general. Still, Wernick pushes back, telling Wilson-Raybould that the law “specifically has these provisions in it that allow you to ask questions of the DPP, and that is provided for and that is not interference.
Again, though, Wilson-Raybould reminds him that the Trudeau cabinet agreed that the DPA tool would not be used as a way to overrule the prosecution service. She mentions “MCs,” short for cabinet “memorandums to cabinet,” and tells Wernick that his argument about DPAs being a policy tool is “fair, but in our MCs, all the way up and in the law that we changed, we gave the Director of Public Prosecutions the discretion to enter into the DPAs and the judge to oversee the regime.
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