Bob Mackin
The Liberal Party will announce Justin Trudeau’s successor as Prime Minister in 19 days. But Democracy Watch is determined to hold him accountable for the SNC-Lavalin scandal after finding evidence the RCMP bungled the investigation.
Co-founder Duff Conacher said Feb. 19 that he is filing a private prosecution application in the Ontario Court of Justice, aimed at charging Trudeau with obstruction of justice and breach of trust by a public official.
Democracy Watch’s Duff Conacher
Conacher’s application, supported by IntegrityBC founder Wayne Crookes, was announced the same day that Trudeau revealed SNC-Lavalin — now known as AtkinsRealis — is part of the Cadence consortium the Liberal government chose to build a multi-billion-dollar bullet train from Toronto to Quebec City.
Trudeau was found in conflict of interest in 2019 after he and several officials under him repeatedly pressured former-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould and her staff to drop corruption charges against SNC-Lavalin during the last four-and-a-half months of 2018.
SNC-Lavalin successfully lobbied for the Liberal government to enact a deferred prosecution agreement scheme in 2018, so that corruption charges could be settled with a fine instead of conviction. But Wilson-Raybould resisted pressure from Trudeau and company, to the point that she was shuffled out of the justice portfolio and into veterans affairs in early 2019.
Conacher found, via thousands of pages obtained under access to information — albeit delayed and heavily redacted — that the RCMP closed its investigation without interviewing Trudeau. That was not the only flaw.
“The investigating officer changed the standard of proof initially being used by the RCMP for the charge of obstruction of justice, and applied an incorrect legal standard as the basis for the conclusion that no one should be prosecuted,” said Conacher’s six-page will say document.
“The RCMP did not interview many witnesses, and accepted the cabinet’s restricted cabinet document disclosure order, and relied in part on the clearly self-interested and biased statement by Jody Wilson-Raybould in February 2019, while hiding part of statements by her and other key witnesses concerning whether the actions of the PM amounted to obstruction of justice.”
Further, the RCMP “did not even consider prosecuting the PM for breach of trust even though the evidence supports such a prosecution. The RCMP has also refused to disclose approximately 300 pages of its investigation records.”
Conacher’s application also includes a legal opinion from a retired Superior Court judge, who provided it voluntarily under the condition of anonymity. That opinion details the reasonable and probable grounds to believe Trudeau committed the criminal offences of obstruction of justice and breach of trust by a public official.
That legal opinion recalled the roots of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, in which an executive paid bribes to the family of dictator Moammar Gadaffi in order to obtain contracts in Libya.
If convicted, SNC-Lavalin would have been barred from bidding on Canadian contracts for up to a decade.
In May 2022, SNC-Lavalin announced it would pay $29.6 million over three years under the first deferred prosecution agreement with Quebec’s Crown prosecution office. The company had paid $2.3 million in kickbacks on the $128 million Jacques Cartier Bridge refurbishment contract from 1997 to 2004.
The company formerly known as SNC-Lavalin is a contractor on BC Hydro’s $16 billion Site C dam and operates the Canada Line rapid transit system in Vancouver and Richmond. AtkinsRealis Group CEO Ian Edwards and four others are registered to lobby the B.C. NDP government.
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