Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has no choice but to resign, says Peace River-Westlock MP Arnold Viersen, echoing comments made by many Opposition politicians since the details of the Canadian government’s involvement in the SNC-Lavalin affair were made public.
On Feb. 27, former justice minister and attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould appeared before the House of Commons justice committee to give her perspective on what she called “a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the attorney general of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin.”
In her statement, she went on to implicate the Prime Minister’s former principal secretary, the clerk of the privy council and Trudeau himself in trying to sway her away from a criminal prosecution of the Quebec-based engineering firm, which stands accused of bribery and fraud in relation to alleged activities that took place in Libya between 2001-2011.
For its part, the Liberal government has called the situation an “erosion of trust.”
“I don’t know who’s playing who,” said Viersen in an interview March 5 at the Westlock News office, a day before Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts was set to appear for the justice committee.
“Wilson-Raybould has definitely laid out a narrative that seems to be confirmed as we go along.”
Viersen said he remembers at the time of Budget 2018, giving a speech in the House pointing out a criminal code matter, deferred prosecution agreements, was part of the budget bill.
The Opposition didn’t quite put the pieces together until SNC-Lavalin came into the spotlight, he said.
The deferred prosecution agreement would allow the company to avoid a criminal conviction and instead pay a large fine and abide by any conditions laid out as part of the agreement.
The fundamental question, said Viersen, is whether Wilson-Raybould was removed from her ministerial position as a result of her not going along with the government’s wishes.
Early in 2019, Wilson-Raybould was moved to the veterans affairs portfolio from the justice ministry. She resigned from Trudeau’s cabinet shortly after.
“Did she lose her job over this?” asked Viersen. “I’m still at a loss as to what is actually going on.
“She’s playing chess and he’s playing checkers.”
The Liberals are focusing too much on the optics of this scandal and should be preoccupied with other things, like saving Albertan jobs, said Viersen.
“What’s really frustrating to me is they’re having the longest cabinet meetings that this country has seen in a long time, we’ve got all this attention around governing the country, but that’s doing nothing for the jobs here in Alberta. Could we not have had some long cabinet meetings on solving the pipeline issue?”
“The people in Peace River-Westlock are uncertain about the economic situation in this country, pipelines continue to be a big thing that animates us. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re involved in in Northern Alberta, when our rail is full of oil, the other things that we need, whether it’s our lumber or our agriculture, isn’t getting through.”
Conservatives are going to continue to call for transparency and the Prime Minister’s resignation as more is revealed in regard to SNC-Lavalin, said Viersen.
“Justin Trudeau resigning would be an appropriate next step and then the election comes up in October.”
