Let me start by stating that I’m about to take an unpopular stance with regard to the Judy Wilson-Raybould SNC-Lavalin controversy.
I admire Judy Wilson-Raybould’s deeply ethical approach to her job as Minister of Justice and Attorney General. She is a politically elected leader deeply guided by her moral conscience. What I admire most about what she did as Minister of Justice and Attorney General is that she held firm to her beliefs about the SNC-Lavalin case and did not change her view despite the strong opinions of those around her. As Attorney General, she withstood any attempt to dissuade her from her legal opinion of the case. She did what she felt was correct and proper in her role as Attorney General.
It is what Wilson-Raybould did after she was shuffled to a different cabinet position that troubles me. It seems to me, that in her anger at being transferred to another file, Wilson-Raybould chose to strike out at her prime minister and at her fellow cabinet ministers. She obviously felt that the move was a retaliation against her for refusing to budge on the SNC-Lavalin case. As such, she has used the media very effectively to move politically against her own party and government.
But when The Globe and Mail first broke the story that Wilson-Raybould had felt that she had been subject to undue pressure from her cabinet colleagues, I remarked to my wife that I feared for the Canadian prisoners currently sitting in Chinese jails in retaliation for Canada arresting a Huawei executive at the behest of the United States. If the recently former Minister of Justice was outing political interference with the Canadian justice system, she was also very likely countering her own government’s position that such interference was impossible in the Huawei case and thereby likely condemning innocent Canadians to prolonged incarceration and maltreatment in Chinese prisons. I could only intimate the despair that their families must have felt when the first headline broke. The international reverberations seemed obvious to me, as well as the deeply personal cost that those individuals will pay for Wilson-Raybould’s personal accounting.
As such, I’m not sure that she grasped her role as Minister of Justice and as a member of cabinet. Here, I feel she seems astonished that as an elected politician that she would have been subject to informal lobbying about a case that had potentially profound impacts on Canadians. As a cabinet member and government minister, why shouldn’t she have listened to arguments about SNC Lavalin’s role as a large employer in Quebec? Why is it so offensive that cabinet colleagues and those in government who disagreed with her, tried to change her mind? The whole point of a cabinet is that is a confidential leadership group which thrashes and hashes issues out in private, allowing individuals to say things that may not be ever carried out, and even perceived as erroneous moments later. Moreover, it is an environment of contestation, argument and discussion and, one hopes, eventually of resolution. She occupied a ministerial position that is subject to political considerations. While Wilson-Raybould understood her role as Attorney General, it is not clear to me that she grasped her role as a cabinet member and Minister of Justice. In this latter position, she is required to think of her constituents, of Canadians and of the country as a whole. What her testimony demonstrates is that she did act as an Attorney General: she did not alter the legal decision despite her political colleagues’ efforts. But she felt overwhelmed and angered by the political aspect of her job as Minister of Justice and as member of cabinet. She is likely not the first Minister of Justice/Attorney General to have faced this type of dilemma. While Wilson-Raybould seems to imply that Trudeau’s government behaved inappropriately, what I think her situation makes clear is rather, that in the current age, that perhaps the two roles of Minister of Justice and Attorney General should be separated because individuals such as Wilson-Raybold find the tensions of the dual role too onerous.
What I fear, is that Wilson-Raybould’s self-righteousness will ultimately bring about consequences that are political but, just because they are political does not mean that are not important and far reaching. It seems clear that the media frenzy and political storm that her testimony has created may well do a number of things about which I fret:
(i) It imperils the lives of Canadians who are being held in Chinese prisons
(ii) It may cause a government, which is the first and only government (however imperfectly carried out) to openly support reconciliation with indigenous nations and peoples in this country . . . an area of deep and systemic injustice that needs concerted and intensive attention. In the short term, Wilson-Raybould stands as an extraordinary and principled member of her first nation, indigenous peoples and of Canada. In the long term, I worry that her very public portraiture of the tension she felt as Justice Minster and as AG, will ultimately set the agenda backwards in terms of Canada facing its obligations to its indigenous people if this government fails.
(iii) It may cause the only federal government to overtly address the headlong threat of climate change to collapse. This occurs in a political situation in which the other parties are seemingly uninterested in this incredibly important issue. I believe that climate change truly imperils us and the generations to follow, I want it addressed forthwith and I believe that it is a such enormous and complex issue that only government can truly address this multifaceted behemoth threatening us.
In sum, while I believe Wilson-Raybould acted well as an Attorney-General, what I am not so clear about is whether she really did a very good job as a cabinet member and Minister of Justice. As a Canadian, interested in the future of this country and of the planet, I would leap to appoint her as a judge, but I would not want her to be a member of cabinet again. And I would certainly not want her as PM, despite the fact that her instigation and management of this crisis certainly demonstrates that she has ample political capacity in terms of furthering her own views, and perhaps of being elected.