Lawyer Marie Henein argued the government has lagged on providing records the defence requires to make its case
OTTAWA — Even as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s former right-hand man Gerald Butts testified at the justice committee on Wednesday about his role in the SNC-Lavalin affair, a lawyer for suspended naval commander Mark Norman was suggesting calling him in as a witness in a criminal case rife with suspicions of political interference.
Some of the documentation that has been offered is “completely and utterly useless,” she said, detailing PCO lawyer Paul Shuttle’s submission of an inch-thick pile of records that are already public, such as the government’s access-to-information manual. “How is that possibly responsive to the request?” Justice Heather Perkins McVey quipped.
But Henein said she was “concerned that there has been a lack of responsiveness to the court order and the subpoenas,” and that the defence counsel had been put in a “difficult position” of staring down court dates at the end of the month without having seen a single relevant document. Astravas had already been called to testify in January, and it became clear from her answers to Henein’s questions that in her case, the search for records relevant to Norman had been incomplete.
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