He said that what she felt was inappropriate pressure was simply a government grappling with a decision that could put thousands of jobs at risk
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s close friend and former principal secretary Gerald Butts told the House of Commons justice committee Wednesday morning he’s confident that “nothing inappropriate occurred” regarding interactions between the Prime Minister’s Office and former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould in the case against Quebec engineering giant SNC-Lavalin.
Butts claimed repeatedly that the position of the Prime Minister’s Office was that Wilson-Raybould should “seek independent advice from an eminent Canadian jurist or panel of jurists” — he mentioned former Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin as one possibility. He said outside advice would have been helpful because the law allowing for remediation agreements was new and had never been applied before, and because the roughly 9,000 people SNC-Lavalin employs in Canada.
Butts said Wilson-Raybould’s assertion last week that she had made her decision by Sept. 16 not to intervene in the director of public prosecution’s decision was news to him, and he believes no one in the PMO was aware of this either. This differs from Wilson-Raybould’s version of events — she said she told the prime minister on Sept. 17 that she’d made up her mind.
“In that version of events, the attorney general made the final decision after weighing all of the public interest matters involved in just 12 days,” he said. “What would be the rationale?” Butts also gave his version of two meetings he attended that Wilson-Raybould detailed last week. The first was a dinner the two shared at the Château Laurier on Dec. 5, which Butts said she requested. He said Wilson-Raybould only raised the issue of SNC-Lavalin at the end of the meeting and asked for his opinion. He said it might help to receive outside legal advice, but said there was nothing “negative” about the exchange. “I said that it was her call, and I knew it was her call.
“I do remember that part of the conversation,” Butts told the committee. “I think this the heart of that matter here. Does asking for external advice constitute political interference? I think by any reasonable definition of the term it does not.”
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