Breaking: Jody Wilson-Raybould says she has been removed from the federal Liberal caucus and stripped of her nomination as the Liberal candidate for the riding of Vancouver Granville.
Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Raybould, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, arrives on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 2, 2019.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has expelled Jody Wilson-Raybould from the caucus Wednesday evening for criticizing his role in attempting to shelve the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.
“I am not the one who tried to interfere in sensitive proceedings, I am not the one who made it public, and I am not the one who publicly denied what happened,” she said in a two-page missive to nearly 180 Liberal MPs. “Now I know many of you are angry, hurt and frustrated. And frankly so am I,” she wrote to fellow Liberal MPs. “I am angry, hurt and frustrated because I feel I was upholding the values that we all committed to … I was trying to protect the Prime Minister and the government from a horrible mess.”
Ms. Wilson-Raybould has testified that she believed her demotion stemmed from her refusal to shelve the criminal prosecution of the Montreal engineering and construction giant. PMO staffers and other senior Liberals had urged her to abandon the prosecution. PMO senior adviser Mathieu Bouchard told Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s chief of staff last fall that “we can have the best policy in the world, but we need to be re-elected," according to her testimony in February.
“We committed to break old and cynical patterns of centralizing power in the hands of a few unelected staffers, the marginalization of hundreds of Members of Parliament with expertise and insights to offer, and the practice of governing in the shadows, out of sight of Canadians,” she wrote. “I believed we were going to uphold the highest standards that support the public interest, and not simply make choices to create partisan advantage.
Earlier Tuesday, the Liberal-dominated House of Commons justice committee voted down an effort by the NDP to call Ms. Philpott as a witness after her comments last month on the SNC-Lavalin affair. Ms. Philpott told Macleans magazine on March 21 that “there’s much more to the story that needs to be told’ and “we actually owe it to Canadians as politicians to ensure that they have the truth.
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