True North

It’s been a stunning 24 hours in Canadian politics since I wrote about former Attorney General and Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould taking a wrecking ball to the Parliament of Canada.

Last night the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Scheer gave a press conference calling on the Prime Minister to resign over the revelations in Wilson-Raybould’s testimony to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Wilson-Raybould detailed the pressure she faced from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Finance Minister’s office and the Chief Clerk of the Privy Council Office to abandon a decision to prosecute Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin over bribery and fraud charges emanating from their trying to get contracts from the Libyan government.

The Prime Minister then gave a press conference essentially saying that Wilson-Raybould was lying. The problem with that is that Wilson-Raybould had notes, emails and text messages supporting her testimony.

The PM steadfastly refused to resign saying there was an election coming this fall and Canadians will decide who should be the Prime Minister then.

Scheer followed that up with a letter to RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki on Thursday essentially saying the actions of the PMO and other senior members of government may have committed a crime under section 139 (2) of the Criminal Code which discusses obstruction of justice. In point of fact, I made exactly that point in a discussion with Andrew Lawton of True North two weeks ago.

The difference now is that Scheer’s letter represents a complaint of criminal behaviour that the RCMP is duty-bound to investigate. The Commissioner’s office acknowledged receipt of the letter and said they are “reviewing” the letter. Really? What’s to review? The Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has made an allegation of criminal behaviour by senior members of government.

This must trigger an investigation.

It is no different than if you call the RCMP to say that your neighbour is in possession of stolen property. They are duty-bound to investigate and with that justify the allegation or say there is no evidence. But action must be taken.

To add to that five former federal or provincial Attorneys General wrote to Commissioner Lucki calling for an investigation. And it wasn’t along party lines. Signatories were from former federal Conservative AG Peter McKay as well as former NDP B.C. provincial AG Colin Gableman.

The rule of law is at stake in this question and this matter simply cannot be ducked by Lucki however much she may wish to do just that.

Since the days of Norman Inkster as Commissioner, the office of the RCMP commissioner has been politicized and is essentially a Deputy Minister under the Minister of Public Safety, in this case Ralph Goodale who has been an MP and Liberal Party hack since the current Prime Minister’s father was Prime Minister in the early 80’s. Is she going to claim independence and investigate this given that relationship?

That then brings into question the tradition of Parliamentary responsibility for members of Executive Council. Historically, Cabinet members, including the Prime Minister, had to step aside if the cloud of investigation hung over their head until that cloud was lifted. Our history and the history of British Parliamentary tradition is littered with examples of where this has happened.

This is serious.

If Lucki says the RCMP will look into all of this, would not then the Prime Minister, the Finance Minister and the Clerk of the Privy Council have to step aside? That’s traditionally what should happen. But, in an election year that will decimate the governing party. Yet not doing so would also likely be as damaging to the Prime Minister and his government.

The short-term future is not looking good for this government.

I recently learned that Canada’s state broadcaster spent resources trying to investigate me and my social media. And the Prime Minister’s Office took an interest.

The CBC attempted what amounts to a smear campaign against, among others, myself, Ezra Levant and Barbara Kay.

You might have seen the story online. The alarmist headline read: “Twitter trolls stoked debates about immigration and pipelines in Canada, data show: 9M troll tweets released by Twitter reveal foreign campaigns to influence Canadians’ opinions.”

That’s quite the statement. And a reader could be forgiven for thinking that foreign agents posted nine million tweets about Canadian pipelines and immigration in an attempt to meddle in our politics and push propaganda. That’s what the headline says, after all.

But that’s far from the truth.

The article reveals that Twitter released an archive of 9.6 million deleted tweets since 2013 that came from suspected bots — that is, fake accounts that are not connected to real people.

Of the 9.6 million deleted tweets, 21,600 mentioned Canada.

Yes, 21,600. Not nine million, as the headline deceptively implies.

The story reveals that the account most retweeted by trolls was CBC News, followed by Rebel Media and its founder, Levant.

Despite the alarmism of this “investigative report,” these accounts were retweeted less than 200 times each.

For context, there are 261 million Twitter users worldwide who post about half a billion tweets per day. In Canada alone, there are over seven million Twitter users who post hundreds of millions of times per day.

Levant getting 148 retweets from bots since 2013 is hardly news. Levant has posted 113,000 tweets since he joined Twitter, and it isn’t uncommon for his posts to be retweeted thousands of times.

Upon request, CBC reporter Roberto Rocha sent Levant his methodology, including the keywords searched in the report. Rocha didn’t include the country’s most prominent journalists or mainstream media outlets in his analysis, but he did include myself, Kay and Levant.

Why? It’s safe to bet that this report was a set up, designed to discredit conservative voices in the hopes our names would top their list. Perhaps the CBC desperately wanted to demonstrate that our online audiences are somehow illegitimate — propped up by “Russian bots.”

Despite the best efforts of the bullies over at our state broadcaster, the attempt to smear conservatives failed. They couldn’t muster up enough dirt to even mention me or Kay in their story, and had to resort to pretending Levant’s 148 retweets over seven years is a big deal.

So why did the CBC drum up this fake news story?

In one of his last social media posts as the top advisor to the Prime Minister, Gerald Butts shared this CBC article with the caption: “!”

He, too, was keen to fear-monger over this nonsense report.

You see, the Trudeau government is planning to censor and regulate free speech online. They’ve already warned Facebook to fix its “fake news problem” and recently announced a $7 million government program to re-educate Canadians about how to read the news online.

Trudeau’s inner circle and his friends at the state broadcaster want Canadians to believe there is a crisis of foreign meddling and fake news. This “investigative report” was supposed to be another helpful datapoint on the road to government censorship.

Instead, the report was a dud. But count on the CBC to peddle more fake news in the future to help the Trudeau government crackdown on free speech.

Nobody saw this coming. Were there people who believed it was possible that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and those around him improperly pressured Jody Wilson-Raybould on the SNC-Lavalin file? You bet.

But nobody guessed it would be as bad as Wilson-Raybould said it was during her bombshell testimony on Wednesday. This scandal has become worse than Trudeau’s harshest critics predicted.

“For a period of approximately four months between September and December 2018, I experienced 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. These events involved 11 people (excluding myself and my political staff) – from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office, and the Office of the Minister of Finance. This included in-person conversations, telephone calls, emails, and text messages. There were approximately 10 phone calls and 10 meetings specifically about SNC-Lavalin that I and/or my staff was a part of,” Wilson-Raybould said.

That was just the opening paragraph of an opening statement that lasted over half an hour. During that time, Wilson-Raybould did not present innuendos or rumours or impressions – she offered up detailed accounts of those meetings, phone calls, text messages and more that practically incriminate several of the most senior people in government.

Not only did Wilson-Raybould detail numerous examples of this “consistent and sustained effort” but also explained how she made it to clear to them multiple times that she felt this was inappropriate influence and wanted it to stop.

“I was irritated by having the meeting as I already told the Prime Minister et cetera that DP [deferred prosecution] was not going to happen and that I was not going to issue a directive,” she says of one such incident. Another was a meeting with now former Principal Secretary Gerald Butts where she explicitly tells him to stop pressuring her and then he goes right on pressuring her again a moment later.

Speaking of Butts, it looks like he is the one in the biggest trouble here. Wilson-Raybould cites a text message to her from her Chief of Staff concerning a meeting the latter had with Butts: “Gerry said: Jess there is no solution here that does not involve some interference.”

Wow. A flat out admission of intent to interfere in the justice system. If true, this is not just politically damning but potentially warrants obstruction of justice charges.

Now Butts himself denies any influence in his resignation letter. And Trudeau says he disputes Wilson-Raybould’s “characterization of events”.

It is for these conflicting reasons that there needs to be an RCMP probe, to get to the bottom of this and sort out these competing “perspectives,” to use Trudeau’s current favourite word.

Right now, Wilson-Raybould is the most credible voice at the table. Far more so than Trudeau, whose story keeps changing. Or top bureaucrat Michael Wernick, who gave a masterful but failed attempt at distracting from the issue at hand with his committee testimony theatrics.

A very bad scandal indeed. One with consequences that could very well go beyond the political sphere and into the legal.