My goals here are three-fold:

1. To give non-Canadian readers a window into the story that’s going to determine whether Trudeau gets re-elected this year.
2. To give Canadian readers a clearer and more complete sense of what’s happened than is easily found in any other single source.
3. To make a few arguments re: what does and doesn’t matter here, and why. (And in the case of what doesn’t matter, outlining a theory on why some are pretending otherwise.)

By necessity, what follows isn’t exactly short. But I’ve done my best to keep it as interesting and concise as possible while still hitting the above goals.

For those unfamiliar with my writing, two quick notes: (1) My only interest in the partisan side of politics is deconstructing it. I have no team or tribe. (2) To ensure the most accurate takes possible, I offer rewards for all corrections.

Ok, enough housekeeping.

[EDIT: My original answer here was written March 1st. I returned on March 13th to make a few minor corrections and to address some common questions / objections. Where it made sense, I added edit snippets throughout the main text. Where I felt additions would be too distracting, I saved new commentary for the end. You can track all changes via the answer’s edit log.]

Background Context

Here’s what brought us to today, in six bullet points:

1. SNC-Lavalin is an EPC firm, which is to say that they’re the folks governments turn to when they want to contract out large infrastructure projects. SNC has roughly 50k employees globally, including 9k or so in Canada, with some 700 of those Canadian jobs being in the Montreal area (where SNC is currently headquartered). As recently as last October, SNC was worth about $9bn CAD, which is a fair amount for a Canadian company. If not quite a crown jewel, they were right at the top of the next tier down.
2. SNC engaged in some shady stuff between 2001 and 2011, leading to a mire of lawsuits and investigations. As evidence of their misdeeds mounted, thousands of employees left, the board was made over, and a host of new compliance procedures were put in place to ensure that The Bad Times were behind them.
3. In July 2012, the Harper government (the Conservative majority that preceded Trudeau’s Liberal majority) had Canada’s national contracting office revise their anti-corruption rules, with the net effect being that any vendor found guilty of certain crimes would be “rendered ineligible” for future federal contracts for a period of 10 years (reducible to 5 with good behavior). The Conservatives also made further amendments over the following years to reduce options for leniency, largely (it’s assumed) to position themselves against the Liberals, who had a party history of bedfellowing with shady corporations.
4. For obvious reasons, SNC didn’t care much for this. They began lobbying for Canada to adopt what many other countries call deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs), which are something like plea deals, where a corporation can admit wrongdoing and submit to certain penalties and government-supervised renovations without bearing the full weight of a potentially crippling criminal conviction. (The logic here being that it’s not generally fair or useful to punish an entire enterprise for the sins of a few, especially if those few are no longer there.)
5. The Trudeau government, which came to power in late 2015, ultimately did move forward with creating a DPA regime this past September. Unsurprisingly, SNC was quick to request an invitation for entry, arguing that they’d already done all the sorts of penance and reform that a DPA would require, and that further punishment was basically just value-destruction with no upside.
6. The person responsible to decide on SNC’s request said no, setting off a chain of dramanoes just now reaching their crescendo.

Now, before we can unpack the decision itself, we have to make a quick detour into the structure of the Canadian government — which I promise isn’t (quite) as boring as it sounds!

Super Fun Learning Time!

Trudeau, in addition to being Prime Minister (PM), is a Member of Parliament (MP) representing a riding in Montreal. That’s because in Canada the PM is always head of the executive branch and a sitting member of the legislature, with those two branches of government being heavily intertwined.

[EDIT: Quora User pointed out that all ministerial roles, including PM, can legally be filled by Senators and/or credentialed professionals, though this is only applicable in fringe cases where no suitable MP is found for a given role, which almost certainly would never be the case for PM — though this did happen twice in Canada’s early days when the sitting PM died in office.]

(I’m going to skip over the roles of the Queen, her Governor General, her Privy Council, and the Canadian Senate — mostly because those are all legacy institutions that hold marginal effective power today. If a PM has the backing, or “confidence”, of a majority of individual MPs, the PM effectively is the government. They own nearly all executive powers, and have enormous influence over legislation. Individual MPs have latitude to vote as they will, but those in the PM’s party will generally support the PM on all but rare “vote your conscience” items. The only part of the federal government that a majority-party PM has no real influence over is the judicial branch.)

Anyway, there’s this other thing that the Harper government did (again, presumably) to brand themselves in distinction to the scandal-ridden Liberal Party of the early 2000s.

In brief:

• The Conservatives instituted the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, which was to be subordinate to (but somehow independent of) the Department of Justice.
• The Department of Justice is headed by the Attorney General (AG), who is almost always a sitting MP selected for said purpose by the PM. In this new arrangement, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) would be a civilian appointed by the sitting Attorney General.
• The idea here is that the DPP would be two steps removed from the PM, which would theoretically protect the former from undue political influence from the latter as far as deciding whom to prosecute.
• (Oh, and by the way, the Attorney General is also the Minister of Justice, which is a totally different hat that the same person always wears. It’s a confusing duality not worth getting into here, outside the basic idea that the same person is to be considered independent or not-so-independent depending on the hat they’re wearing in a given instant, which often leads to all the obvious complexities that one would expect.)

Now, if you’re wondering what the division of power is between the AG and DPP on a practical level, there’s a handy guide for that very thing: Relationship between the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

In a way, it’s the most “Canadian Politics in a Nutshell” thing you could ever read — almost 4,000 words of high-sounding rhetoric (“independence!”, “justice!”, “accountability!”) that accomplishes basically nothing outside of making the system even more convoluted and bureaucratic.

Two reasons I say that:

• The DPP serves at the pleasure of the AG, who serves at the pleasure of the PM. While this gap between the DPP and PM probably does make it slightly harder for an otherwise good PM to improperly influence an otherwise good DPP, it doesn’t at all solve the problem that a bad PM would appoint a complicit AG, who would hire a complicit DPP.
• The AG can overrule and/or sideline the DPP at their own discretion, making the whole thing kinda pointless. (The AG would have to publish a memo of sorts explaining why, but that’s about it.)

The obvious (if uncharitable) reading here is that Harper wasn’t all that interested in changing anything, so much as he was very interested in the optics of being seen to change things. That this chess move would also make it near impossible for his successor to reverse the changes without massive blowback (despite the changes being largely symbolic) was just an added bonus.

[EDIT: For more on Harper’s presumed insincerity, see this combined with this. Also note that the current chair of SNC’s board was a key figure in Harper’s government for three years, as he’d been in several governments prior. He was expecting his calls to be answered, regardless of who was PM at the time. The idea of a Conservative government handling the SNC case any differently on a practical level seems like bad fiction to me, and I’m not sure on which grounds someone could even argue otherwise. I suspect Harper was unsurprised to hear that his trap had worked, if also a bit surprised to learn it was the SNC deferral that sprang it.]

This all in mind, let’s get back to the current narrative.

A Series of Unfortunate Decisions

Before the new law even came into effect, the SNC began pushing hard for their chance at a deferral. But Canada’s current DPP, Kathleen Roussel, for reasons still unknown, decided that she was going to tell SNC “no deal”, leading her to issue an internal memo to this effect on September 4th of last year. The contents of said memo aren’t public at this point, having been private to the AG. But the fact of the decision was communicated to the PM’s office, which Trudeau and co. were, well, not entirely satisfied with. This set off a chain of contacts over the next three months or so, which broadly consisted of the PM’s office looking for the AG to either reconsider or allow an outside legal opinion.

As to Trudeau’s motivations here, we can make some reasonable guesses:

1. SNC is headquartered in Trudeau’s home city.
2. Trudeau has an election coming up, and Quebec often plays the deciding role. SNC is a big deal to Quebec, and a conviction could cause deep harm to SNC. (At the least, the conviction would play poorly, whatever the ultimate economic consequences.)
3. The Liberal Party has always been corporate-friendly (in ways both good and bad). In particular, they’ve largely been against value-destruction as a general principle. And Trudeau almost certainly sees refusing SNC’s request to be textbook value-destruction.

Anyway, whatever his motivations or their relative weighting, Trudeau’s entreaties to Wilson-Raybould to intervene didn’t change her mind. But they did cause significant friction between them, which Trudeau was unable to keep entirely private. This was a gift that Andrew Scheer feasted upon. (Scheer is the current leader of the Conservatives, and Trudeau’s chief competition in this year’s election.)

As a further gift to Scheer, Trudeau initiated a cabinet shuffle in January, which included the reassignment of Wilson-Raybould to Veterans Affairs (with additional responsibilities in National Defence). While this was met with some suspicion, the real drama began on February 7th when The Globe and Mail published a rundown of the spreading rumors. This in turn led to someone asking Trudeau a few days later if he and Wilson-Raybould were still on good terms. His answer was to the effect of “well, she’s still here working for me, which should be its own answer” — which, uh, backfired spectacularly in that she resigned a few hours later.

[EDIT: The timing of an ethics probe may have also played into her timing. Also, it isn’t clear how aware Trudeau was of how Wilson-Raybould felt until the shuffle. She says it should have been obvious. He says it wasn’t. As of this time, no documentary evidence has come out proving either right or wrong.]

Her resignation obviously raised even more questions, which ultimately led to her appearing before the House Justice Committee to address concerns over whether Trudeau and co. had crossed any legal lines in their lobbying.

The Fallout

You can read Wilson-Raybould’s opening remarks here.

Being as objective as able, I’d summarize them as follows:

• Trudeau and team lobbied aggressively on SNC’s behalf, and he made it clear that he was displeased with her and Roussel for being inflexible.
• While she didn’t accuse them of breaking any hard laws, she feels they did cross well into “inappropriate” territory, both in tone and frequency of approach, including after she’d basically said “no means no”.
• She feels that she was “demoted” because of her stand.

All said, she seemed entirely credible. Her notes were thorough and it’s hard to imagine her having lied on any point. Even so, there’s the open question of interpretation, especially as it concerns that last bullet point.

While there’s much that’s still unclear, we do know that, as far as immediate causes go, she was reassigned as part of a larger cabinet shuffle triggered by someone else’s resignation. This in mind, Trudeau’s official position has been “had Scott Brison not stepped down, Jody Wilson-Raybould would still be minister of justice and attorney general of Canada.”

Now, Scheer is obviously hoping for a smoking gun that will prove this statement false. But we don’t have one yet, and it doesn’t seem all that likely to me that one exists. Could Trudeau have opportunistically used the shuffle to punish her? It’s possible. But it’s also possible that he was simply annoyed at how she handled the whole affair, leading him to decide that he’d prefer her elsewhere. I can see how either scenario could be viewed as objectionable, but I’m less sure that even the former rises to the level of criminal obstruction. Whatever Trudeau’s motivations in shuffling her, his replacement AG has so far left the existing DPP in place, which means nothing involving SNC-Lavalin has actually changed. I suppose you could still argue pettiness, but pettiness isn’t quite a crime.

[EDIT: There’s also the possibility that there was no pettiness at all and that the shuffle was exactly and only for the reasons that Trudeau’s former top aide suggested. I found his testimony compelling in its own right, and I’m not sure how to adjudicate between the two accounts outside further evidence. My lean is that it feels a little unlikely for there not to have been some secondary motive, however small. But YMMV. I get into this a bit more in the edits at the end.]

Anyway, all those arguments are meaningless to Scheer, mostly because it’s very convenient for him to not consider them.

(Note: As I don’t want to give anyone cause to believe that I’m meaningfully biased, I’ll point out before continuing that one of the last two votes I cast was for a Conservative. And I’m fine with throwing more votes in their direction — just as soon as they stop nominating feckless lizardpeople like Andrew Scheer.)

A Study in Insincerity

While I wasn’t much of a Harper fan, my dislike for him was mostly benign. Had he won against Trudeau in 2015, I’d have made a vaguely disappointed clicking noise and then gone back to whatever I was doing. I ultimately voted against him because I was displeased with how he seemed to court the alt-right as it became clear he was going to lose — but his work as PM was largely … fine?

Andrew Scheer, however, is a different category of conservative. Andrew Scheer, in a nutshell, is the kind of person you’d get if you isolated all the unhealthy impulses that Harper struggled with and then doused them with growth hormones (and then also stripped most of Harper’s policy/strategy IQ).

He made a speech yesterday in response to Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, of which I’ll share just one excerpt:

The testimony Canadians have just heard from the former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould tells the story of a Prime Minister who has lost the moral authority to govern. A Prime Minister who allows his partisan political motivations to overrule his duty to uphold the rule of law. A Prime Minister who doesn’t know where the Liberal Party ends and where the Government of Canada begins. And a Prime Minister who has allowed a systemic culture of corruption to take root in his office and those of his most senior cabinet and public service colleagues.

Now, much of this is just your run-of-the-mill disingenuous nonsense. But even in that ignoble context, I still find this one line incredible:

a Prime Minister who doesn’t know where the Liberal Party ends and where the Government of Canada begins.

Scheer seems to be making one of two absurd arguments here: (1) that “the government” is somehow separable from the declared values/views/proposals of those specifically elected to form said government; (2) that a majority government should set the values/views/proposals they were elected on aside so as to privilege the values/views/proposals which voters judged less attractive.

I honestly don’t know which one of those ideas is less preposterous, but that Scheer would employ that kind of cutesy phrase despite it not actually meaning anything is one of many reasons I hope he’s never allowed to run anything more important than a blender. (Like, is it better if he just didn’t think through how dumb the sentence was, or if he did and said it anyway? And in the case of the latter, what does it say about the state of things if he judged this a viable tactic?)

[EDIT: I don’t know how I forgot this, but by far the funniest thing here is that Harper had literally renamed the Government of Canada as “The Harper Government” in 2011! And guess who worked for Harper at the time? I wonder if he was this passionate about the distinction then?]

Anyway, let’s shift from the statement to the motivation behind the statement. Who benefits from the SNC being prosecuted? Scheer! Who benefits from Trudeau being perceived as trying to interfere with this prosecution? Scheer! He wins either way. The only way he doesn’t win is if he’s forced to actually give his own opinion on why SNC does or doesn’t deserve a deferral.

Lucky for him, no one is going to force him to do that — which I’d argue is symptomatic of the defining problem in this whole mess.

About That Deferral

Before we move on to why Scheer is able to get away with all this, a few final words about SNC.

What Scheer would prefer lost in the hubbub is that a deferral is not an exoneration. It’s a decision to choose a scalpel over a sledgehammer. While there may be times when the latter is the more appropriate tool, Scheer hasn’t really made any argument to that end (nor will he on this side of the election). His argument is simply “the DPP said sledgehammer, so Trudeau has to use the sledgehammer, which I don’t otherwise have an opinion on, but hey it does win me a lot of votes! — and PS, if Trudeau argues against the sledgehammer, it’s because he’s a coward/crook who hates Canada!”

Trudeau’s response hasn’t been “c’mon, let’s let them off lightly because they’re my yacht buddies and besides I need their votes!” but rather “let’s pursue a form of justice which doesn’t introduce unnecessary collateral damage — and PS, I’d rather keep those votes thank you very much”.

All else being even, it isn’t unreasonable for politicians to lean towards decisions that benefit them in the polls. But all else isn’t even here. One of these decisions is better for Canada, and one is worse.

Now, is it possible that the DPP and AG actually had good reasons to stick it to SNC? Could be. The problem is that neither explained their reasons, both citing that it would be inappropriate to comment while SNC is pursuing their appeal of said decision in the courts. (This is probably a reasonable position now, though I’m less sure it’s a good reason for not having explained the decision at the time.)

[EDIT: Just to be super clear on this point: the DPP’s Section 13 memo was read by the AG and no one else that we know of. The AG’s deputy didn’t read it. No one in the PM’s office read it (though Wilson-Raybould says a copy was forwarded, and then re-sent again after her conversion with Wernick on Dec 18th). SNC was never told why they were rejected. It’s all a mystery. And despite this being the first decision on this law, the AG refused to solicit an external opinion from a former Chief Justice of Canada. The AG had the right to make this set of decisions, but it’s hard to understand the logic here.]

While their silence keeps us from perfect clarity, there are two dominant theories for why the DPP and AG decided against SNC’s plea:

1. They agreed on the technical argument that SNC is legally ineligible for deferral on the explicit grounds of national economic interests (which is to say that Canada can’t use that as a factor in its judgment).
2. They found compelling evidence that SNC hasn’t reformed and/or wouldn’t offer good faith cooperation in context of a plea.

In the first case, it’s hard to argue against this reading of the law being facially correct. Even so, there are non-trivial counter-arguments: (i) Governments make this kind of self-benefiting decision all the time. The game is that you simply list reasons other than “national economic interest” when filling out the paperwork, regardless of how important said interests actually were. Now, maybe countries shouldn’t do this. But they do. And while I personally see the appeal of “let’s go by the book, even if mostly alone, even if that’s a net tax”, I don’t think people who take the other side are necessarily bad. (ii) If you have enough other reasons outside the national economic interest, it isn’t clear to me that it being helpful to the national economic interest is bad. (iii) Pragmatic flexibility is half the Liberal Party’s platform. Most voters who had an informed opinion here would have expected Trudeau to take precisely the stance he has. As such, you could argue that this is a form of mandate that he’s actually responsible to uphold.

In the second case, the counter-argument is simply that over-ruling the PM’s judgment shouldn’t actually be their call, regardless of what the current letter of the law may say. Remember that this whole new structure was a Harper innovation, and arguably just a symbolic one. And while the AG has always theoretically been independent from the PM’s office, there are realist arguments for why this distinction has always been something of a legal fiction.

(To be clear, we don’t know which — if either — of these arguments Trudeau is leaning on, largely because we don’t know what Roussel’s thinking was.)

Formalist v. Realist

(As preface for what follows, I’m not trying to convince anyone that one particular school of thought here is better or more right than the other. My point is that both are valid, in as much as they’re both logically robust frameworks that you could believe and defend without being inherently bad or crazy.)

As to what I mean by the realist school, there’s a significant parallel here (in a narrow way) to the current situation in the US with Trump. When his new AG (who at the time wasn’t yet his AG, but who had been an AG before under Bush Sr.) issued an unsolicited memo outlining an argument that Trump was constitutionally OK to reassign and fire his way to outcomes he wanted without this implying actual obstruction of justice, this was widely met with cries of “treason!” — despite (a) that not being what treason means, and (b) it being a coherent and well-argued theory of law.

Now, sure, you or I may disagree with this philosophically. And we may be right! But the idea that the chief executive has extraordinary and unilateral powers over nearly all executive affairs isn’t necessarily as dangerous as it may seem at first blush.

Over-simplifying this a bit, imagine two competing scenarios:

1. You restrain the executive’s powers with a complicated set of rules which are really hard to enforce with any consistency and which involve endless subjective judgment calls and which can easily be misused by a belligerent opposition to thwart the executive doing its job and which really don’t offer much effective restraint anyway.
2. You restrain the executive’s powers with two simple levers: (a) in the case of gross judgment, you vote the executive out next election; (b) in the case of gross judgment that will cause more harm if left that long, you vote them out by pressuring your reps for impeachment / a no-confidence vote.

Now, yes, there are real objections to this second system, which we’ll get to in a second. But just keep this idea of two approaches in mind as we consider a statement from Wilson-Raybould’s remarks yesterday:

We either have a system that is based on the rule of law, the independence of prosecutorial functions and respect for those charged to use their discretion and powers in a particular way, or we do not.

This is basically an argument for that first system — which, on its face, seems entirely reasonable. The rule of law is obviously good! And independence sure sounds like something we’d want! But step back for a minute. Let’s recall that the AG is a member of the executive (not the judiciary). They serve at the pleasure of the PM. And while we’d want the AG to have their own personal philosophy and set of legal interpretations, they weren’t elected to enact those. (In the US, the AG isn’t even an elected official at all!) And if the PM/President happens to have a different philosophy and set of legal interpretations (which they, in effect, were elected to enact), it isn’t at all obvious why they must lose in the event of a tie.

By way of analogy, imagine that I’m a hiring manager working directly under the CEO in a public company. She’s the one hired by the shareholders (via the board), not me. She’s hired me to be an extension of her vision. To the degree that I do this well, all is well. But if she and I disagree on whether to hire a given candidate, my objection of “well, our bylaws say this is my call” isn’t itself all that compelling. I can go to the board and say “hey, she overruled me and our bylaws say she can’t do that”, but for the board to be fully interested they’d want me to also add “and her judgment was dangerously flawed for x reason”, else the board would just say “yes, well, we hired her and not you, so if she thinks your judgment is wrong, you’re not really fulfilling the function you were hired to fulfill, so I’m not sure why you’re still here”. What they care about most is whether the CEO displayed poor judgment relative to the standard they were hired to uphold. Whether or not bylaws were broken along the way is somewhat incidental. (While some board members care a lot about bylaws, that concern is more often about organizational dynamics than any higher theory of justice. If they like the CEO’s vision and you were hired to execute that vision and the CEO no longer feels like you are executing that vision, arguing “but the bylaws!” is probably not going to save your job.)

To be ultra clear, this isn’t to say that a CEO or PM or President should be allowed to “get away” with whatever they want. There are many occasions where a PM will want something that’s not actually consistent with the platform on which they were elected (or that’s just generally bad in some moral or ethical sense) — in which case we would want the AG to object, and object strongly. But in cases where the AG loses this argument, we’d also expect them to no longer be AG thereafter, which is itself fully consistent with a healthy system provided that their exit triggers a thorough review.

To use an extreme example, imagine that Trudeau tells his AG to tell her DPP to bring a Biblical flood of lawsuits against his next-door neighbor because they objected to his backyard Nickelback concert. In the realist view, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the AG says yes or no, or even whether they have the latitude to make that decision. What matters is that the public is informed so that we can all decide whether this is something we object to or not. And if we do, enough of us will call up our local MP and say “if you don’t stop this guy immediately, we’ll vote in your opponent next year”, which they’ll take as impetus to go vote the PM out. It’s no less an effective check against the PM’s abuse of power than the AG having theoretical independence. It’s just a different mechanism. Sure, there are plenty of people who prefer one mechanism over the other (which is the kind of viewpoint diversity that’s good and healthy!), but it’s hard to argue that this realist view is essentially wrong. Having an independent AG is not as structurally important as having an independent judiciary — provided that the actions of the executive are regularly and efficiently reported back to a voting public interested in holding leaders to account.

And it’s exactly with this last bit that things get thorny.

A Requiem

The phrase “constitutional crisis” has been bandied about a lot in both Canada and the US in recent days. Yet few of the underlying situations really seem to fit the bill, at least relative to a much deeper constitutional crisis that’s been growing unchecked for decades now.

The constitution (both in the US and Canada, and in nearly every developed democracy) depends upon an engaged citizenry willing to demand and do, and a press capable of giving said citizenry the data on which they can fairly decide.

The problem is that none of this works if we don’t share common ideas of which bad things are especially bad, or if we don’t all trust that at least a few impartial and talented journalists will always ask the right questions to empower useful explanations of what the executive did so that we can vote and/or pressure our reps accordingly.

The challenge as I see it is that Canadians have long been remarkably ill-served by their press.

1. Huge chunks of the country only have a Postmedia outlet as their local paper. (Postmedia being the antithesis of unbiased.)
2. There are less sensational papers, including some large national ones. But none are especially good at what we need them to be good at. (If you can find me an explainer from a major outlet that’s anywhere near as thorough or clear as this one, I’ll send you $25. And I really don’t mean this to my own aggrandizement. I just don’t think one exists.) [EDIT: I’m happy to 10x this offer to $250 CAD just in case $25 isn’t enough of an incentive.]
3. Most papers have dedicated an increasing amount of space to opinion pieces, which are quite good for clicks and quite bad for reader education. (They’re too short, too slanted, and they mostly use the little space they have to tell rather than show.)
4. Most opinion columnists sell a partisan spin, which only serves to divide people into camps that inevitably grow further and further apart, thus making voter coordination across party lines difficult to impossible, all while also reducing common ideas of which things are worth coordinating on.
5. No outlets have shown a willingness or ability to force Trudeau or Scheer to answer hard questions. (Hard to say if they’re too worried about losing access, too self-focused to coordinate, or too distracted to see the civic necessity of getting those answers.)

I’ve polled a bunch of my Canadian friends — all bright young people who regularly vote and try to do so intelligently. None could really explain what happened with Trudeau and SNC, nor were they sure where to turn to rectify the gap. Plenty of stories were a search away. But which would give my friends the context required to understand Trudeau’s decisions for what they were?

(That’s a non-rhetorical question, by the way. My wallet is open if I’ve misspoken here.)

Why This Matters

Consider this current case. It’s fine for someone to say “hey, I believe in closely following the letter of the law in all cases” and for them to thus side against Trudeau here (assuming he did in fact inappropriately pressure Wilson-Raybould). Like, I may not personally find this to be the world’s most sophisticated ideology, but the point is that we all tend to think our own judgment best, which is exactly why we do things like vote in free multi-party elections. Lots of people probably believe that an AG should be 100% independent in every way, and these voters should be welcome to form a party around that belief! But that party wouldn’t quite be today’s Liberal Party (or the Conservatives), which is something that’s been poorly explained to voters.

The resulting issue is that I don’t think most people will go to the polls this October with optimal clarity in mind. While some are only ever going to vote against the candidate they hate more, many with less tribal feelings are going to be swayed by a faulty assumption that Trudeau committed some especially heinous crime here, where the reality (to the current public evidence) is more that, at worst, he and his AG were approaching from two different angles, with one of them ultimately having the trump-card of being the elected PM.

There are all sorts of valid reasons why someone might vote for or against Trudeau. But I think it’s important that those votes are cast in light of what actually happened here and what it actually implies — which Scheer is actively trying to muddy and misrepresent, which the media is largely unwilling to combat, which I think is probably a bad thing?

EDITS: ROUND #1

Original answer written March 1st. Coming back on the 13th to get around to some needful updates/corrections/addendums.

Some I’ve made above; others I’ll list here in no particular order:

• Trudeau and Butts have been arguing that they do believe in full prosecutorial independence. But I almost wish they wouldn’t. It’s hard to believe that they (or any PM team) totally believes it to be the best possible mechanism. I get that it’s scary to say anything else (imagine the headlines!), but this feels like a good opportunity to maybe start talking about all the stuff I’ve outlined here. (I suppose there’s a world in which they could totally believe in the idea. Butts certainly sounded sincere when he talked about it. But I just can’t get there as it concerns a PM. The sorts of people who win national elections aren’t generally the sorts to take being overruled by an underling all that well. I only leave this door open because of how authentic Butts seemed on the point.)
• My original piece included this note: “In the interests of precision, the most recent source I could find said that SNC has 3,400 employees in Quebec (vs. just Montreal). But as their headquarters are in Montreal, I’m assuming the bulk are there. I could be wrong.” As an update, this authoritative-seeming Globe & Mail article puts the number in Quebec at 2,500 and the number in Montreal at 700.
• Lots of commentary out there about just how at risk those 9,000 Canadian jobs were (and about how a federal debarment wouldn’t necessarily influence bidding on provincial/municipal projects). Though I’ve made a few edits to account for these arguments, they all seem peripheral to me for two reasons: (i) if SNC was found guilty, this would almost certainly impact their employee retention and bidding prospects in a general downstream way (we have evidence of recent press impacting them already); (ii) while most displaced workers would find new jobs, there’s no obvious replacement within Canada for SNC in terms of EPC firms. (For more, I thought this take was balanced and thorough — though I did find the final four sentences wildly upsetting.)
• I found this personal testimony from a current SNC exec (who lives and works in Saskatchewan) worth reading. His main point is that those trying to politicize this as some Liberal gambit to exclusively favor Quebec are overlooking that some 2/3rds of SNC’s Canadian workforce don’t live or work in Quebec. (On a political level, an SNC conviction would definitely hurt Liberals more. But his point that Trudeau is fighting for jobs that are mostly not in Quebec is certainly valid.)
• It still isn’t clear to me which laws/precedents are shielding the DPP’s SNC-related memo(s) from public review. The court has since ruled against SNC’s appeal, and it really feels like this whole debate would be much simpler if we all knew exactly why Roussel and Wilson-Raybould felt so strongly against SNC being eligible for a deferral. (FWIW, you can read the full text of the deferral-related legislation here.)
• For those asking, I’m 100% behind a thorough investigation. Let’s get lots of uninhibited testimony, and let’s subpoena relevant emails/texts, etc. Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant. But let’s also report those findings in a cautious and contextual and non-sensational way.
• There’s a representative thread here on why the AG's independence is somehow sacrosanct. All such threads/articles I've come across share the same hallmarks: (i) they ignore/discount that individuals serving at the pleasure of the PM can never be truly independent; (ii) they make a weird assumption that independence is a required pre-condition to keeping a PM from interfering with prosecutions in a gross way (when a non-independent prosecutor could just as easily report the PM for gross judgment). I don’t know who is debating that bad judgment is anything other than bad, or who is suggesting we shouldn’t deter/punish it. The question is whether a certain old and imported legal doctrine is the most effective mechanism to ensure an end we all agree is important.
• The way most journalists use the word “political” in the phrase “political interference” is also weird! Whether interference is “political” has nothing to do with whether it’s good or bad. Take the case of weed-related prosecutions. Most would say that more political interference would have been good (in terms of directing prosecutors to not prosecute any more pot cases while new legislation was framed). The fact that Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould didn’t interfere with those prosecutions is a widespread criticism. That resources were spent fining and jailing people for trivial amounts of pot possession after Trudeau’s majority election on a “legalize pot” platform is, to many, a symptom of a flawed system, not proof of some sacred pillar doing its job. The public will was pretty clear about this (and had been for some time). Following the existing law to the letter led to an outcome that most consider bad. Governments semi-regularly opt to not prosecute existing laws for various political reasons (most of them positive/healthy). This isn’t necessarily a meaningful threat to the rule of law. (This is doubly true when it’s a new law with no prosecutorial precedent either way.)
• On a related note, I think “rule of law” is one of those phrases where everyone has some idea of what they mean by it, but where few actually have a robust conception that could survive a hard cross-examination. By any conception, sure, inconsistent and partial rulings are generally to be avoided. But the idea that prosecutorial independence (which just shifts who gets to make the decisions which some will find inconsistent and/or partial) has some necessary role in supporting the rule of law is curious. Taking up the example of pot again, look how many Americans were angry at Jeff Sessions for increasing the number of pot prosecutions given that this was contrary to Trump’s platform. Sessions’ decision caused all sorts of confusion/chaos, and it clearly favored one demographic of voters at the expense of another. No one is questioning that he was legally allowed to make said decision (the federal law was clear, and the restrictions placed upon on it by the previous AG were non-binding), but I’m not sure how any could argue that his decision reflects the rule of law working in a positive way either.
• A few good write-ups about the Shawcross doctrine (the basis in Canadian legal theory for prosecutorial independence) here, here and here. The last link (about the UK implementation) is interesting in that it describes a “Shawcross letter” (i.e., a letter sent by the AG to their ministerial colleagues to solicit their input). This was, in effect, what Wilson-Raybould didn’t do. She made up her mind independently, then dismissed those who expressed contrary views. Had she gathered up all available views to inform her decision (rather than decide based exclusively on her and her DPP’s legal judgment), one imagines that others would have found less cause to ensure their views were being heard/considered. (She had the legal right to make up her mind independently, but that hardly means she was right in doing so.)
• I’ll have to write a separate answer about Butts’ testimony at some point, but the big things for me were: (i) it gave a pretty good explanation for why Wilson-Raybould was shuffled; (ii) Butts made an extraordinary and easily-falsified set of claims about her interactions with him about the SNC file, which, if true, are enormously problematic for her case.
• The other thing that came out of Butts’ testimony was that Trudeau really dropped the ball in offering Wilson-Raybould (who is Indigenous) the Indigenous Services portfolio as opposed to the Crown-Indigenous Relations portfolio, with that difference being, roughly, the difference between being in charge of restructuring relations (the latter) and being in charge of administering welfare (the former). She was never going to accept the former, and he and Butts have no real excuse for not foreseeing this.
• The real crisis here (if we must use the term crisis) seems to be that Trudeau was so out of tune with two of his ministers, and that he was unable to keep them in the fold after they raised their objections (even if the way they raised them was less than ideal).
• On the subject of raising objections, Scott Welch wrote a great companion answer here about the various opportunities (if not obligations) that Wilson-Raybould had to report any inappropriate or unethical behavior on the part of Trudeau or his staff. She, to our current knowledge, made use of none of them. Prior to her being shuffled, her only vocalized discontent came in the form of telling some people (paraphrasing) “stop lobbying already!”, which is not at all the same thing as raising a formal concern/complaint about misconduct. (And again we have Butts’ testimony that his sole one-on-one conversation with her about SNC came at the end of a friendly two-hour dinner which she initiated, with no other text or email ever being sent to him on the subject. Per his testimony, she was the one who brought it up then, and her after-dinner text said nothing further about it. He claims she never laid out her concerns until during one of their “four or five” “long” and “personal” conversations they had after she was transferred, and that he was dumbfounded when she mentioned her suspicion on why she had been moved.)
• While she isn’t a disinterested party (and while I think some of her criticisms are overly strong), I thought Sheila Copps’ interview with CBC contained some solid points, namely: (i) that saying “I’ve made up my mind, now go away” is not exactly consistent with the role of an AG/MOJ when your colleagues don’t feel heard, (ii) that it’s kinda weird to quit a cabinet without also quitting caucus, (iii) that the number of meetings which Wilson-Raybould took on this file was not especially high, (iv) that the original decision to not prosecute was split. (As an aside, I really dislike that interviewer. He’s part of the problem.)

EDITS: ROUND 2

• So, the Conservatives have started a “Let Her Speak” campaign pushing for a second (at least) round of testimony from Wilson-Raybould. While I’m broadly supportive of this, it’s worth noting that Trudeau has a rational case for saying “no” that isn’t solely rooted in being afraid of some harmful truth being revealed. From his perspective, Wilson-Raybould is on a mission to take him down. Let’s assume that every word she said in the first testimony was true. There was nothing particularly damning in it from a legal context, but it played very poorly for Trudeau all the same. He’s now facing a decision between: (i) allowing her to speak again and the same thing happening again and it hurting him more in the polls, (ii) not allowing her to speak again, which will hurt him in the polls now, but which may also cap the damage. Were I his advisor, I’d push him toward letting her speak and then prepping a killer set of rebuttals (assuming the facts are indeed on his side). More downside, but more upside. That said, it would seem that he’s being pushed in a different direction. While I’m not so much a fan of this, I wouldn’t infer from it (as many are) that it’s necessarily a sign of guilt.
• Ok, a bit more about Scheer. I keep getting comments wondering why I dislike him so much. First, I should point out that most Conservatives never cared much for him either until he was their sole hope against Trudeau. He didn’t crack 20% in opinion polls until after Kevin O’Leary dropped out (and that’s among Conservative Party members). He won the nomination on the 13th ballot, having trailed on all 12 ballots prior. The fact that he won (which was contested due to significant inconsistencies) was largely viewed as a frantic rejection of Maxime Bernier (who had led on all of the first 12 ballots), not an endorsement of Scheer. From his first speech post-nomination, he’s relied on red meat, generalities, and strawmen. That’s not what we need from the Leader of the Opposition. We need someone able to carefully and accurately deconstruct the PM’s decisions, showing voters a detailed vision of some plausibly better way. Jack Layton was that guy. Harper, in his own way, was that guy. Scheer is not that guy. He once wrote an op-ed in support of Brexit — aka, arguably the most ill-conceived set of decisions in modern political history. (He was still in support of it as recently as this past November, which is just wild given how things have unfolded. It’s one thing to be theoretically in favor of sovereignty. It’s quite another to be in favor of a nation jumping off a cliff to get it.) Scheer’s campaign chair, Hamish Marshall, is also a former director of Rebel Media, which is morally inexcusable in itself. (Marshall says he had nothing to do with editorial there and that he eventually did resign. But this rundown of all the content they published before he quit is deeply disturbing — not to mention that we have no reason to believe that he quit for moral reasons.)
• I’d been waiting for a transcript of Nathalie Drouin’s (Wilson-Raybould’s former deputy) testimony before the House Justice Committee (which it seems doesn’t exist anywhere, maybe due to some rule). But snippets were reported by the CBC. A few interesting takeaways: (i) JWR had given Drouin an instruction not to talk about the SNC case by September 17th, which was super early into the process; (ii) JWR forbade Drouin from answering a question from the PCO (civil service) about the potential impact of SNC failing to get a deferral; (iii) Drouin was never told what the evidence against SNC’s case was. This is all very odd.
• An important open question: where did the original leak to the Globe & Mail come from? And why was a leak made to the press before internal remedies were exhausted (or even attempted)?
• An interesting tidbit from Butts’ testimony that I missed the first time around: Wilson-Raybould was the second minister that Trudeau attempted to move from a dream portfolio to Indigenous Services using the same logic. The difference is that the first person said yes. (Incidentally, this was the other minister that later quit in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould.) While it was still an unwise move, this does lend credence to the argument that Trudeau was doing it to signal continued support for his Indigenous reconciliation efforts, which is to say it could have been a bad decision made with positive intent. (Logically, though, this same move having been made before might have been a really convenient cover. I don’t know how we’d know for sure unless we’re just taking someone’s word.)
• Echoing what Copps said about the insubstantial meeting count, Butts estimated the number of meetings on the TMX pipeline deal as being around 100. By comparison, the SNC file ended up drawing 10 meetings and 20 contacts over a little more than three months. While the context is a bit different with an AG vs. other ministerial roles, this number still doesn’t seem outlying.
• Lots of people have been mentioning how prosecutorial independence is “constitutionally guaranteed” (or other wording to that effect). This is true in a sense, but that sense is mostly misleading. Canada is unlike the US in that we have no single document called The Constitution. What we have is a messy patchwork of acts, statutes, orders, and precedents. Prosecutorial independence is a “constitutional convention”, meaning that it’s an unwritten rule with no binding power over Parliament. In the absence of contrary legislation, conventions are the best practices which all are generally expected to follow. But not only have conventions been broken from time to time with little consequence, the House is free to pass new laws to make written what is unwritten, and the courts (explicitly) have no power to overrule. So if Trudeau were to decide tomorrow “hey, let’s do away with this thing” and if enough MPs were to say “yeah, let’s do that”, then the bill would be passed. (There are more steps, but the gist is that there’s no way to stop a majority-supported bill without sparking an actual constitutional crisis likely to resolve in the House’s favour.) While I can’t imagine that any PM would try this in the current climate, there’s nothing actually legally stopping them.