Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was plunged back into the biggest scandal of his term just two months before elections, after the nation’s ethics watchdog ruled he inappropriately interfered in a judicial matter.
In a report released on Wednesday, Canadian Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion said Trudeau sought to pressure his former attorney general last year to help SNC-Lavalin Group settle corruption charges out of court, partly for political reasons.
Since the Montreal-based engineering firm would have benefited financially from Trudeau’s efforts, the prime minister’s actions contravened conflict of interest laws, the watchdog concluded.
“The authority of the prime minister and his office was used to circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit” the attorney general’s authority, Dion said.
The reprimand is a blow to Trudeau, just 10 weeks ahead of an October election.
The ruling effectively undermines Trudeau’s argument that he did nothing wrong and was only seeking to stave off job losses, chalking up the disagreement with his attorney general to the normal operations of government.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Trudeau accepted responsibility “for everything that happened,” even though he said he disagreed with some of the conclusions.
“My job as a prime minister is to stand up for Canadians and defend their interests, and yes, it is essential we do that in a way that defends our institutions, that upholds prosecutorial independence, but we need to be able to talk about the impacts on Canadians right across the country of decisions being made,” Trudeau said.
He said he would implement new measures to reinforce the independence of the attorney general’s office.
The controversy centers around conversations Trudeau and aides had with then-Canadian minister of justice Jody Wilson-Raybould and her staff over whether to help SNC-Lavalin settle a fraud and corruption case dating back to its work in Libya during then-leader Muammar Qaddafi’s rule.
However, the ethics watchdog found the pressure on Wilson-Raybould “troubling,” and said the evidence showed on at least four separate occasions that political interests to back SNC were put before the attorney general, directly or indirectly.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
RSS