What's Next, Obstruction of Justice?

It went largely unnoticed yesterday when the RCMP announced their investigators were looking into the SNC-Lavalin/JWR/Trudeau affair. It's hard to imagine they're looking at anything other than possible obstruction of justice.

I expect they'll be focusing on s. 139(2) of the Criminal Code that reads:

(2) Every one who wilfully attempts in any manner other than a manner described in subsection (1) to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years.

For starters, I don't believe that Justin Trudeau, either alone or in conjunction with Butts and Wernick, went so far as to commit obstruction, perversion or an attempt to defeat the course of justice.  Even Jody said as much.

Yet if I'm wrong on 139(2), I have immense difficulty trusting the RCMP to investigate this.

The RCMP has a history of wrongful meddling in parliamentary matters, usually, it seems, to the benefit of the Tories.

Think back to then Commissioner Zaccardelli, who took the unusual step of announcing in the midst of a federal election campaign that Ralph Goodale (of all people, Goodale) was under active RCMP investigation.  That was when Paul Martin was trying to get out from under the Chretien-era 'sponsorship scandal.' It was enough of a leg up for Harper to win a minority.

The telling part is that afterwards when Goodale was cleared and Zaccardelli was called before MPs to explain himself and his 'unusual' action in mid-campaign, he simply refused to answer their questions. Lawful questions and the top Mountie clammed up. Now you may have a different idea of 'benefit of the doubt' but I was left with very little doubt that Zac wanted to throw the election to the Conservatives.

Then there was the RCMP pension scandal.

On March 28, [2007] RCMP officials provided damning testimony to the public accounts committee, saying there were major accounting irregularities in the force's pension and insurance plans in 2002. 

The officers said when they tried to report the wrongdoing, they were either stonewalled or punished by top officials in the force, including Zaccardelli. 

Some of those same officials appeared as witnesses Monday, alongside Zaccardelli. 

But Zaccardelli said none of them had ever been punished for reporting wrongdoing. 

Zaccardelli denied that Chief Supt. Fraser Macaulay, who was sent to work at the Department of National Defence, was punished for reporting his concerns.

Somehow the whole scandal went nowhere and Zaccardelli resigned with his pension intact.

More recently there was the Duffy/Harper/Wright affair.  Duffy refused to play ball about the housing allowance scandal (it's a long, convoluted saga). The RCMP, under then Commissioner Bob Paulson, was called in.

It was said that Harper's crew figured that they could launch a criminal pogrom that would either give Duffy a heart attack or bankrupt him in legal costs.

Sure enough the RCMP came up with a 'kitchen sink' list of charges, 31 charges. When was the last time you heard of somebody, anybody indicted on 31 charges that didn't involve massive drug trafficking or multiple murders?  When was the last time you heard of someone indicted on 31 charges for padding the expense account? Then again, when was the last time you heard of anyone standing trial on 31 charges and winding up convicted on none, not one, the learned trial judge concluding that crimes were committed, just not by Duffy?

That was the proceeding that gave birth to the 'immaculate bribe' offence in which Duffy was supposedly guilty of taking a bribe for which no one was culpable of giving him that very bribe.  It was the criminal law equivalent of the virgin birth.

Paulson's team of topnotch investigators went at length into some evidence while ignoring the smoking gun that created the entire scandal and became Harper's nightmare.

I was inadvertently involved in Duffy's defence when I pointed out to a member of his legal team that the truth was obvious from the Duffy email that someone sent to Bob Fife who then broke the story.

The email, written while the scheme was still very private, outlined the terms of the deal Duffy had been given by Wright and Harper.  Duffy would do certain things. They would do certain things. He would be put into funds needed to pay off his Senate expenses tab.  The most critical part of that initial email was that it was contemporaneous. It set out a series of events, each of which subsequently happened, before Bob Fife got his hands on it.  Afterwards, only one person's evidence was consistent with that telltale email - Duffy's. Every one else's story was a flimsy contrivance and, at trial, that's precisely what Justice Vaillancourt found.

After Duffy was acquitted and on reading the Reasons for Judgment I was left with the powerful belief that this whole thing had been a set up and that the RCMP surely must have been party to that.

After all these shenanigans it is difficult for me to believe that the RCMP can be trusted in anything dealing with the Liberals, particularly Justin Trudeau and the SNC-Lavalin affair. That's especially true as we near another federal election campaign. We should not tolerate a Ralph Goodale II.

I have little sympathy for Justin Trudeau or Butts or Wernick. They went too far, crossed ethical lines, and that should have consequences. Would we have demanded anything less for Harper? I just don't believe that a criminal investigation with an election two months away is warranted, especially if it is in the hands of the RCMP.

Trust, once broken, is hard to restore.  Trust, repeatedly broken, can be extremely hard to rebuild.