https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-07/trudeau-licks-wounds-and-tries-to-change-channel-on-snc-scandal
Trudeau Licks Wounds and Tries to Change Channel on SNC Scandal
Last week, Trudeau expelled two former ministers at the center of the SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. ordeal and tried to stop the bleeding. The lawmakers are viewed either as dissident troublemakers or as principled whistle-blowers, so the prime minister is trying to change the channel to an issue on which he feels he’s an unambiguous winner: climate change.
“The best thing the prime minister can realistically do in the short term is get out of the news and focus back on his agenda,” Nik Nanos, chairman of Nanos Research, said in an interview.
The pollster’s latest surveys show Trudeau’s Liberals and the opposition Conservatives tied at 35 percent ahead of an election this fall. The governing party’s support seems to have leveled off but Trudeau’s personal approval ratings are still falling, Nanos said. “We’re headed to a minority government.”
Canada’s 2015 election was a three-horse race between the Liberals, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the left-leaning New Democratic Party under Thomas Mulcair. But this year’s vote is shaping up as a head-to-head fight between Trudeau and Harper’s successor, Andrew Scheer.
Hearings into the scandal have shown that Trudeau and aides had a series of conversations with his then-justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, and her staff over whether to help SNC-Lavalin settle a fraud and corruption case dating back to its work in Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya. Issuing a directive to seek a deferred prosecution agreement would shield the firm from a potential conviction and subsequent ban on federal government contracts.
The controversy hinges on Wilson-Raybould’s allegation that the interventions amounted to judicial interference. Trudeau and his aides, however, say they were just trying to stave off job losses, and chalk it all up to the normal operations of government.
Wilson-Raybould was a star recruit to federal politics in the Pacific Coast battleground of Vancouver in 2015 who went on to become Canada’s first indigenous justice minister. She quit cabinet after being shuffled to a lesser role at the beginning of the year, and was soon followed out the door by another top rookie minister, Jane Philpott.