The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development working group on bribery said in a statement Monday that it is "concerned" by accusations that Trudeau and staff in his office tried to get former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to let the Quebec engineering giant negotiate a remediation agreement rather than pursue the firm on criminal charges of bribery and fraud.Drago Kos, the chair of the OECD working group on bribery, elaborates:
Canada is one of 44 nations that in 1999 signed the legally binding Anti-Bribery Convention, which established international standards to criminalize the bribery of foreign officials. The idea was that all signatories — including all 36 OECD nations as well as eight others such as Russia and Brazil — would punish their own citizens and companies for trying to undermine governments elsewhere.
The statement says Canada's commitment under the convention is to "prosecutorial independence in foreign bribery cases," and that political factors such as national economic interests and the identities of the company or individuals involved should have no influence on the prosecution.
“This is the point of our concern,” he told the Star in a telephone interview.Here is more on this development:
And Kos said the excuse used by Trudeau and others for their interventions — that they were concerned about jobs at SNC-Lavalin [a concern that seems less and less legitimate, by the way] — is not a legitimate justification.
.@Lizacorn says OECD anti-bribery convention is at root of Canada’s anti foreign bribery law. Only way it could work is if all countries undertook obligation to not allow their companies to engage in bribery...enforcement has to be applied in way that ensures level playing field. pic.twitter.com/a1hyy1HTQe
— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) March 11, 2019
As in so much else, it appears Canada talks a good game on the international stage, just as it does on the domestic one. However, as a signatory to the legally-binding OECD pact, it has obligations that no amount of prime ministerial obfuscation and equivocation can lessen. And that is something even the most ardent of Mr. Trudeau's fans cannot deny.
Internationally, Lorne, things get hotter. In Quebec, it's just small potatoes.
ReplyDeleteI read your post this morning, as usual, Owen. It helped to provide another perspective on this whole issue, which I appreciated.
Delete"even the most ardent of Mr. Trudeau's fans cannot deny" - says who? Of course they'll deny it, anything, which is why useful public discourse has become so strained.
ReplyDeleteI want to share the comment I left on Owen's blog today:
Yesterday I wrote that I don't much care about Lavalin - as a scandal. However I see in Lavalin, as we all saw in General Dynamics Land Systems (the Saudi arms deal) and the KPMG/Isle of Man tax evasion scam, a common thread of favouritism based on wealth and influence. This didn't begin in Canada but it's part of the contagion of neoliberalism. All three of those occurred in this same government's first term in office. And let's not forget the "cash for access" affair.
Paul Manafort gets four years for cheating the American government out of millions in taxes yet a pleb caught with a bag of weed is banged up for life.
What we witnessed both in Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau as well as in other nations is a decline in democratic governance and the ascendancy of a corporate state. If you take these failures individually it's much easier to conjure up explanations or excuses. Taken collectively they present a much darker, more worrisome picture.
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It's when you take these controversies together that the real picture emerges and that's when it becomes inescapable how much of Stephen Harper continues on in Justin Trudeau.
Yet, for pointing this out you're branded a "Trudeau hater" or worse by a clown who purports to be the arbiter of "our cherished Canadian values." This is a guy whose stock in trade is vitriol and whose remarks, far from reflecting Canadian values, would be perfectly at home at a Trump rally.
It was with this hyper-partisan gutter sniping in mind that I posted on an item from the Economist on fixing democracy starting with the resurrection of grace and virtue in the political forum:
"When people see each other as fellow citizens rather than as enemies, they are more likely to attend not only to different judgments about facts, but also to different moral commitments. Manichaeism becomes difficult or even impossible. It looks thin and tinny, infantile, even pathetic."
Thin and tinny, infantile, even pathetic. How did we, especially avowed Liberals, come to abide that?
Thanks, Mound. Your comments make eminent sense. I, too, find intolerable the notion among some 'progressives' that Trudeau is somehow sacrosanct and mustn't ever be admonished, no matter how grave the infraction. It calls to mind the kind of reflexive, foaming-at-the-mouth crap we get from the extreme right.
DeleteDoctrinaire, ideologically-driven perspectives at the expense of critical thinking make such claimants objects of pity and derision, not icons deserving of admiration.