OTTAWA, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) — The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have for the first time since 2019 confirmed it is investigating Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet for potential obstruction of justice concerning a bribery scandal involving a large Canadian engineering firm.
In a press release sent out today, the non-profit advocacy group Democracy Watch said it got a response to an Access to Information Act (ATIA) request it filed with the RCMP on July 27, 2022, about the SNC-Lavalin affair and Trudeau.
According to Democracy Watch, the RCMP response letter, which is dated March 25, 2023, “confirms it is investigating the allegation that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, former Finance Minister Bill Morneau, some members of their staff, and former Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick, obstructed justice by pressuring then-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to stop the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin in 2018.”
The response letter is 96-pages long but contains 86-pages which are fully redacted, as the matter is “currently under investigation.”
The only visible portion is Democracy Watch’s 5-page February 2021 letter which it sent to the RCMP.
“This is the first public statement the RCMP has made about the situation since August 14, 2019 when it stated that it was examining the situation carefully,” said Democracy Watch.
Jody Wilson-Raybould was Trudeau’s former attorney general of Canada. Back in 2019, she contended that both Trudeau and his top Liberal officials had inappropriately applied pressure to her for four months, to directly intervene in the criminal prosecution of Montreal-based global engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, relating to a scandal involving corruption and bribery charges connected to government contracts it once had in Libya.
Wilson-Raybould testified in early 2019 to Canada’s justice committee that she believed she was moved from her then-justice cabinet posting to veterans’ affairs due to the fact she did not grant a request from SNC-Lavalin’s for a deferred prosecution agreement, rather than a criminal trial.
Of note is that a criminal conviction would have banned the company from getting any government contracts for 10 years.
The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) failed spectacularly at resisting the initial COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates that were imposed by the government on freedom-loving Canadians.
Most CPC MPs subserviently complied with Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party in creating a police-state where our Charter Rights were regularly violated, but now Pierre Poilievre would have us believe they have turned a corner and nothing like it will ever happen again.
How can they rebuild our trust? Well, they can start by owning up to their terrible mistakes.
SIGN: The CPC must apologize for abandoning Canadians to Trudeau’s COVID regime.
You will remember how freedom-loving Canadians were abandoned by the CPC, with Erin O’Toole calling for vaccine passports and most CPC MPs pearl-clutching about “vaccine hesitancy”.
That was until the party realized how popular the Truckers’ Convoy had become and got behind the movement.
It’s quite possible the CPC would still be mute on vaccine mandates and lockdowns were it not for the heroic Freedom Convoy that converged on Ottawa.
Let’s not forget the businesses, churches, schools and universities that were shuttered for months on end because of the COVID hysteria generated by politicians in Ottawa, and the CPC did nothing.
They did nothing when people started losing their livelihoods (with some Canadians even losing their lives to suicide) because of the government’s deranged policy of locking people down.
The CPC must show they have learned a lesson from the COVID tyranny Canadians needlessly suffered and that they contributed to.
SIGN: Demand the CPC apologize for abandoning Canadians to Trudeau’s COVID tyranny.
In yet another reminder of how disconnected from reality the CPC were, MPs like Leslyn Lewis, Marilyn Gladu and Rosemarie Falk were omitted from their “Shadow Cabinet” in November 2021 because they dared to question the COVID shots.
Canadians must still contend with vaccine mandates in some settings and the intrusive ArriveCAN system in order to re-enter the country, while we are among the last three countries in the world to continue discriminating against unvaccinated visitors who remain barred from entering.
As Pierre Poilievre takes the reigns of the CPC, conservative voters must demand an apology from the party that abandoned them during the COVID-hysteria of the past two years.
SIGN: The CPC can rebuild trust by apologizing for capitulating to Trudeau’s COVID tyranny.
On February 12, 2019, Wilson-Raybould resigned from veterans’ affairs, and Treasury Board president Jane Philpott quit in March of the same year. They both cited a lack of confidence in the Liberal government’s handling of the scandal.
Then, in April of 2019, Trudeau turfed both Wilson-Raybould and Philpott from his caucus, meaning they were no longer part of the Liberal Party.
A little less than four years ago, Trudeau was found to have broken the federal ethics laws for his role in pressuring Wilson-Raybould.
Democracy Watch: RCMP should have ‘confirmed long ago that it was investigating’ Trudeau
According to Democracy Watch, a September 2019 Globe and Mail report stated that the then-Clerk of the Privy Council “had refused to waive Cabinet confidence to allow government witnesses to provide full information to the RCMP, and that sources within the RCMP said it was putting its examination on hold through the fall 2019 federal election campaign period.”
“The next day former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould stated publicly that she had been interviewed by the RCMP about the actions of the Prime Minister and others,” said Democracy Watch.
Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, said in the press release that the RCMP “should have confirmed long ago that it was investigating the situation given the evidence.”
“And that more than four years have passed since the situation was made public, and almost four years since the Ethics Commissioner’s ruling finding that Prime Minister Trudeau violated the federal ethics law pressuring the Attorney General,” he added.
Conacher said that given the fact “four years have passed,” he noted “it is difficult to believe that the investigation has not been completed, and it raises many questions for the RCMP to answer.”
He then questioned whether the RCMP and prosecutors are “waiting for a third federal election to pass, or doing what often happens in Canada when powerful politicians and government officials are involved in alleged illegal activities – delaying with the hope that they can eventually bury the results of the investigation?”
Conacher then called upon the RCMP to answer six questions, writing:
- When did the examination end and the investigation begin?
- How many investigators have been investigating?
- How many hours in total have they spent investigating?
- Have there been negotiations with the PMO to disclose Cabinet confidences about the situation and, if not, why has the RCMP let almost four years pass without challenging the refusal to disclose in court?
- When does the RCMP expect that the investigation will conclude?
- Will the RCMP and Crown prosecutors issue a full public explanation of the investigation and its findings when it concludes?
In February of 2021, Democracy Watch said it had sent a letter to the RCMP which set out “the grounds for prosecuting for obstruction of justice, and calling on the RCMP and Crown prosecutors to issue the full, public explanation that the public has a right to about the state of the examination.”
“The RCMP did not respond,” said the group at the time.
On June 1, 2022, Democracy Watch sent a second letter to the “RCMP again setting out the grounds for prosecuting, and again calling for a full, public update, and also requesting disclosure of records under the ATIA.”
“DWatch filed the ATIA request because the RCMP had disclosed documents in spring 2022 under the ATIA explaining its decisions concerning its investigation into the Aga Khan’s trip gift to Trudeau and his family. After some communications with the RCMP clarifying the request, it was finalized on July 27, 2022.”
Since becoming prime minister in 2015, Trudeau and his Liberal party have been caught in scandal after scandal, such as the WE Charity corruption scandal, the above-mentioned SNC-Lavalin affair, and the sacking of high-profile female MPs.
Despite this fact, Trudeau’s Liberals won both the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, albeit with a minority seat count.