Trudeau’s Ex-Adviser and Close Friend Testifies in Political Crisis

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Gerald Butts, a close friend and former political aide to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who testified before Parliament on Wednesday.CreditCreditSean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

By Ian Austen

March 6, 2019

OTTAWA — A close friend and former top political aide to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada repeatedly denied on Wednesday that he and others had improperly pressured the former justice minister to settle a criminal case, saying thousands of jobs were at risk.

Speaking in an opening statement before a parliamentary committee, the former aide, Gerald Butts, is the first person to present the government’s view of the controversy that has engulfed Mr. Trudeau just seven months before a national election, creating a political crisis that could jeopardize his leadership.

Mr. Butts said he and other aides had asked the former justice minister, who was also the attorney general, to seek advice on how to apply a new law that would allow a company, SNC-Lavalin, to avoid a criminal conviction by paying a multimillion dollar fine.

A criminal conviction, Mr. Butts said, would have imperiled Canadian jobs by barring SNC-Lavalin from doing government business for a decade.

“When 9,000 people’s jobs are at stake, it is a public policy problem of the highest order,” Mr. Butts said, speaking in a calm and lowered voice. “It was our obligation to exhaustively consider options the law allows.”

The crisis began last month when Mr. Trudeau and top officials in his government were accused of having improperly pressured Jody Wilson-Raybould, who was then the justice minister and attorney general, to settle the criminal case against SNC-Lavalin, a major Canadian construction and engineering company.

The company had been charged with bribing Libyan officials during the dictatorship of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and defrauding the Libyan government.

Shortly after the accusations were first reported in The Globe and Mail, Ms. Wilson-Raybould resigned her post. Last week she testified before the justice committee, detailing the pressure she said she felt from Mr. Trudeau and his team to settle the case.

In his statement, which lasted about 30 minutes, Mr. Butts said no pressure had been put on the former Justice Minister and attorney general to drop criminal prosecution against the company.

“This, to me, begs the entire question of what constitutes pressure,” Mr. Butts said. “According to the former attorney-general, 11 people made contact with her office over four months. That’s two meetings and two phone calls per month.”

Mr. Butts took pains throughout his representation not to criticize Ms. Wilson-Raybould, or pick apart her version of events.

“When trust breaks down between people, it’s easy to see things that happened in a different light,” he said of Ms. Wilson-Raybould.

Mr. Butts said he had been surprised at how Ms. Wilson-Raybould framed the events, quoting from text messages between the two that he characterized as cordial, and noting that she signed in a shortened form of her first name, “Jod.”

Two weeks ago, Mr. Butts abruptly resigned from his position, denying in his resignation letter that he had pressured Ms. Wilson-Raybould and saying that he and “those around me acted with integrity.”

When Ms. Wilson-Raybould appeared before the committee, she spent nearly four hours laying out a detailed narrative of how she was, in her view, improperly pressured by Mr. Trudeau and his aides, including Mr. Butts.

She described 10 meetings, 10 calls and several emails in which, she said, she had been asked to order prosecutors to use a new law to cut a deal with the company in which it would pay a multimillion-dollar fine to avoid a criminal verdict.

The testimony by Ms. Wilson-Raybould, who was Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister, was as provocative as it was detailed. At one point, she compared her treatment to President Richard M. Nixon’s infamous move to quash the Watergate investigation.

In the end, SNC-Lavalin’s case is proceeding as a criminal prosecution. But in January, Ms. Wilson-Raybould was moved from justice to the less prestigious post of veterans affairs, prompting some to say she was punished.

After Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, Mr. Trudeau faced more criticism. Some said it appeared that a prime minister who describes himself as a feminist and who has made a priority of reconciling past wrongs with Canada’s Indigenous communities had joined with a mostly male group of political enforcers to gang up on an Indigenous woman.

Mr. Butts faced a delicate task in his testimony, political analysts said. While he must outline a compelling alternative to Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s testimony, he cannot suggest that she was not telling the truth.

While the justice committee hears its witnesses, Parliament’s ethics commissioner is also examining the accusations. Andrew Scheer, the Conservative opposition leader in Parliament, has called for Mr. Trudeau’s resignation and has asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to open a criminal investigation of the matter, an idea Mr. Trudeau rejects.

Mr. Trudeau’s political troubles greatly intensified on Monday when Jane Philpott, a cabinet minister who led the treasury board and is widely respected, handed in her resignation.

“I’ve been considering the events that have shaken the government in recent weeks and after serious reflection, I have concluded that I must resign as a member of cabinet,” Ms. Philpott said in her resignation letter.

Follow Ian Austen on Twitter: @ianrausten

Catherine Porter contributed reporting from Toronto.