Canadian Lawyer InHouse

35 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE MAY/JUNE 2019 sulted on details of a new remediation law and secured its passage. Then action com- menced with a flurry. A preliminary hearing on charges against SNC, originally scheduled for Sept. 10, was set over until Oct. 29, by which time the new legislation had been enacted. The Ca - nadian law came into force Sept. 19, 2018, but by then, court records show that DPP Roussel had already informed SNC on Sept. 4 that she would not negotiate a remedia - tion agreement. Trudeau says he met with AG Wilson-Raybould Sept. 17 but didn't pressure her to overturn the DPP's ruling. He says he only assured Wilson-Raybould that the final decision was hers to make. He later added that any lobbying of the AG by his staff was done to protect jobs. The AG and the prosecutor's office held firm and, in October, SNC announced that it had been denied a remediation agree - ment. As its share price slumped 14 per cent, the company sought a Federal Court order reversing Roussel's decision. In an official written response, Roussel said that SNC's application was "bereft of any possi - bility of success and should be struck." The Federal Court ruled March 8 that there were no grounds to review the decision of the prosecutor. A recurring question in the media has been whether remediation agreements can or should apply retroactively to charges laid more than three years before the law was enacted. Without commenting on the specifics of the SNC case, Fasken's Norm Keith says he believes "the Canadian DPA program could [properly] be applied to any criminal charge that has not been fully re - solved before the courts." In a Jan. 14 cabinet shuffle, Trudeau de- moted Wilson-Raybould to veteran's affairs and on Feb. 12 she resigned from cabinet. She later told the Standing Committee on Justice, "I experienced a consistent and sus- tained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the attorney general of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin." With SNC before the courts, experts in white collar crime declined to comment di - rectly on the case, as did SNC. But in An Open Letter to Canadians, SNC says some 10,000 Canadian employees have left the company since charges were laid and that 9,000 remaining Canadian employees could be adversely affected by a trial, along with pensioners and clients. "This debate is about what is right for this country," the letter says. But s. 715.32 (3) of the new remediation law says that if a company is charged with bribery under s. 3 of the CFPOA, as is the case for SNC, "the prosecutor must not consider the national economic interest" in deciding whether to negotiate or prosecute. Section 715.32 (2) says factors that should weigh against nego - tiation include the degree of involvement of senior company officials and whether there are current or past charges of similar bad I n d u s t r y S p o t l i g h t Legislative change to accommodate a single criminal defendant is very suspicious and smacks of favouritism or cronyism. MICHAEL BRYANT, CCLA

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