National
Explosive New RCMP Transcript Renews Spotlight on Trudeau, Butts, Telford—Powers Behind Mark Carney’s Leadership Bid
Sam Cooper
Wilson-Raybould asked by RCMP: ‘Did you advise Mr. BUTTS at one point that all this interference could amount at one point to an unlawful act?”
Despite controversial redactions that, according to a transparency advocate, may be inappropriately shielding Justin Trudeau’s inner circle from obstruction of justice accusations, newly released Royal Canadian Mounted Police transcripts provide unprecedented insight into the intense pressure campaign aimed at Jody Wilson-Raybould’s office to obstruct the prosecution of a major Quebec corporation closely tied to Trudeau’s government, his Montreal riding, and the Liberal Party’s re-election hopes.
These newly revealed RCMP interview records, though more than four years old, cast a fresh spotlight on Trudeau’s senior aides—several of whom, including Trudeau’s close friend Gerald Butts, have reportedly thrown their weight behind Mark Carney, the Liberal leadership frontrunner who appears poised to succeed Trudeau.
In a stunning revelation, RCMP records indicate that Wilson-Raybould warned Trudeau’s then-Principal Secretary, Gerald Butts, about her concerns regarding the unlawful nature of the pressure campaign.
As previously reported by The Bureau, Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch—which obtained the records—commented:
“The Prime Minister and Cabinet officials pressuring the Attorney General to obstruct a prosecution is a situation that has not been publicly revealed before. Given that no past court ruling makes it clear the RCMP could not win a prosecution, a fully independent special prosecutor should have been appointed to pursue a search warrant for secret Cabinet communications.”
Documents obtained through access-to-information requests from Democracy Watch detail how Jessica Prince, Chief of Staff to then-Attorney General Wilson-Raybould, faced repeated, coordinated, and escalating demands from senior Trudeau officials to persuade Wilson-Raybould to override her prosecutors’ decision and cut SNC-Lavalin a deal.
What began as a single call from Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s office in August 2018 spiraled into months of pressure, involving some of the most powerful figures in Trudeau’s inner circle, including:
- Ben Chin, Chief of Staff to Finance Minister Bill Morneau
- Elder Marques & Mathieu Bouchard, Senior Advisors in the Prime Minister’s Office
- Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s Principal Secretary
- Katie Telford, Trudeau’s Chief of Staff
- Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council
SNC-Lavalin, one of Quebec’s largest engineering and construction firms, was charged in 2015 with fraud and corruption over alleged bribes to Libyan officials. In 2018, the Director of Public Prosecutions refused to offer SNC-Lavalin a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, prompting intense lobbying efforts by senior Trudeau officials.
Prince was first approached by Ben Chin in mid-August 2018.
“The case wasn’t on my radar at all,” Prince told an RCMP investigator. “The Public Prosecution Service is independent and handles tons of cases. We weren’t on top of all of them because the Department of Justice has about 45,000 pieces of litigation of its own. This was not high on my list of priorities.”
She recalled the abruptness of Chin’s outreach.
“He had clearly been speaking—I don’t know to whom—but to somebody at SNC-Lavalin, presumably someone quite high up, and was asking questions about the status of their prosecution.”
Prince described Chin as relentless, continuing to press her even as she tried to deflect.
“Francois was acting as Chief of Staff in my absence, so whenever people were trying to get a hold of me, I’d push them off to Francois. But Ben wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was like, ‘No, I really need to speak to you; I can’t speak to Francois.’”
Despite Prince’s repeated explanations about prosecutorial independence, Chin kept pushing. At one point, he insisted there had to be “a middle ground”—a compromise that would spare SNC-Lavalin from a criminal conviction.
Prince stood firm:
“There is no middle ground on prosecutorial independence, Ben. Like, you can’t. There’s not. It’s independent, you can’t, you can’t touch it.”
The next day, Bill Morneau’s office followed up, this time through Deputy Chief of Staff Justin To, whom Prince described as “Ben’s number two” and a former Prime Minister’s Office staffer.
One of the most explosive allegations from Jessica Prince’s RCMP interview involves her accusations of interference to Mathieu Bouchard, a Senior Advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office.
In October 2018, Prince received a call from Bouchard regarding a note prepared by the Deputy Attorney General. The note examined the relationship between the Attorney General and the Public Prosecution Service of Canada and included a controversial option: obtaining an external legal opinion on whether the Director of Public Prosecutions’ decision to deny SNC-Lavalin a Deferred Prosecution Agreement was appropriate.
Prince described Bouchard as persistent, pressing for ways to circumvent the Director of Public Prosecutions’ decision.
During the call, Prince accused Bouchard of interference:
“Look, Mathieu, this is… this is interference, right? Like this is, uh, to say we’re getting an external legal opinion, like, to what end, right? Like, if we think that the Director is exercising her discretion appropriately, why are we getting an external legal opinion, right?”
She pushed back on the implications of his request. Bouchard responded by tying the decision to the political stakes in Quebec, warning that SNC-Lavalin could pull its headquarters from the province.
“He said, ‘You know, Jess, we could have the best policy in the world, but if we… we have to get re-elected, right?’”
According to Prince, the intensity of pressure culminated in a meeting with Katie Telford and Gerry Butts on December 17, 2018. Prince emphasized how extraordinary the meeting was, saying, ‘It was incredibly rare that I would even have a phone call with Gerry or Katie, let alone be summoned to their office. So, I knew it wasn’t good.’ She noted how ‘the Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister is like, effectively the boss to all the chiefs of staff of the ministers’ offices.’
Katie TelfordAfter the meeting, Prince took detailed handwritten notes and sent a text to the Minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, informing her of everything that had happened.
In her own subsequent interview with RCMP, according to the records, Wilson-Raybould was asked: “We’re in December now, so there’s quite a bit of meetings that took place before that. Did you advise Mr. Butts at one point that all this interference could amount at one point to an unlawful act?”
“I met Gerry at the Chateau,” the former Attorney General answered, “[and] we talk about a bunch of things, and there was a list of things that I wanted to bring up at the end which, is what I did and reflecting to him the nature of the number of discussions that I’ve had and it’s simply inappropriate.”
Meanwhile, the documents say around the time of that meeting, Prince learned that Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council, was also involved in the pressure campaign. According to Prince, Wernick spoke to Wilson-Raybould and made it clear that the Prime Minister was growing increasingly agitated over her refusal to intervene. Prince recounted that Wernick said, ‘I don’t want the Attorney General and the Prime Minister to be at loggerheads on this… he’s in a real mood.’
The rest of Prince’s interview reads like the dénouement of a play, as she describes both herself and the Attorney General refusing to be shuffled to other posts, with both believing their functions had been interfered with from the highest levels, to benefit Trudeau’s re-election chances. After hearing Prince’s chronological narrative, the RCMP investigator pressed her on Ben Chin’s relationship with SNC-Lavalin.
“At one point… did Mr. Chin really indicate exactly what he meant by keeping that relationship positive with SNC-LAVALIN?”
Prince responded:
“I had the impression that he had been talking with somebody pretty senior at the company… he was clearly speaking to people high up in the company.”
The scandal broke in early 2019 when Wilson-Raybould resigned from Cabinet, followed by Treasury Board President Jane Philpott. Trudeau weathered the political storm but suffered the loss of a majority government in the October 2019 federal election.
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Canada’s wealth is based on its success as a trading nation. Canada is blessed with immense resources spread across a vast country. It has succeeded as a small, open economy with an enviable standard of living that has been able to provide what the world needs.
Canada has been stuck in a situation where it cannot complete nation‑building projects like the Canadian Pacific Railway that was completed in 1885, or the Trans Canada Highway that was completed in the 1960s. With the uncertainty of U.S. tariffs looming over our country and province, Canada needs to take bold action to revitalize the productivity and competitiveness of its economy – going east to west and not always relying on north-south trade. There’s no better time than right now to politically de-risk these projects.
A lack of leadership from the federal government has led to the following:
- Inadequate federal funding for trade infrastructure.
- A lack of investment is stifling the infrastructure capacity we need to diversify our exports. This is despite federally commissioned reports like the 2022 report by the National Supply Chain Task Force indicating the investment need will be trillions over the next 50 years.
- Federal red tape, like the Impact Assessment Act.
- Burdensome regulation has added major costs and significant delays to projects, like the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project, a proposed container facility at Vancouver, which spent more than a decade under federal review.
- Opaque funding programs, like the National Trade Corridors Fund (NTCF).
- Which offers a pattern of unclear criteria for decisions and lack of response. This program has not funded any provincial highway projects in Alberta, despite the many applications put forward by the Government of Alberta. In fact, we’ve gone nearly 3 years without decisions on some project applications.
- Ineffective policies that limit economic activity.
- Measures that pit environmental and economic objectives in stark opposition to one another instead of seeking innovative win-win solutions hinder Canada’s overall productivity and investment climate. One example is the moratorium on shipping crude through northern B.C. waters, which effectively ended Enbridge’s Northern Gateway proposal and has limited Alberta’s ability to ship its oil to Asian markets.
In a federal leadership vacuum, Alberta has worked to advance economic corridors across Canada. In April 2023, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba signed an agreement to collaborate on joint infrastructure networks meant to boost trade and economic growth across the Prairies. Alberta also signed a similar economic corridor agreement with the Northwest Territories in July 2024. Additionally, Alberta would like to see an agreement among all 7 western provinces and territories, and eventually the entire country, to collaborate on economic corridors.
Through our collaboration with neighbouring jurisdictions, we will spur the development of economic corridors by reducing regulatory delays and attracting investment. We recognize the importance of working with Indigenous communities on the development of major infrastructure projects, which will be key to our success in these endeavours.
However, provinces and territories cannot do this alone. The federal government must play its part to advance our country’s economic corridors that we need from coast to coast to coast to support our economic future. It is time for immediate action.
Alberta recommends the federal government take the following steps to strengthen Canada’s economic corridors and supply chains by:
- Creating an Economic Corridor Agency to identify and maintain economic corridors across provincial boundaries, with meaningful consultation with both Indigenous groups and industry.
- Increasing federal funding for trade-enabling infrastructure, such as roads, rail, ports, in-land ports, airports and more.
- Streamlining regulations regarding trade-related infrastructure and interprovincial trade, especially within economic corridors. This would include repealing or amending the Impact Assessment Act and other legislation to remove the uncertainty and ensure regulatory provisions are proportionate to the specific risk of the project.
- Adjusting the policy levers that that support productivity and competitiveness. This would include revisiting how the federal government supports airports, especially in the less-populated regions of Canada.
To move forward expeditiously on the items above, I propose the establishment of a federal/provincial/territorial working group. This working group would be tasked with creating a common position on addressing the economic threats facing Canada, and the need for mitigating trade and trade-enabling infrastructure. The group should identify appropriate governance to ensure these items are presented in a timely fashion by relative priority and urgency.
Alberta will continue to be proactive and tackle trade issues within its own jurisdiction. From collaborative memorandums of understanding with the Prairies and the North, to reducing interprovincial trade barriers, to fostering innovative partnerships with Indigenous groups, Alberta is working within its jurisdiction, much like its provincial and territorial colleagues.
We ask the federal government to join us in a new approach to infrastructure development that ensures Canada is productive and competitive for generations to come and generates the wealth that ensures our quality of life is second to none.
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Devin Dreeshen
Devin Dreeshen was sworn in as Minister of Transportation and Economic Corridors on October 24, 2022.
Business
Federal Heritage Minister recommends nearly doubling CBC funding and reducing accountability
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling for the CBC to be completely defunded in the wake of the federal Liberal government’s recommendation to nearly double the state broadcaster’s cost to taxpayers and hide its budget reporting.
“It is outrageous for the government to try to hide the cost of the CBC from the taxpayers who are paying its bills,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “This government is totally out touch if it thinks it can nearly double CBC’s cost to taxpayers and try to hide its costs.”
Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said the government should nearly double the amount of money the CBC takes from taxpayers every year.
The CBC will cost taxpayers about $1.4 billion this year.
“The average funding for public broadcasters in G7 countries is $62 per person, per year,” St-Onge said. “We need to aim closer to the middle ground, which is $62 per year per person.”
Canada’s population is about 41.5 million people. If the government funded the CBC the way the minister is recommending, the CBC would cost taxpayers about $2.5 billion per year.
That amount would cover the annual grocery bill of about 152,854 Canadian families.
St-Onge also recommended the annual taxpayer funding for the CBC be removed from the government budget report and instead be entrenched in government statutory appropriations.
“I propose that it be financed directly in the legislation instead of in the budget through statutory appropriation,” St-Onge said.
“Canadians have told this government that the CBC costs them too much money, that it is not accountable to taxpayers and they don’t watch it, and now the government wants to double down on all those problems,” said Kris Sims, CTF Alberta Director. “The CBC is an enormous waste of money and journalists should not be paid by the government.
“The CBC must be defunded.”
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