Category: Chairman’s Desk

On Wednesday afternoon, in an event that exceeded its considerable billing, Canada’s former attorney general and minister of justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould, filled in many of the contours of Bob Fife’s early-February reporting that thrust the prime minister, his closest advisers and the Liberal Party of Canada into a political firestorm.

Her testimony was as astonishing as it was remarkable in its candour, and willingness to draw blood.

Wilson-Raybould named names and read records: phone calls, emails, text messages and contemporaneous meeting notes.

She told a story of a co-ordinated and persistent effort by the machinery of government – PMO and PCO alike – to influence her decision-making.

She vividly recalled veiled threats and potential personal consequences. Her recollection of 10 phone calls and 10 meetings contradicted Michael Wernick, the clerk of the Privy Council.

Her language conveyed, in a straightforward way, her conviction that an injustice had taken place.

And yet, when the dust settled, there remained so much more to be said.

What has the PMO not allowed the former AG to say? Why was she not released to discuss her time as minister of veterans affairs and her resignation from cabinet?

And then beyond the former minister herself, what will others have to say? How will Gerry Butts use his appearance before the justice and human rights committee to recast the government’s narrative?

What about all the other people Wilson-Raybould named?

And above all, how will l’affaire SNC-Lavalin play out in Quebec vs. ROC? Which parties’ electoral fortunes will it help? Whose will it hurt?

While we wait for answers to these and many more questions specific to this matter, we’d do well to think about some of the things that gave rise to this mess at first instance.

Lisa Raitt, deputy leader of the opposition, asked Wilson-Raybould on Wednesday if this experience had left her with anything she thinks should be recommended to Parliament.

Wilson-Raybould’s response was instructive.

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” she said, “and I think this committee (should) look at the role of the minister of justice and the attorney general of Canada, and whether or not those two roles should be bifurcated.”

She went on to say that there should be consideration around “having the AG not sit around the cabinet table.”

In hindsight, it’s plainly clear she has a point.

While there are procedural and practical arguments for dividing the roles, perhaps the most important argument for doing so is the simple fact it is unreasonable to ask one person to perform two contradictory roles.

Is it not, on its face, absurd to think that one person can, one minute, be expected to act in a non-partisan way and then in literally the next minute to act as a partisan?

In our system, the minister of justice is inherently partisan: She or he is responsible for drafting partisan policy and shepherding partisan legislation through Parliament on behalf of the governing party.

The attorney general, on the other hand, is the chief law officer of the Crown, responsible for the government’s litigation and for providing legal advice regarding the very policies they have – while wearing their minister of justice hat – helped to draft.

In the United Kingdom, the role of the secretary of state for justice, who has oversight of the ministry of justice, is separate and distinct from the attorney general, who is the chief legal adviser to the Crown and oversees prosecutions but is not usually a member of cabinet.

And when the AG has sat in cabinet, problems have arisen. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s AG, Lord Goldsmith, came to a “better view” of the legality of the Iraq War 10 days after conversations with the prime minister and his cabinet.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

When Wilson-Raybould speaks of the strain that she has been subject to, she refers of course to “political interference.”

But she is also sounding a warning to Canadians that the burden she faced stemmed, at least in part, from a structural flaw in our political system.

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist. He is a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @jaimewatt

And so, between the novelty of the product, the ignorance of the consumer, and the absence of government regulation, a $445-billion company has been able to take deep root.

However, that era of unimpeded growth may be coming to an end. The aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election brought with it an acknowledgement that these platforms were effectively weaponized by hostile foreign powers. The unprecedented accumulation of personal data by these companies has created all manner of potential liabilities, and foreign interference in elections is only one example.

The consequence is that a new level of scrutiny has begun.

The Canadian government has announced a panel of civil servants has been deputized to watch for foreign interference during an election campaign.

The federal parliamentary committee on privacy and ethics has made 26 recommendations that would block hate speech, limit surveillance, and protect user privacy.

And, just this week, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould testified before the procedure and house affairs committee, suggesting a critical examination of the role of social media in democracies with a view “to hold[ing] the social media companies to account.”

In the U.K., a select committee of the House of Commons issued its final report on the inquiry into disinformation and fake news. Among the committee’s findings, Facebook intentionally and knowingly violated privacy and anti-competition laws.

According to the report, “big tech companies must not be allowed to expand exponentially, without constraint or proper regulatory oversight. But only governments and the law are powerful enough to contain them. The legislative tools already exist. They must now be applied to digital activity, using tools such as privacy laws, data protection legislation, antitrust and competition law.”

Since the beginning, missteps were priced into Facebook’s success. Mark Zuckerberg’s motto was “move fast and break things.” Surely, that wasn’t intended to extend to the public trust.

Short of antitrust action, Facebook’s gravest threat may well be that the user — of what is ultimately an advertising business, and therefore the product — will eventually grow bored of the service or weary of scandal and walk away.

Polls tell us the public professes to be concerned about digital privacy. And yet, when Facebook announced its annual results last month, after a bruising year of drip, drip, drip revelations of questionable conduct from Cambridge Analytica to accusations of fomenting genocide in Myanmar, usership was actually up across the board, in every region of the world.

All of which, of course, asks the question: so long as users are not prepared to abandon Facebook, how much political capital will governments expend on policy prescriptions to regulate it?

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist. He is a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @jaimewatt