When the team is corrupt, leaving is the moral option.

Fixed for you.

Canada is single party consent.

When it is a whistle blower blowing in your preferred political direction, do you still find moral fault with it?

I do not find any "high moral ground" on any side of this whole affair.
As I've stated very clearly, many times here
This is the normal shit of politics. It happens all the time and the only difference is you heard about this one.

So don't play the moral issue and claim taping people is legal,

because so is the 'political interference'.

The Minister is the official legal advisor of the Governor General and a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada.

Many federal statutes give the Attorney General additional powers and duties relating to prosecutions. These are conferred both directly on the Attorney General personally, and indirectly on the Attorney General through the many responsibilities placed on “"the prosecutor"” in the Criminal Code.

They're both unethical, but not illegal.

It's legal to record conversations you are a part of.

And she explained it quite clearly in the recording of her conversations. The law, as written, did not apply to SNC Lavalin.

The fact that she went out of her way in those conversations to explain to Wernick that what he and the PM were asking for could only be considered pressure on the MoJ to apply a law that did not apply for a favourable political outcome, is corruption.

This is Canada, not fucking China.

Frankly as bad as it looks, these two had to go. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were not team players and right or wrong that is what politics and political parties are all about.
Hopefully, this story will soon fade from the headlines and the much more important story of the Vice-Admiral Norman affair will command the attention it so richly deserves. Considering the former AG had a hand in that debacle, it will be interesting to see what her excuses are for her complicity.

Ever since they resigned from Justin Trudeau’s cabinet in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott have gotten a lot of heat both from political pundits and from Liberals on social media. They’ve been accused of endangering the Trudeau government’s accomplishments, and there have been calls for Trudeau to kick them out of caucus. Instead, he’s let them stay, emphasizing that there’s room for many different views in the federal Liberal party.

Some media commenters are saying that Trudeau letting Wilson-Raybould and Philpott stay makes him look weak and that he can’t control his caucus. That comment illustrates how much modern Canadian politics has forgotten the role government backbenchers are supposed to play in our system of “responsible government.”

Under responsible government, the prime minister or premier and their cabinets can only stay in office if they can keep the support of a majority of MPs or MLAs in the legislature. That includes a majority of their own backbenchers, who are meant to voice their constituents’ concerns to their leaders. Unfortunately, sometimes voters end up feeling like their backbench MPs or MLAs are representing the government’s concerns to them.

Ever since they resigned from Justin Trudeau’s cabinet in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott have gotten a lot of heat both from political pundits and from Liberals on social media. They’ve been accused of endangering the Trudeau government’s accomplishments, and there have been calls for Trudeau to kick them out of caucus. Instead, he’s let them stay, emphasizing that there’s room for many different views in the federal Liberal party.

Some media commenters are saying that Trudeau letting Wilson-Raybould and Philpott stay makes him look weak and that he can’t control his caucus. That comment illustrates how much modern Canadian politics has forgotten the role government backbenchers are supposed to play in our system of “responsible government.”

Under responsible government, the prime minister or premier and their cabinets can only stay in office if they can keep the support of a majority of MPs or MLAs in the legislature. That includes a majority of their own backbenchers, who are meant to voice their constituents’ concerns to their leaders. Unfortunately, sometimes voters end up feeling like their backbench MPs or MLAs are representing the government’s concerns to them.

This isn’t a new thing in Canada. In 1980, Richard Gwyn wrote in The Northern Magus: Pierre Trudeau and Canadians about how Trudeau senior’s “Supergroup” of officials in his office were isolating him from Canadians, even as Trudeau himself dismissed backbenchers as becoming “nobodies” when they left Parliament Hill. In 2001, Jeffrey Simpson wrote a book describing the Jean Chrétien government as The Friendly Dictatorship. In 2010, Lawrence Martin wrote Harperland: The Politics of Control about Stephen Harper’s tight control of his caucus. Our own Brent Rathgeber quit the Harper caucus for that very reason, and wrote Irresponsible Government: The Decline of Parliamentary Democracy in Canada about his experiences in 2014.

The trend towards centralizing power in leaders’ offices and backbenchers seeming unable to challenge them isn’t a change in the actual rules of government so much as it is a change in the way politicians choose to do their jobs.

When they want to, caucuses can still wield a lot of power over their leaders. Here in Alberta, the Progressive Conservatives forced Premier Allison Redford to resign when they thought they’d lose the next election with her as leader. Before that, the PCs forced out Ralph Klein when they thought he’d passed his best-before date. The federal Liberals also forced Chrétien to retire for the same reason.

Wilson-Raybould and Philpott could be said to be holding Trudeau and his officials to account. Other Liberal MPs such as Nate Erskine-Smith and Wayne Long have also called for inquiries into Lavscam, even if officials in the Prime Minister’s Office might have preferred they stay silent. Unfortunately, when MPs openly criticize their leadership like this, the leaders are often portrayed as weak or indecisive.

That’s one of the reasons so many premiers and prime ministers have instituted the controls they do …

… and harmed Canadian democracy in the process.

“Ultimately the choice that is before you,” Jody Wilson-Raybould pleaded with her caucus colleagues, in a letter written hours before they were to pass sentence on her, “is about what kind of party you want to be a part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up.”

But they made that choice long ago. They knew what kind of party they wanted to be a part of from the moment they accepted their nominations; indeed, were they not the type of person that party attracts they would not have been recruited for it. It is the kind of party, and person, that unquestioningly puts loyalty to party before principle — and mercilessly punishes those who do not.

So on the question of whether to expel the former minister of justice and attorney general — along with the former Treasury Board president, Jane Philpott — for the crime of denouncing the attempt, by the prime minister and senior government officials, to interfere with a criminal prosecution, there could have been little doubt how they would vote.

Whether they chose to shoot the messengers so spontaneously, over Justin Trudeau’s objections, as some reports have claimed — they were “determined to take the matter into their own hands,” according to a Canadian Press story, as if MPs were so eager to prove their obedience to the leader as to be willing to defy him — or whether they did so under orders doesn’t much matter. The rotting of the soul is the same either way.

We can now see, if it were not already apparent, the moral compass by which the prime minister and his caucus steer. The scandal in the SNC-Lavalin affair is, by this reckoning, not the months-long campaign to subvert the independence of the attorney general and, through her, to force the independent director of public prosecutions to drop charges of fraud and corruption against a long-time Liberal party contributor, but the opposition to it.

Traditional political theory teaches that the executive branch of government is responsible to the legislative. It is now clearer than ever that the reverse more nearly applies: members of the Liberal caucus plainly see it as their role, not to hold the government to account, but rather their fellow MPs — on behalf of the government. When wrongdoing by those high in government is alleged by a pair of whistleblowers, their first thought is to root out the whistleblowers.

Even when presented with incontrovertible evidence, in the form of an audio recording, that the clerk of the privy council, Michael Wernick, threatened the former attorney general with dismissal if she did not bend to the PM’s will, and that she repeatedly and explicitly protested against this “political interference” — on both points contrary to his testimony before a parliamentary committee — the prime minister and his camp followers profess themselves outraged, not at what the tape reveals, but that it exists.

No such outrage attended the release of a near-verbatim transcript of a later conversation between the former attorney general and the prime minister, based on notes taken by a person who was not even (so far as she was aware) privy to the call: the prime minister’s former principal secretary, Gerald Butts. Why is a surreptitiously obtained transcript (which confirms, not confounds, her testimony) acceptable, while a surreptitiously obtained tape is not? The objection would appear to be that the latter is more accurate.

So the charge is a pretext. What has agitated Liberal MPs is not the former attorney general’s recording of a conversation she correctly anticipated would be improper and could have guessed would be denied, or her failure to alert the prime minister at whose behest it had taken place (and who could not fail to have been informed of its contents), but rather that she has contradicted and embarrassed the leader.

Or rather no: I suspect what truly outrages them is the sight of a person of conscience, unwilling to sacrifice her principles so readily on the altar of partisanship. For those who can still remember what that was like, it must be deeply shaming. For the rest, there is only one principle — blind loyalty to the leader — in which cause they are prepared to sacrifice any number of colleagues.

We should understand, not only how noxious this is, but how unusual. Only in Canada can you be kicked out of the party for disobeying the leader — because only in Canada has the party been so wholly subsumed by the leader, to the point that it exists more or less as an extension of his persona. The prime minister of Great Britain has suffered multiple coup attempts, without any such purges. Because in Britain it is understood that the leader serves the party, rather than the other way around.

Yet it is exactly that sort of leader-dominated, centralized politics that created this mess. Only a leader who was effectively accountable to no one could have so lost sight of the relevant ethical boundaries as to attempt to shut down a prosecution — for any reason, let alone the nakedly partisan purposes alleged. Only a leader surrounded by sycophants could have imagined that the past seven weeks of denial, deflection and smears could succeed in rescuing his reputation.

In the halcyon days of 2013, when Gawker, magazine print deadlines, and a mayor shrugging off his “drunken stupors” were all a thing, I regularly took midnight taxis home after late production runs at work. I ended up having a lot of conversations with cab drivers about Rob Ford. “All politicians are the same,” they’d say. “They all do it. At least Rob Ford cares about us.” Asked what it was that all politicians did, they’d respond that politics the world over is corrupt, and politicians all do things they don’t fess up to. Observant Muslim men (it came up in conversation), they could overlook the illegal substance abuse; their fury was reserved for the media, who they felt was manufacturing this scandal because it was out to get Ford. No matter what I said, I couldn’t seem to persuade them that it’s one thing to be pragmatic about politics, and another to think it is normal for your mayor to smoke crack and lie about it, while his driver and friend is charged with extortion for trying to retrieve the video evidence.

There is an obvious and wide gulf between the two cases, but listening to some media pundits, politicians, and colleagues celebrate, or shrug off, the stunning news of MPs Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott’s ousting from the Liberal caucus—and indeed, opine on SNC-Lavalin, necessary compromises and the nature of politics the past many weeks—I found myself recalling those Rob Ford conversations I had six years ago. Worldly pragmatism is a delicate balance. Take too naïve a view and you are bound to be disappointed. But too much pragmatism—about crack smoking or judicial independence—can be equally dangerous.

Worldly pragmatism marked the response from liberal-minded people to the SNC-Lavalin matter long before Tuesday’s “inevitable” events. Almost as soon as the story broke, it was framed around a coming federal election. And not only by political operatives or Liberal party officials, but by voters, citizens, people like me. The view—before very much evidence was out at all—was that any facts that emerged had to be considered against the desired end result, which for many in my circles meant not electing a Conservative government. No need for Liberal campaign ads telling us to forget internecine squabbling on SNC-Lavalin and focus on the threat of Conservative leader Andrew Scheer; a large swath of Canadians were already there—a striking picture of late-capitalist democracy. The culture of political spin has so thoroughly permeated the public sphere that voters can skip the cumbersome middle stage of being spun to—we’ll sell it to ourselves, thanks.

Some of the self-spin arguments were familiar ones: SNC-Lavalin is too important a company (“too big to fail,” one might have said a decade ago); Quebec is too important a province; this is how companies must operate to do business in some countries (“going native,” one might have said a century ago); that’s politics, and Wilson-Raybould didn’t know how to play the game; and, paradoxically, Wilson-Raybould and Philpott knew all too well how the game is played and intended to destroy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and take over the party. (That last theory has not aged well.)

But the most virtuous, and most influential, argument—and one we are bound to encounter over and over again in the coming campaign—could be succinctly summed up as “But white nationalism.” Former Toronto city planner Jennifer Keesmat tweeted this message last weekend:

“Dear Media looking for a scandal. I’ve got a good one for you. Endless material. And it’s causing real destruction, in real time, in real lives. Our democracy is even at stake. It’s hidden in plain sight. Just go at it. It’s called White Nationalism. You are welcome for the tip.”

Perhaps Keesmat’s point was only that there were other important stories for media to cover. But given the high pitch of the message, and the hyper-partisan calls in other corners to change the channel from SNC-Lavalin, her tweet almost seemed to suggest that anyone talking about corruption, or the importance of a free judiciary, or the gross mistreatment of a principled senior official trying to do her job, must be apathetic—perhaps even sympathetic—to white nationalism. (I can say with confidence this isn’t true.) Another tweet that made the rounds summed up interest in JWR and SNC-Lavalin as the preoccupation of “#MiddleAgedWhiteMen.”

Framing support for the country’s most powerful politician as the brave, social-justice position has to be one of the odder turns in this increasingly strange story. But it has been a prevailing view of justice in this case, along with censuring and ousting a former attorney general because she fought to preserve the letter and spirit of the law and didn’t bend to astonishing political pressure from the PM’s advisers. And advocating for gentler treatment of a multinational company that, as the National Observer wrote in a brilliant investigation, allegedly moved millions of dollars into a brutal and murderous foreign dictatorship over more than a decade.

Judicial independence? Not something for Canadians to worry themselves about, it seems. It was instructive to watch SNC-Lavalin unspool against the backdrop of the Mueller report. When the U.S. attorney general makes a political call on a prosecutor report: bad. When our attorney general refuses to make a political call on a prosecutor report: also bad. Dissent from Jeff Sessions: good (possibly the only good from Jeff Sessions). Dissent from Wilson-Raybould: bad. Former FBI director James Comey’s increasingly detailed notes of his conversations with President Donald Trump: great. Wilson-Raybould’s recording of the Michael Wernick conversation: unconscionable.

Let’s talk about that recording—by all appearances the act of a woman who felt sufficiently under siege to think she might need proof of what actually transpired. (She was not wrong.) Within the government it seemed to eclipse every principle except how Liberal party members like to be treated by their colleagues, or perhaps how little they like a paper, or audio, trail (see the Mark Norman affair). Never mind that every other Canadian who holds a job is reminded constantly that workplace communications are not private. Our sensitive emails can be read, our corporate phone texts and Google searches reviewed, and we are not (most of us) communicating on matters of public interest. And never mind that Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to the PM, then handed over his text exchanges with Jody Wilson-Raybould, to no outrage at all.

For Liberals, that recording is a convenient (if not very believable) smoking gun—especially given that the MP who didn’t make a recording was punished the same way. The public outrage over it, though, is even more disingenuous. Really this response has nothing to do with breach of trust or an MP’s un-collegial behaviour. Imagine a muzzled senior official in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government recording a conversation laying bare the PMO’s machinations. We’d be shocked, but very appreciative. Besides, Trudeau vs. Wilson-Raybould was not a criminal proceeding. People could have been discomfited by how the conversation came to light and still admitted its relevance and the facts it presents.

No, the reasons for the ouster vastly pre-dated the emergence of any recording. Wilson-Raybould had to go because white nationalism. And climate change. Because it’s 2019. Because Trudeau’s our guy. Because we need just the right amount and kind of diversity. Because we can’t afford for SNC-Lavalin not to keep doing what it does (at home and, as it happens, abroad, in some deeply troubled corners of the world). And we can’t afford for Trudeau to not be PM because apparently, for a number of liberal folks, the alternatives—pasty-faced Andrew Scheer, with his alt-right connections, and (at the other end of the political spectrum) the very un-white-nationalist NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, with his coalescing fleet of diverse candidates and progressive policies—are both too awful to contemplate. Because politics, shrug.

The great comedy of the past day is in the fight against the hegemony of “middle-aged white men” being won by a middle-aged white man ousting a member of the party who happens to be Indigenous and female. In a remarkably short time, Wilson-Raybould went from best-case example of diversity in action—an independent mind challenging organizational orthodoxy on a vital political issue—to party pariah and mortal threat to Canada’s last hope against white nationalists.

The great tragedy is that whatever Liberals would prefer, the rest of the country needs more people like Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott in politics, not fewer. More people willing to dissent, to risk their jobs for their principles, to fight for transparency and accountability, and to do politics differently. It seems almost redundant to note that Wilson-Raybould and Philpott can, and probably will, be replaced by faces who look as diverse in Liberal Party photos as they did. But anyone who may have been tempted to think differently will surely reconsider that option.

If they are unethical, why support them? If it is 'normal shit' it is because we let it become the normal.

She’s lucky she wasn’t dealing with the Clintons because accidents happen.

I do not find any "high moral ground" on any side of this whole affair.
As I've stated very clearly, many times here
This is the normal shit of politics. It happens all the time and the only difference is you heard about this one.

So don't play the moral issue and claim taping people is legal, because so is the 'political interference'. They're both unethical, but not illegal.

Recording unethical behaviour of your superiors to protect yourself is never unethical. That's fucking stupid.