Face of Nation : The Liberal majority on the House of Commons ethics committee has voted down an opposition motion to call Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion to testify about his report concluding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated the Conflict of Interest Act over the SNC-Lavalin affair.
Liberal MP Steven MacKinnon said he and the other Liberal MPs sitting on the committee today voted down the motion because, following Dion’s report and hours of testimony on the scandal over a five-week period, there was nothing new to add to their understanding of the SNC-Lavalin affair.
“The opposition’s claim to simply wanting the facts is contradicted by the fact that what they seek is found in the commissioner’s report,” MacKinnon said. “The only conclusion that I, and members of this committee, can come to is that the opposition seeks to prolong this process for reasons of politics, reasons of partisan games, and it is for that reason … that we will be opposing this motion.”
Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith broke ranks with his party and voted with opposition MPs to call Dion before the committee — not, he said, because he thought Dion had more to tell, but because he wanted to challenge the commissioner’s findings, which he called “flawed.” “I would like the commissioner to sit right there to answer how he got this so completely, completely wrong,” Erskine-Smith said.
Dion had said that he would be happy to appear before the committee to discuss his report. Despite Erskine-Smith’s vote, the Liberals’ majority on the committee saw to it that the motion to call Dion was defeated 5 to 4.
The commissioner’s report, released last week, found that Trudeau improperly pressured then-justice minister and attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to give Quebec engineering giant SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution deal to allow the firm to avoid a looming corruption trial.
The company is accused of paying almost $50 million in bribes to Libyan officials between 2001 and 2011 and of defrauding Libyan organizations of almost $130 million.
