The Canadian Press
OTTAWA–Former federal Treasury Board president Jane Philpott says there’s “much more to the story” of the SNC-Lavalin affair that should be told.
In an interview with Maclean’s magazine that landed like a bomb today on Parliament Hill, the ex-minister said she had concerns in January–before the controversy became public–but that she has been prevented from discussing them through efforts by the Prime Minister’s Office to “shut down the story.”
Philpott joined the former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, in resigning from Justin Trudeau’s cabinet last month, following public allegations the prime minister and others pressured that latter to avert a criminal prosecution of the Montreal engineering firm for alleged corrupt practices in Libya.
“My sense is that Canadians would like to know the whole story,” Philpott told Maclean’s in her first extended interview since her resignation.
“I believe we actually owe it to Canadians, as politicians, to ensure that they have the truth,” she noted. “They need to have confidence in the very basic constitutional principle of the independence of the justice system.”
Philpott’s new public statements already are fanning the flames of a scandal the government is desperate to douse, and which the Opposition Conservatives are doing their best to keep alive.
They forced the House of Commons to sit all night, voting line by line on the Liberal government’s spending plans.
Yesterday, the Liberal majority in the House shot down a Conservative motion calling on Trudeau to let Wilson-Raybould testify more fully about what she experienced through the fall and into the early winter, especially what prompted her to resign from cabinet altogether after she was shuffled from the justice portfolio to Veterans Affairs in January.
The motion was defeated by a vote of 161-134, with both Philpott and Wilson-Raybould absent.
That set the stage for the Conservative-sponsored filibuster that began last night and continued through this morning.
Since any vote involving government spending automatically is a confidence vote, Liberals were required to be out in force to avoid potential defeat of the government.
The voting theoretically could last 36 hours but the Conservatives only had to keep it going until just after 10 a.m. (ET) today to scrub the remainder of the parliamentary day.
Committee meetings scheduled for today already have been cancelled.
Philpott’s interview gave new life to opposition MPs as the voting dragged on.
