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Noah Zivitz

Managing Editor, BNN Bloomberg

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It was a story that sent shockwaves across Canada, pulling back the curtain on a tangled web of business and political relations. "PMO pressed justice minister to abandon prosecution of SNC-Lavalin," screamed the headline on the front page of The Globe and Mail on Feb. 7.

What followed were stunning claims from unnamed sources, who said former attorney general and justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould defiantly stood her ground in the face of pressure from the highest levels of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office to force federal prosecutors to cut a deal and spare Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin Inc. from a high-profile criminal trial on charges tied to years-old alleged fraud and corruption in Libya.

The Globe’s bombshell report came just a few short months after SNC had disclosed it was turned away from negotiating a remediation agreement to resolve those charges, and it set in motion a remarkable sequence of events that saw Wilson-Raybould drop jaws with pull-no-punches testimony in Ottawa before eventually being ousted from the Liberal caucus, engulfed Trudeau's government in controversy as a federal election loomed, and thrust a major Canadian engineering and construction company into the spotlight like never before.

That's why Jody Wilson-Raybould is BNN Bloomberg's newsmaker of the year.

Wilson-Raybould says she would do it all again, if she had to.

“I don’t regret anything that I did,” the independent member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville said in an interview on Friday. “I would do the same thing (again). I was doing my job as the attorney general and I would do it again, if presented the same situation.”

“What I do regret,” she added, “is that we had to get to this place. Had others just enabled the prosecution in this case and the justice system to unfold as it should, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we are now. “

To take you behind the scenes of how our newsroom operates, we have a daily story meeting every morning and several show-specific discussions about the day's interviews and major stories. But nothing compares with the annual debate in our boardroom, when we haul in the entire editorial team to hash out the merits of some of the year's most incredible stories. This year, we deliberately decided to focus on newsmakers, rather than stories. Who were the personalities (or, in the case of the grounded Boeing 737 Max jet, an inanimate object) that made things happen in 2019?

When a colleague asked how we should weigh the 10 candidates against each other, I suggested the room ought to consider which newsmaker stood above the rest to deliver a wow moment in 2019 (though my exact wording might have been a bit more colourful).

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Jody Wilson Raybould adjusts the microphone as she waits to appear infront of the Justice committee in Ottawa, Wednesday February 27, 2019 (The Canadian Press)

There were plenty of strong candidates to choose from on our short list, including the Huawei CFO whose arrest in Vancouver last December upended this country's relationship with China, and a whistleblower whose allegations of illegal production (behind fake walls, no less) at CannTrust Holdings Inc. laid bare a scandal that eventually led to one of the biggest names in Canada's newly-legal recreational cannabis industry having its licences suspended.

And to that question, little, if anything, rivals the moment on Feb. 27 when Wilson-Raybould took us into her view of the inner workings of the Prime Minister’s Office.

"For a period of approximately four months between September and December 2018, I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the Attorney General of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin," she said before going over that campaign in meticulous detail in what became must-see television. 

Actually, if something rivals that, it was likely BNN Bloomberg's interview in late March with SNC's then-CEO, Neil Bruce. By that point, much of the country was preoccupied with the political firestorm surrounding his company. Bruce was also putting out fires internationally, while trying to rebuild investor confidence after major operational setbacks had sent SNC's stock price into a tailspin just before the interference claims surfaced.

This was a chief executive in full-blown crisis communications mode as Amber Kanwar held his feet to the fire. And he refused to give an inch, disputing that SNC warned the feds of mass layoffs in the absence of a settlement and thumbing his nose at chatter that he had threatened to move the company’s headquarters ("I don't know what people make up or what they have in their minds," he said). Less than two months later, Bruce was replaced as chief executive.

In the end, one of SNC’s subsidiaries entered a guilty plea to fraud in Libya this week that allowed the company to be spared from a full trial and saw the other charges tied to years-old activities in that country dropped. While the abrupt end to the process lifted the overhang of legal uncertainty from SNC’s outlook, it may have left some observers wondering if Wilson-Raybould was satisfied after having so steadfastly refused to pressure prosecutors into cutting a deal with the construction giant.

She wasted little time making it clear on Twitter that what mattered most to her was ensuring the rule of law prevailed.

Wilson-Raybould told BNN Bloomberg that the SNC-Lavalin affair has entered Canadians into important discourse about protecting the nation’s democracy and its institutions.

“What this year has shown is that we need to be constantly vigilant about the nature of the democracy that we live in, ensure that we continue to protect the institutions that we have – which is what I was doing as the attorney general – and to ensure that we uphold rule of law and [its] independence,” she said.

“I think Canadians have been brought into an important conversation about what all of those things mean. We need to be constantly vigilant about it, but I believe that the justice system took its course and Canadians can be confident in our justice system.”

“One of the defining features of Canadian business is the level of management – or interference – from the government,” said BNN Bloomberg General Manager Grant Ellis.

“Perhaps never before, or at least for several decades, has Ottawa’s backroom maneuvering into a company, and infringement on the rule of law, been laid so bare in front of the Canadian people,” he added. “Because of Jody Wilson-Raybould’s actions, we have a much clearer understanding of how Ottawa picks winners and losers in our economy.

 

BNN BLOOMBERG NEWSMAKER OF THE YEAR VOTE BREAKDOWN 

 
Rank SUBJECT  1ST 2ND 3RD Total Points


1
 		 Jody Wilson-Raybould
Representing the SNC story and how business and
government crashed into each other badly earlier
this year.		 11 9 2 53


2
 		 Meng Wanzhou 
How her arrest threw Canada into a titanic
international trade dispute, causing Canada to face the ire
of the country we counted on as our trade saviours		 5 7 9 38

3
 		 Nick Lalonde
CannTrust whistleblower brings a company to its knees
in a dramatic fashion		 7 3 4 31

4


 		 Jason Kenney
Representing the stalled pipelines and the rise
of Western alienation		 1 1 3 8
5
 		 Bruce Linton 
A symbol for the reckoning of the cannabis industry 		 1 0 4 7
6
 		 Boeing's Grounded 737 Max
For its impact on the global airline industry		 1 1 1 6
7
 		 Mark Bristow
Barrick-Goldcorp-Newmont deal		 0 2 0 4
8
 		 Steve Eisman
Shorting the big banks.		 0 1 1 3

9
 		 Doug Suttles 
Encana’s departure and name change is perhaps a new
demoralizing low for Big Oil		 0 0 2 2
10
 		 Richard Baker
HBC takeover		 0 0 1 1