Chantal Hébert: Ethics report´s damning findings are a first for a sitting prime minister but is it enough to take Trudeau down?
(The Star Food)

MONTREAL—Where to start?The ethics commissioner report on the SNC-Lavalin affair contains the most damning findings ever rendered by an officer of Parliament against a sitting prime minister.Yes, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin were splattered by the sponsorship scandal. And Stephen Harper spent his last year in office embroiled in a senate scandal that involved the second most powerful player in his office.But neither Chrétien, nor Martin, nor Harper were singled out in the way that Justin Trudeau is in the report released on Wednesday by ethics watchdog Mario Dion.(As an aside, despite their leaders having been absolved of direct responsibility, the Liberals and Conservatives paid a hefty price in the ballot box for the events that unfolded on their parties’ respective watches in power.)Anyone who believed the prime minister could not come out looking worse for his handling of the SNC-Lavalin file than in the testimony of former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould will discover that the picture Dion paints is even more devastating.That’s because it documents PMO efforts on behalf of and/or orchestrated in tandem with SNC-Lavalin to secure a remediation agreement to spare the Quebec engineering giant a possible criminal conviction that go beyond those already revealed by Wilson-Raybould.To read the ethics commissioner’s accounting of the events is to get the impression that the senior levels of the government essentially functioned as an arm of the engineering firm. The line between the two was not so much blurred as virtually invisible.The commissioner’s conclusion that the prime minister violated the federal ethics law is unadulterated.He finds no extenuating circumstances to absolve Trudeau of having applied improper pressures on the then-attorney-general to overrule her prosecutors in their dealings with SNC-Lavalin.Dion rejects the rationale that the prime minister was only acquitting himself of his duty by trying to ...