Description
Canada’s SNC-Lavalin affair erupted in a firestorm of political controversy in February 2019, when then Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his close advisers of pressuring her improperly to allow SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec-based global engineering firm, to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement – rather than face trial on charges it paid bribes to win lucrative contracts in Libya. The scandal dominated the news cycle for months. It encompassed cabinet resignations, caucus ejections, and an ethics investigation. To analysts at the time, this was a constitutional crisis.
Zooming out from the focus on how the scandal played out in Canadian politics, this paper theorizes the SNC-Lavalin affair against the backdrop of Canada’s international legal obligations to control transnational bribery. The attempt to use a deferred prosecution agreement in this case is best understood as (a) an instance of international diffusion of legal practice from the United States--comparable with similar developments the UK--and (b) a legal strategy to avoid the political and financial costs of anti-corruption enforcement. The analysis underscores the political barriers to state compliance with global efforts to control transnational bribery, and the limits of international law as a driver of global governance.
