Outside the law

John Ivison unloads on Gary Lunn, and in the process fills in one more detail about Lunn's efforts to intimidate the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission:

Mr. Lunn, who appears to have been disengaged about all things nuclear to this point, suddenly leapt into action. In a call to Ms. Keen on Dec. 8, during which she characterized his manner as "abrupt and demanding," he pushed for the CNSC to allow the reactor to resume operation. Ms. Keen said that to do so, the law required a licence amendment, something that could only be granted after the Commission reviewed all the facts and legal requirements.

Apparently unaware that ministers should not interfere in the operation of arm's-length, quasi-judicial tribunals, Mr. Lunn continued to attempt to bully Ms. Keen with an "aggressive" questioning style and subsequently even withdrew the Department of Justice's services from the regulator on the AECL file.

Ivison doesn't make clear when exactly Lunn decreed that CNSC would no longer have access to the Department of Justice. But it appears obvious that CNSC would need immediate legal advice to deal with a number of the issues related to Chalk River, including to follow up on the license amendment process, as well as to determine the effect of both Lunn's own ministerial directive and as the legislation that eventually passed to override the CNSC.

Not surprisingly, though, Lunn doesn't seem to have been the least bit interested in allowing CNSC to obtain needed information. Instead, he apparently decided that any legal advice to CNSC would be too likely to actually analyze the law rather than echoing the Cons' public position. And that in turn could only intrude on the Cons' bad-cop, bad-cop strategy of bullying Keen both in public and in private.

Of course, the withdrawal of legal advice looks to have been one of the least of Lunn's efforts to override CNSC's independence. But it offers one more example of the Cons' belief that they are the law - and one more reason to remove the Cons from any position where they're able to act on that assumption.