Last week was a remarkably bad one for Jonathan Denis, once Alberta’s justice minister and attorney general and nowadays a fixture in provincial and federal Conservative circles in Wild Rose Country. Support rabble today!
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Denis was found guilty of criminal contempt by a Court of Queen’s Bench justice on Wednesday for threatening to sue the plaintiff in a wrongful-dismissal civil trial for her testimony.
Given the circumstances, political advisors to prominent figures in Alberta’s United Conservative Party and the federal Conservative Party must be watching Denis’s very bad week with deep concern.
The saga started on Apr. 8, when media reported how a letter sent on Denis’s behalf by another lawyer at his Calgary firm had been interpreted as a threat to launch a defamation suit against plaintiff Anny Sauvageau, Alberta’s former chief forensic pathologist, for her testimony in her suit seeking $7.6 million in damages for wrongful dismissal in 2014, when Mr. Denis was the province’s justice minister.
Although Denis is not named in her suit, the letter claimed Sauvageau “has engaged in a seven-year campaign of defamation and harassment as against Mr. Denis.
“We have been closely watching Dr. Sauvageau’s current trial and are aware that … Dr. Sauvageau’s defamation of Mr. Denis has continued unabated,” it continued. “Mr. Denis is a respected and renowned lawyer and business person and will not tolerate these tortious actions against him. These actions must forthwith cease and we reserve the right to refer to this correspondence should Dr. Sauvageau’s defamation continue.”
By leaving the impression he was threatening Sauvageau with almost everyone in the courtroom—including Madam Justice Doreen Sulyma, as it turned out—Denis’s letter brought the trial to a standstill.
The ability of courts to conduct fair trials depends on the right of witnesses to be immune to lawsuits for their testimony. The principle of absolute privilege for honest testimony is not some esoteric bit of legal ephemera, but a pillar of the rule of law understood by pretty well everyone, even journalists.
While Denis’s lawyer argued the letter had been misunderstood and the former chief medical examiner’s counsel called it “intimidation,” Sulyma said she’d never encountered such a thing in 25 years on the bench and as many years in private practice.
So on Apr. 11, she said she would ponder the matter until Wednesday, when she would return to court and rule on Denis’s conduct.
Meanwhile, also on Apr. 11, the Canadian Press published a story quoting a “political fixer” with ties to several high-profile Alberta Conservative operatives saying Denis had hired him to get the phone records of a journalist to find out who her sources were for a story that said COVID-19 protocols had been broken at the lawyer’s wedding reception.
The CP story, which featured a who’s who of United Conservative Party operatives in bit parts, made it sound as if David Wallace was acting as an unlicensed private detective specializing in political mischief. Denis denied he had spoken to Wallace.
Sulyma returned to her courtroom and pronounced Denis, now a prominent Calgary lawyer in private practice, guilty of contempt for the letter. “I find that the intention exhibited was to obstruct her testimony and the trial process itself,” she said.
Everyone is expected to be back in court later this week to set the dates on which Sulyma will determine Denis’s penalty and assign costs.
Since the Criminal Code leaves it up almost entirely up to judges to decide what to do about contempt, Denis could face a serious fine or even jail time. Meanwhile, he has indicated he will appeal the judge’s ruling. So this drama is bound to be around for a while yet.
This likely makes UCP political strategists quite nervous.
The situation has already drawn comment about the recent problems faced by two of Kenney’s justice ministers. Kaycee Madu, now labour minister, was shuffled out of the portfolio after he called the Edmonton police chief last spring about a traffic ticket in an attempt to influence the administration of justice. Tyler Shandro, shuffled in to replace Madu, faces a Law Society investigation of allegations he harassed a couple of critics in 2020.
Still, at least from the UCP’s perspective, Shandro’s and Madu’s troubles seem like small beer compared to Denis’s current problem.
Plus, from the perspective of the UCP, there’s something to be said for any story that distracts from Premier Jason Kenney’s troubles with his own party and his personal unpopularity with Alberta voters.
As for the federal Conservatives, no one is now about to forget that until recently Denis was a volunteer for leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre’s Alberta campaign or that in the 2000s the men founded a political communications company and together ran a Calgary real estate investment firm.
One imagines a lot of Conservatives would be delighted if these stories would just go away.
Denis joined premier Ed Stemach’s Progressive Conservative cabinet as housing minister in 2010 and was made solicitor general and minister of public security immediately after Alison Redford was sworn in as premier in 2011. He became minister of justice and attorney general soon after Redford’s PCs won the 2012 election.
He resigned from cabinet in 2015 shortly before the provincial election after allegations about his private life, which a court later ruled were unfounded, became public during legal proceedings with his former wife, from whom he was estranged.
He was defeated in his Calgary—Acadia riding in the 2015 general election by New Democrat Brandy Payne, who was treated by Conservative activists as if she were not up to the job because of her work as the owner and manager of a yoga studio.
She turned out to be a capable MLA, however, and in 2016, NDP Premier Rachel Notley appointed her associate minister of health, with responsibility for implementing recommendations of a review of mental health services and responding to the opioid crisis.
Shandro has represented the riding since the UCP won power in 2019.
David J. Climenhaga
David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike... More by David J. Climenhaga