Ottawa – In the spring of 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government is pressing ahead with the Alto high-speed rail project — a multi-billion-dollar flagship initiative linking Toronto and Quebec City. The co-development contract, valued at roughly $3.9 billion for the first phase, was awarded to the Cadence consortium, which prominently includes AtkinsRéalis — the company formerly known as SNC-Lavalin.
For many Canadians, the name still carries the echo of one of the most damaging corporate-political scandals in modern Canadian history.
Between 2001 and 2011, SNC-Lavalin executives were accused of paying approximately $48 million in bribes to Libyan public officials close to the Gaddafi regime in order to secure engineering contracts. Charges were laid in 2015. On January 31, 2014 — as detailed in court documents that later circulated widely — former executives Sami Bebawi, Constantine Kyres and Stéphane Roy faced multiple counts including fraud over $5,000, possession of proceeds of crime, obstructing justice, and bribery of a foreign public official under Canada’s Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act.
The company itself eventually saw its construction division plead guilty to fraud. It paid a $280-million fine and avoided a decade-long ban from federal contracts that could have crippled the firm and cost thousands of jobs.
What turned a corporate prosecution into a full-blown political crisis was the 2019 SNC-Lavalin affair. Then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office were accused of pressuring Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to offer the company a deferred prosecution agreement so it could avoid a criminal trial. Wilson-Raybould refused, was shuffled out of her cabinet post, and resigned. She later testified that she had faced “veiled threats” and inappropriate political interference.
The Ethics Commissioner investigated and ruled that Trudeau had violated the Conflict of Interest Act. Yet no criminal charges were ever laid against the Prime Minister, his chief of staff, or any minister involved. The government survived the scandal politically. SNC-Lavalin rebranded as AtkinsRéalis in 2023, signalling a fresh start. And now, under a new Liberal leader — former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney — the company (through its consortium) is once again positioned to profit from a major federal infrastructure contract.
The timing has not gone unnoticed. When a Liberal minister was recently pressed in the House and in media appearances about collapsing public and political support for the high-speed rail project — citing rural land concerns, ballooning costs, and Conservative promises to cancel it outright — the minister reportedly conceded there is currently “no plan” to help everyday Canadians struggling with high gas taxes and fuel prices.
Critics argue the episode illustrates a deeper pattern: how allegations of foreign corruption, political pressure on the justice system, and ethical breaches at the highest levels of government can occur without resulting in meaningful accountability. No top Liberal figure faced criminal consequences in 2019. The company paid a fine, changed its name, and kept bidding on — and winning — federal work. Today, the same government is advancing a project that will funnel billions in taxpayer dollars toward that very firm while ordinary households receive little immediate relief on the cost-of-living pressures they face at the pump.
Whether one views the Alto rail project as visionary nation-building or an expensive political priority, the historical record is clear. Corruption in the form of foreign bribery happened. Attempts to influence the prosecution were found to have breached ethics rules. And yet the highest levels of the Liberal governments — both then and now — have faced no criminal reckoning. The cheques keep flowing, the contracts keep being signed, and the pattern repeats.
That is the uncomfortable lesson of this flashback. In Canadian politics, powerful institutions and well-connected corporations can weather serious scandals, rebrand, and return to the public trough — while the public is left wondering whether anyone at the very top is ever truly held to account.
