Ottawa

‘Bend the rules, you will be punished’

As Bruce Cheadle notes, the in-and-out charges will be pursued by the public prosecutor’s office.

Dan Brien, spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office, said a team reviewed all the evidence gathered by Elections commissioner William Corbett and decided summary charges, rather than criminal indictments, were the way to proceed. “It’s a Crown decision,” said Brien…

The role of the public prosecutor, an innovation brought in by the Harper government as part of the Accountability Act, is to remove any cloud of political interference from the legal system. “There’s going to be a new code on Parliament Hill,” Harper said as he introduced the public prosecutor model during that hotly contested 2006 election campaign. “Bend the rules, you will be punished; break the law, you will be charged; abuse the public trust, you will go to prison.”

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