Text messages between Jody Wilson-Raybould and one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's top advisers suggest she initially tried to prevent her move out of the prestigious Justice portfolio by arguing it would send the wrong message to Indigenous Peoples.
But Wilson-Raybould's exchanges with Gerald Butts, Trudeau's former principal secretary, became increasingly angry and ominous-sounding as the day of the Jan. 14 cabinet shuffle approached.
In one of her final texts before the shuffle, she told Butts she was ``prepared'' for what's coming, and that she knew why it was happening.
Butts has submitted the text messages to the House of Commons justice committee in response to Wilson-Raybould's written submission last week, which supplemented her nearly four hours of oral testimony at the committee in February.
None of the texts directly mentions SNC-Lavalin but Butts told the committee last month that he had numerous conversations with Wilson-Raybould during the week before the shuffle in which she stated her belief that she was being punished for refusing to intervene in the criminal prosecution of the Montreal engineering giant.
Wilson-Raybould, who made history as Canada's first Indigenous justice minister, resigned from cabinet a month later. Butts resigned shortly thereafter.