OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his government might have acted differently had it known the criminal case against SNC-Lavalin would be resolved without crippling the company or throwing thousands of its employees out of work.

“Obviously, as we look back over the past year and this issue, there are things we could have, should have, would have done differently had we known, had we known all sorts of different aspects of it,” he said Wednesday in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press, just hours after the Montreal engineering giant pleaded guilty to one charge of fraud.

“But you don’t get do-overs in politics. You only do the best you can to protect jobs, to respect the independence of the judiciary and that’s exactly what we did every step of the way.”

Throughout the year-long saga that shook Trudeau’s government and likely contributed to the Liberals being reduced to a minority in the Oct. 21 election, the prime minister argued his only preoccupation was protecting the 9,000 innocent Canadian employees, as well as pensioners, shareholders and suppliers, who stood to be harmed if SNC was convicted on corruption charges related to contracts in Libya.

Under current federal policy, a criminal conviction could have barred SNC-Lavalin from federal contracts for 10 years.

In an internal SNC document obtained by The Canadian Press and presented to prosecutors in the fall of 2018, the company outlined a “Plan B” that would go into play if it did not get a remediation agreement. The plan involved splitting the company in two, moving its offices to the U.S. and chopping 5,200 Canadian jobs before eventually shutting down its Canadian operations entirely.

Yet after the company reached an agreement with the Crown prosecutor Wednesday, it issued a statement saying it “does not anticipate that the (guilty) plea will have any long-term material adverse impact on the company’s overall business.”

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