Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister, refused to let a crooked company off the hook in a corruption case. She refused to make a deal with SNC-Lavalin, and so they fired her.
00:00:00.000Hello, my rebels. You're listening to a free audio only recording of my show, The Ezra Levant Show.
00:00:05.400It's really made for TV, I should tell you. Today, an amazing story. It's, you know, when you see a
00:00:11.540unicorn, you have to say, all right, I found the unicorn. They do exist. They're extremely rare,
00:00:16.440but they do exist. I'm referring to the front page story in the Globe and Mail about how the
00:00:20.640liberals pressured Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister, to let a crooked company in
00:00:27.160Quebec named SNC-Lavalin off the hook for corruption crimes. She refused, and so they
00:00:33.760fired her. It's a hell of a story. We're going to go through it, and go through it, and I say,
00:00:41.160you got to admit, it's a great story, great reportage, and you know what? I didn't have a
00:00:45.140lot of time for Jody Wilson-Raybould. I did not know she had a spine made of integrity,
00:00:51.020and she would not bend for Trudeau. I'll go into it in depth in a minute. If you do like
00:00:57.960listening to these podcasts, by the way, I think you'd like watching it, but you got to be a
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00:01:31.240where you do it all. If you want to leave some five-star reviews, that'll help us too. They're
00:01:36.200a great way to promote the show for free. Without any further ado or to-do, let me present to you my
00:01:42.360show about Jody Wilson-Raybould. Here you go. Tonight, shocking news. Justin Trudeau's office
00:01:48.480pressures the justice minister to call off a prosecution of a corrupt Quebec company.
00:01:53.560She refused and was fired in a cabinet shuffle. It's February 7th, and this is The Ezra Levant Show.
00:02:01.200Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:02:04.940There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer. The only thing I have to say to the
00:02:10.480government of a wire publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
00:02:19.920I believe Canada's media has a bias towards the Liberal Party and towards Justin Trudeau
00:02:24.820in particular, and I believe that is being made far worse by the $595 million bailout
00:02:30.300of journalists offered by Trudeau. And so when there is a rare exception to this pattern,
00:02:35.860it behooves me to recognize it, and today is one of those days. The Globe and Mail has published a
00:02:41.640front-page story that is not pro-Trudeau propaganda at all. In fact, it's the opposite, and it is huge
00:02:48.480news. Now, they're a newspaper, so it's their job to report huge news, but in this day and age of
00:02:54.080media party bias, we have to congratulate them for doing their jobs. There were three reporters on this
00:03:00.180story, Bob Fyfe, Steve Chase, and Sean Fine. So they put some work into this story, and it shows. Let me
00:03:05.900read it to you. I'm not going to read every word, but I'm going to read a lot of it to you.
00:03:10.620PMO pressed justice minister to abandon prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. PMO, of course, stands for Prime
00:03:18.060Minister's Office. Wilson-Raybould is Jody Wilson-Raybould, the first Aboriginal person, the first Aboriginal
00:03:25.100woman, to be the justice minister, a star candidate for Justin Trudeau from B.C. He was so proud of her,
00:03:31.780and you know what? Maybe she really was good. If she resisted his attempt at corruption, maybe she
00:03:37.640really was excellent, at least in that regard. Too excellent. Trudeau obviously thought she could be
00:03:43.480corrupted, but let me tell you more of the story. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office attempted to press
00:03:50.020Jody Wilson-Raybould, when she was justice minister, to intervene in the corruption and fraud
00:03:56.340prosecution of Montreal engineering and construction giant SNC-Lavalin Group, Inc., sources say, but she
00:04:02.920refused to ask federal prosecutors to make a deal with a company that could prevent a costly trial.
00:04:08.880Now that's how courts are supposed to work in Canada. We have the rule of law, which means if you commit a
00:04:13.480crime, whether you are a prince or a pauper, you're all treated the same way. And it's up to judges to
00:04:19.460judge cases neutrally, and it's up to prosecutors to press the case if it's in the public interest,
00:04:25.200not the private interest of liberal fundraisers. That's of no concern. And that the prime minister's
00:04:30.640office itself would be involved is the gravest allegation possible. I'll keep reading.
00:04:37.160SNC-Lavalin has sought to avoid a criminal trial on fraud and corruption charges stemming from an RCMP
00:04:42.040investigation into its business dealings in Libya. Prosecutors alleged in February 2015 that SNC paid
00:04:48.440millions of dollars in bribes to public officials in Libya between 2001 and 2011 to secure government
00:04:55.280contracts. The engineering company says executives who are responsible for the wrongdoing have left
00:05:00.760the company, and it has reformed ethics and compliance rules. So it sounds like they've more or less
00:05:06.700confessed to the whole thing. If they're saying the wrongdoers have left the company, so they were
00:05:11.840caught with their hands in the cookie jar, it sounds like, and the individual criminals left the company.
00:05:16.620So, hey guys, can we just pretend we never did any of that? Look, SNC-Lavalin broke the law.
00:05:23.060They got rich off breaking the law. So they were caught. And a few managers were the fall guys.
00:05:28.180Can we all just settle this over drinks, maybe? You know, maybe that private billionaire island
00:05:32.580in the Bahamas, you know, that vacation retreat that Trudeau and his family go to. I mean, why do we
00:05:38.380have to be all law and order-y about this? I mean, that's not very liberal, is it? Come on,
00:05:42.100we're all friends. Now, at this point, I have so many questions, but a huge one is,
00:05:48.160what other cases has Trudeau meddled in that we don't even know about? Okay, I'll keep reading about
00:05:54.560this case. After the charges, SNC-Lavalin lobbied officials in Ottawa, including senior members in
00:06:01.480the office of Mr. Trudeau, to secure a deal known as a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, or
00:06:05.780Remediation Agreement, that would set aside the prosecution. In such deals, which are used in the
00:06:10.360United States and Britain, a company would accept responsibility for the wrongdoing and pay a
00:06:14.320financial penalty, relinquish benefits gained from the wrongdoing, and put in place compliance
00:06:18.380measures. It is unfair that the actions of one or more rogue employees should tarnish a company's
00:06:23.760reputation as well as jeopardize its future success and its employees' livelihood, SNC argued in a brief
00:06:29.360to federal officials in October 2017. Is that really how it works in Canada? It's been a while since
00:06:37.880I practice law, but as far as I can remember, if you have an excuse or an alibi or some mitigating
00:06:44.240circumstance, tell it to the judge. In open court, under oath, on the stand, a judge can take it into
00:06:52.460consideration if that's what the law allows. Since when do accused criminals hire lobbyists to meet
00:06:59.780secretly with politicians instead? Look at this. This is the website of Canada's Lobbyist Commissioner.
00:07:05.520This is the page showing the official contacts between the president of SNC-Lavalin,
00:07:12.320Neil Bruce, and senior liberal officials. There are dozens and dozens of these meetings. It's like
00:07:19.920it's all he did. I mean, we know Bombardier does that. It's pretty much all they do is lobby. It's how
00:07:25.600they make the money. But they're usually lobbying for free cash. This is different. This is lobbying the
00:07:30.460government to drop criminal charges against your criminal company. Let me just go through some of
00:07:36.400these on November 19th. Meeting Trudeau's senior advisor, Mathieu Bouchard. And you can see on the right
00:07:44.460hand side there, subject matters, justice and law enforcement. Yeah, you're an engineering company, buddy.
00:07:50.440On the same day, do you see that right underneath there? Meeting Bill Morneau's chief of staff,
00:07:56.440former journalist Ben Chin. Same thing, justice and law enforcement. Why on earth would the finance
00:08:01.420department, would Bill Morneau be making decisions about whether or not a prosecutor should prosecute
00:08:06.280a crime? Because they're liberals, dummy. Twelve days before that, they actually lobbied Trudeau's
00:08:13.100ambassador to the U.S. David McNaughton, same thing, justice and law enforcement. Do you see that
00:08:18.680there? David McNaughton should probably spend more time lobbying the United States
00:08:23.000on behalf of Canada to get an exemption from Trump's new Buy American executive order, and
00:08:28.740maybe less time talking to accused criminals begging to be set free with some weird liberal
00:08:34.940get-out-of-jail-free card. Before that, November 5th, there's Mathieu Bouchard again from the PMO
00:08:41.480again. And the week before that, lobbying the head of the Atomic Energy of Canada agency about
00:08:47.060both this crime? SNC-Lavalin was going around Ottawa begging every single liberal to get justice,
00:08:58.080to get Jody Wilson-Raybould to call off the police. Like we're in some sort of banana republic or
00:09:03.260something, if you just talk to all the right people, schmooze all the right people, and your
00:09:06.420crimes will be washed away if you just buy enough people free drinks or something. The week before
00:09:12.040that, I'm not going to read them all, but I just want to show you, I mean, did you see all these pages
00:09:15.240here? The week before that, he was meeting with Jamie Innes in Chrystia Freeland's office. She's
00:09:20.940the foreign minister. Same thing. The day before that, another meeting with David McNaughton again.
00:09:27.680Two days before that, meeting Mathieu Belanger, director of policy for another Quebec-based
00:09:32.620minister. And before that, Elder Marcus, senior advisor to the truth. And on, and on, and on, and on,
00:09:38.600and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, dozens of times. I'm going to say on and
00:09:43.760on, 63 times. And not just meeting with senior staff, but with cabinet ministers too. On September
00:09:52.20018th, sitting down with Bill Morneau directly. I guess that later meeting was a follow-up to make
00:09:56.400sure Bill Morneau was doing what he had to do. The same Bill Morneau who, whoopsies, remember
00:10:01.440that? He hid his ownership of a luxury villa in France from his list of disclosable assets to the
00:10:08.220ethics commissioner. I think meeting with a corrupt finance minister is about right for a corrupt
00:10:13.880company trying to get out of a prosecution for corruption. It fits. I miss the scandals of the
00:10:21.040Stephen Harper era, don't you? Where a cabinet minister once resigned for expensing a $16 orange
00:10:27.140juice. Those were the days. I'm not going to read you the whole lobbying list. Just take it
00:10:31.360from me. SNC-Labiland had a private meeting with pretty much everyone they wanted to, it seems.
00:10:36.500You get the picture. Okay, back to the Globe and Mail story. But in October 2018, SNC-Labiland
00:10:43.260hit a major obstacle. The federal director of public prosecutions refused to negotiate a
00:10:47.540remediation agreement that would have resolved the Libyan fraud and corruption charges without
00:10:52.080prosecution. SNC-Labiland has asked for a judicial review of the decision, citing, quote,
00:10:58.560the extremely negative consequences the underlying legal proceedings have had and will continue to
00:11:03.300have even in the event of an acquittal on SNC and innocent stakeholders, including employees,
00:11:08.240suppliers, pensioners, and stakeholders, in the absence of an invitation to negotiate.
00:11:12.940Well, yeah, buddy, that's how it's supposed to work. If a prosecutor won't give you a plea bargain,
00:11:16.500and there's no reason why he should, and if you don't like that, well, I guess you could appeal it.
00:11:21.440That's what a judicial review means. You're going to a judge, not a private meeting over drinks with
00:11:26.940your favorite liberal. You take it to a judge in open court. You make your arguments in public,
00:11:32.780and the other side gets to challenge you, to cross-examine you, to call you out on any lies or
00:11:38.540omissions, to say, was this really some rogue employees, or was this the whole corporate plan,
00:11:43.060like Enron? We have courts in Canada. We don't decide who's a criminal based on private lobbying
00:11:49.800of liberals? Oh, my God. So up until this point, we have the system working, I guess.
00:11:57.860So far, the prosecution was immune to this political pressure. It shows a gross lack of
00:12:03.880judgment on the part of these public officeholders to even meet with this company accused of breaking
00:12:09.660the law, begging for a special favor, and to meet with them again and again. That is gross.
00:12:14.300That is bad judgment. But until the point, until this point, the line was held, keeping the gross
00:12:22.260liberal politicians away from the non-partisan prosecutors. Yeah, they're all dirty. David
00:12:27.040McNaughton and Bill Morneau, all of them meeting with this grubby guy begging, they shouldn't,
00:12:32.540and shame on them. But the prosecutors held the line. But then this, then this. Sources say Miss
00:12:41.400Wilson-Raybould, who was Justice Minister and Attorney General until she was shuffled to Veterans
00:12:46.380Affairs earlier this year, came under heavy pressure to persuade the Public Prosecution
00:12:51.380Service of Canada to change its mind. Oh. Miss Wilson-Raybould was unwilling to instruct the
00:12:57.720Director of the Public Prosecution Service, Kathleen Russel, to negotiate a remediation agreement
00:13:02.180with SNC-Lavalin, according to sources who were granted anonymity to speak directly about what
00:13:07.840went on behind the scenes in the matter. Hmm. Pressure, eh? Heavy pressure. Who pressured
00:13:14.140her? That's the point, isn't it? Did Justin Trudeau tell her that if she didn't let his Quebec
00:13:19.980friends off the hook, that he'd fire her? Because she didn't let his Quebec friends off the hook,
00:13:24.820and he did fire her. The Prime Minister's office, let me read some more here, issued a short statement
00:13:31.360when asked to comment on efforts to persuade Miss Wilson-Raybould to intervene.
00:13:37.300Prime Minister's office did not direct the Attorney General to draw any conclusions on the matter,
00:13:41.760Press Secretary Chantal Gagnon said in an email to the Globe and Mail on Wednesday evening.
00:13:48.040Sources say officials from Mr. Trudeau's office, whom they did not identify, had urged Miss Wilson-Raybould,
00:13:54.640Canada's first Indigenous Justice Minister, to press the Public Prosecution Office to abandon
00:13:59.160the court proceedings. Do you believe that? Do you believe that excuse? I don't know who
00:14:04.600Chantal Gagnon is. She surely is just a messenger. She didn't write that answer. I know who Bill
00:14:09.760Morneau is. I know who all these very senior advisors to Justin Trudeau are. I want to hear
00:14:14.400from them. Frankly, under oath. I don't want some emailed, non-believable line from some press
00:14:21.900assistant. But even her emailed line is weirdly written. The PMO did not direct the Attorney General,
00:14:29.040to draw any conclusion. Okay. Well, the question is, what did they tell her to do? Did they tell
00:14:35.180her to drop the case? Make the problem go away? That's not direct. Hey, can you make this problem
00:14:40.540go away? What exactly did they say? It's a weird lawyerly denial. It's weirdly specific.
00:14:49.000It's very Clintonian that way. I think they're lying again. Now, it is possible for a justice minister,
00:14:55.480that is the political person, the liberal MP in charge of the prosecutions, the prosecutors in
00:15:00.220this country, to take over a case and make decisions. It is possible in our system, but it
00:15:04.640has to be done openly and with notice and explanation. Let me quote from the Globe story.
00:15:09.620I thought this was a very helpful paragraph. The Public Prosecution Service of Canada's website
00:15:15.020says, with the exception of Canada Elections Act matters, the Attorney General can issue a directive
00:15:20.320to the director of public prosecutions about a prosecution, or even assume conduct of a
00:15:25.320prosecution, but must do so in writing, and a notice must be published in the Canada Gazette.
00:15:32.280So they have to explain themselves in public. They can't do a secret deal over drinks.
00:15:38.380Now, those rules there, that's all too Anglo, isn't it? That's all too rule of law-ish,
00:15:44.080too, you know, legal. Can't we do it how they did it back in Libya? Maybe a nice donation to the
00:15:52.560Justin Trudeau Foundation. Maybe the donation doesn't have to come from SNC-Lavalin. Maybe it
00:15:58.000can come from someone else, some bank in Switzerland. I mean, the National Post did a report showing
00:16:05.000that's how it's done. Money is pouring into the Trudeau Foundation from foreigners.
00:16:10.620Who knows what the quid pro quo is? I can't possibly imagine. I mean, who would ever think
00:16:16.600that our Prime Minister is for sale? Well, other than maybe the Aga Khan, who let Trudeau party on
00:16:21.180his private island in the Bahamas, and then let Sophie Trudeau go back there with her girlfriends
00:16:26.120again. Did you know that? It wasn't just Trudeau party. Sophie Trudeau called up and said,
00:16:30.180can I come back with my girlfriends? And they said, yeah. I shouldn't blame the Aga Khan. He's not the
00:16:35.520one who invited Trudeau, and he certainly didn't invite Sophie Trudeau. You know, he wasn't even on
00:16:40.500billionaires' island when the Trudeaus went there to party. They asked him for a free. They didn't
00:16:43.560want to meet him. They're multimillionaires who inherited everything they have. They sure are
00:16:48.140cheap and gross, the Trudeaus, aren't they? They're really cheap and gross. All right, back to the news
00:16:53.260today. Miss Wilson-Raybould trusted the judgment of the public prosecutor and did not believe it was
00:16:59.100proper for the Attorney General to intervene, especially if there could be any suggestion of
00:17:03.100political interference, sources say. The Trudeau liberals had criticized the former Harper government
00:17:09.360for undermining independent agencies and vowed to respect the decisions. The government has also
00:17:14.680invoked the independence of the judicial system as a reason for not intervening in the case of
00:17:18.380Huawei Technologies Company Limited, Executive Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested at the Vancouver
00:17:23.380airport on an extradition request from the United States. Well, that's a good point. We heard Justin
00:17:28.240Trudeau's hand-picked ambassador to China weigh in the other day on a matter before the courts. He was
00:17:33.080undermining judicial independence just weeks ago. Sounds like a pretty common occurrence under these
00:17:38.000liberals, come to think of it. I think she has quite good arguments on her side. One, political
00:17:46.200involvement by comments from Donald Trump in her case. Two, there's an extraterritorial aspect to her
00:17:54.560case. And three, there's the issue of Iran sanctions, which are involved in her case. And
00:18:04.320Canada does not sign on to these Iran sanctions. So I think she has some strong arguments that she can
00:18:11.720make before a judge. Now, Trudeau later fired McCallum, but the press conference when McCallum said all
00:18:19.360that was organized by the Foreign Affairs Department, who sent government staff along. It was not a rogue
00:18:25.100action by McCallum. It was a liberal Trudeau thing. That's how Trudeau works for his friends. And he
00:18:32.640loves China. SNC-Lavalin. Let me read some more. SNC-Lavalin, Canada's largest engineering and
00:18:40.160construction management company is one of Quebec's biggest corporations and has a reputation for
00:18:43.640holding political sway in Quebec City and Ottawa. One well-connected liberal with close ties to SNC-Lavalin
00:18:49.840said Ms. Wilson-Raybould blew off the PMO requests. It makes me like her more. The company had told the
00:18:56.500government it was in dire circumstances and required a suspension of criminal charges to ensure it
00:19:01.520continued on a solid footing. You know, I bet most criminals would say that. Hey guys, this criminal
00:19:06.520prosecution, it's really inconvenient. I might actually lose my job if I can get convicted for
00:19:13.060fraud. So I really need you to make these charges go away because I'm, you know, bank robbery. I know
00:19:19.040it's not the best, but I could really lose my job if I'm convicted. So can you help me? I'm really
00:19:24.020embarrassed by your prosecution. That's what they're saying. And the fact that a liberal is saying
00:19:32.700this uppity woman, who does she think she is? Doesn't she know that everything she has,
00:19:39.540everything she is, comes by the grace of Justin Trudeau, the precious one. How dare she blow off
00:19:47.140Trudeau's requests like she's some independent woman? How dare she?
00:19:52.580The whole system was rigged in favor of SNC-Lavalin. This is incredible, this next part. It sounds like
00:19:57.980she really did stand up to Trudeau's bullying. I am impressed with her. I got to say it. Here,
00:20:02.520let me read this. The Trudeau government in 2018 amended the criminal code. I didn't know this.
00:20:09.560To allow deferred prosecution agreements that let prosecutors suspend criminal charges
00:20:13.440against Canadian companies found to have committed wrongdoing, the measure was inserted into the 2018
00:20:19.520budget after a brief consultation in 2017. Liberal insiders said Ms. Wilson-Raybould knew this
00:20:26.860legislative change was meant to help SNC-Lavalin out of the legal troubles that were weighing on
00:20:31.480the price of its shares. A conviction on the fraud and corruption charges would result in a 10-year
00:20:36.660ban from federal government contracts, a development that would lead to layoffs. Well, we can't have
00:20:40.380that. We can't have criminals being laid off, people. So it sounds like this law was specifically
00:20:46.440rewritten to benefit a friend of Trudeau. I guess Wilson-Raybould went along with the rewriting of the law,
00:20:52.040but she just wouldn't or couldn't personally intervene to get Trudeau's friends off the hook.
00:20:58.140I can imagine. I mean, she's Aboriginal. One of her themes is helping Aboriginal people with our
00:21:02.620legal system. It's a tough file. It's complicated. There are lots of shades of gray. But imagine having
00:21:08.400some pampered, rich, privileged Quebecer, Justin Trudeau, never worked a day in his life,
00:21:13.960everything, silver spoon. Imagine him telling you that you have to let another pampered, rich,
00:21:19.940privileged Quebecer off the hook from a crime, a massive crime, because they're friends. And you
00:21:25.900know, we just do this for each other. And you're trying to do something about the fact that in some
00:21:32.280Canadian jails, half the prison population is Aboriginal. You're trying to actually fix a
00:21:36.240problem. At least that's how Trudeau sold you. But you're being told instead to let some rich friends
00:21:42.100of the Prime Minister out of jail because they're rich friends of the Prime Minister. And you're an
00:21:47.540Aboriginal justice minister. And you're being told to do what you're being told to do. I wonder if
00:21:53.440there was a little part of her that said, you know what? No, no, no. Equal justice for all. I mean,
00:21:58.040she's a social justice for herself. Don't get me wrong. She's meddled in the courts, too. Don't
00:22:02.180forget. She's no saint. Last year, when a Saskatchewan farmer was acquitted of murder after
00:22:07.700shooting an Aboriginal man who did a home invasion on his property and cold cocked the farmer's wife with a
00:22:12.280pistol, she criticized the jury there and said jury rules should be changed. So she's a meddler, too.
00:22:17.220But maybe doing a favor for some rich company, all fancy-pantsy, was just too much for her. Good for
00:22:25.320her. Good for her. An honest liberal. That's as rare as a unicorn. Here's the Globe and Mail analysis of
00:22:33.120all those lobbying visits I was mentioning.
00:22:35.520Since the beginning of 2017, Representatives SNC-Lamblam met with the federal government
00:22:41.260officials and parliamentarians more than 50 times on the topic of justice and law enforcement.
00:22:47.380According to the Federal Lobbyist Registry, this includes 14 visits with people in the Prime
00:22:53.140Minister's office. Those they met included Gerald Bunce, Principal Secretary of the Prime Minister,
00:23:00.100and met Chip Bouchard, Mr. Trudeau's senior advisor in Quebec, whom they met 12 times.
00:23:09.400Mr. Trudeau's senior policy advisor, Elder Marcus, also met with company representatives.
00:23:15.400Sources at SNC-Lamblam told the Globe that the PMO was furious
00:23:19.560with the justice minister's intransigence on the remediation agreement and that the company was pleased
00:23:28.080to see her moved out of the portfolio. Well, we know who the real boss is now, don't we?
00:23:33.140Furious. I bet they were furious. No one stands up to Trudeau, let alone some aboriginal woman from BC.
00:23:39.980I mean, unlike other members of Trudeau's cabinet, like Seamus O'Regan or Dominique LeBlanc,
00:23:47.060look at those guys. That's the old boys club. She wasn't even part of his wedding bachelor party.
00:23:53.640Who the hell does she think she is? She wasn't one of his frat boy friends. She's so uppity.
00:24:00.180Who does she think she is saying no to Trudeau? No one says no to Trudeau.
00:24:06.740Let me read just a little bit more. I know I'm reading a lot, but it's just so rare
00:24:09.660to see real investigative reporting like this into the Trudeau government. And the Globe put this on
00:24:13.560the front page. Hey, credit where it's due. The closest things we get to investigative journalism
00:24:17.760from the media party is some CBC hack writing a conspiracy theory about the conservative opposition,
00:24:23.340or they saw some mean tweet on Twitter that proves conservatives are racist. Junk journalism
00:24:28.740focused on holding the opposition to account. It's so rare to see something take on Trudeau in a
00:24:34.380serious way. I can think of fewer than a handful of examples in three years. Can you? So let me
00:24:39.460enjoy this moment. Here's some more. After the cabinet shuffle, Ms. Wilson-Raybould released a
00:24:45.460lengthy statement listing her legislative accomplishments during her tenure at Justice. In an unusual move for a
00:24:50.620member of cabinet, she also underlined the need for independence in the portfolio.
00:24:57.220It is a pillar of our democracy that our system of justice be free from even the perception of
00:25:01.560political interference, and uphold the highest levels of public confidence, she wrote.
00:25:06.100As such, it has always been my view that the Attorney General of Canada must be non-partisan,
00:25:12.460more transparent in the principles that are the basis of decisions, and in this respect,
00:25:17.440always willing to speak truth to power. This is how I served throughout my tenure in that role.
00:25:22.560Truth to power. Well, you're the most powerful legal officer in the country. So who could you
00:25:27.620possibly mean when you speak truth to power? You are power. Well, there's one person more powerful
00:25:33.360than you. Ain't there? That's a weird thing to emphasize in an exit letter. That is weird,
00:25:40.520unless it's a sort of coded message, a little bit like a time bomb, which it very much sounds like it was
00:25:46.340in this case. I'm not going to read anymore, but what I want to note, the amount SNC-Lavalin paid in
00:25:53.140bribes wasn't just $100,000, which is what Trudeau's illegal vacation on Billionaires Island was worth.
00:25:59.020I think it was worth $200,000. SNC-Lavalin paid $48 million in bribes. $48 million? That's enough money
00:26:09.540to bribe a Clinton, let alone a cheap Clinton knockoff like Trudeau. I wonder if there was any
00:26:16.340money sloshing over from Libya into Canada, or into one of Trudeau's front groups like the Trudeau
00:26:22.280Foundation or Canada 2020. I don't know. I showed you the other day that Huawei dumped money right
00:26:29.280into Trudeau's think tank called Canada 2020, run by his close friend Tom Pitfield. You see their logo
00:26:34.400there, almost spot in the middle there, Huawei, until they deleted it last month when it became
00:26:39.920embarrassing. I mean, if SNC-Lavalin was paying bribes in Libya, why do you think they weren't
00:26:45.960paying bribes elsewhere? You think only Libya is where they paid bribes? Same thing with Trudeau's
00:26:53.420other favorite Quebec company, Bombardier. They are being prosecuted or have already been convicted
00:26:58.200of bribery and corruption in a great many countries in the world. You might recall we did a whole show on
00:27:04.380it. Why do you think they don't pay bribes here in Canada too? You think liberals in Canada
00:27:09.860are morally superior to the other countries they were bribed? No wonder SNC-Lavalin wants
00:27:14.740to avoid a trial. Imagine what facts would come about. Today, Justin Trudeau indeed took a few
00:27:20.720quick questions on this, and he repeated that very precise technical lawyerly denial. Here, listen
00:27:28.580to this. The allegations in the Globe story this morning are false. Neither the current nor the
00:27:36.060previous Attorney General was ever directed by me or by anyone in my office to take a decision in this
00:27:44.780matter. The allegations reported in the story are false. At no time did I or my office direct the
00:27:54.720current or previous Attorney General to make any particular decision in this matter.
00:28:00.200But not necessarily direct, Prime Minister. Was there any sort of influence whatsoever?
00:28:04.920Yeah. As I've said, at no time did we direct the Attorney General, current or previous, to take any decision whatsoever in this matter.
00:28:15.200That precise phrasing. He's not denying the thrust of the story. That she was pressured. He's just denying that she was directed to make a decision. Of course they weren't that clumsy in their wording. It's like if a local mob boss comes by a store for a shakedown. He wouldn't be blunt. He'd say, hmm, nice business you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it. That crime boss could later say, well, I don't know what you're going to do.
00:28:45.180I never directed them to take any decision. I wouldn't do that. He's lying, obviously. Trudeau's lying. And the problem is that the Justice Minister who was fired, she can't reply to his lies, obviously, because as a lawyer, as the government's former lawyer, she has a duty of confidentiality to her client.
00:29:04.720She can't just talk about things. So Trudeau's got her in a trap. So Trudeau should release her from that trap. He should tell her that he waives solicitor-client privilege and that she should feel free to tell her side of the story. Of course he won't do that.
00:29:19.980And he knows she can't answer his lies until he does. So he won't.
00:29:25.440It's weird. Just two days ago, by coincidence, Blacklock's reporter, a small independent research newsletter in Ottawa, ran this story.
00:29:34.700Cabinet yesterday rejected any blacklisting of the country's largest engineering firm from bidding on public works.
00:29:41.140Three former executives with SNC-Lavalin Group have pled guilty to offenses in the past six months.
00:29:46.060I'm not going to go through it. But for some reason, despite SNC-Lavalin really looking like an organized crime operation, Cabinet just won't stop giving them contracts.
00:30:02.800This is not new. What's new is that the Justice Minister seems to have been fired over it.
00:30:08.980Look at this story from a few years back.
00:30:10.520Canada now dominates World Bank corruption list, thanks to SNC-Lavalin.
00:30:16.900And I'll read one more line. Do you see the line right under it?
00:30:19.680Out of the more than 250 companies year to date on the World Bank's running list of firms blacklisted from bidding on its global projects under its fraud and corruption policy,
00:30:29.940117 are from Canada, with SNC-Lavalin and its affiliates representing 115 in those centuries.
00:30:36.760Yeah, the World Bank will not touch SNC-Lavalin.
00:30:42.140It's like it's some Nigerian email scam.
00:30:45.200The World Bank, they're so corrupt, but they won't touch SNC-Lavalin.
00:30:50.220But Trudeau insists that we do business.
00:30:52.500Yeah, see, you and I read that story and we're repulsed by all the bribes.
00:31:16.680As you may know, Vice Admiral Mark Norman is being prosecuted for allegedly leaking military secrets about shipbuilding plans.
00:31:25.600But his trial has certainly turned around and now looks like he was the straight arrow, blowing the whistle on political corruption in huge military procurement contracts.
00:31:45.720But what should be a military matter, a police matter, a security matter, huh, under Trudeau became a political matter with Trudeau's principal secretary, Gerald Butts, right in the middle of it.
00:31:55.580And if you can believe this, all these PMO people involved in this case and not a single member of Trudeau's inner circle took any notes.
00:32:04.660But Vance, that's the chief of defense staff right now, Trudeau's man, Vance testified at a pretrial hearing last week that he didn't take any notes when senior RCMP briefed him on the matter on January 9th, 2017.
00:32:19.600On the same day, Vance also met with defense minister Harjeet Sajan and with Gerald Butts, prime minister Justin Trudeau's principal secretary, and Trudeau's chief of staff, Katie Telford, to discuss the Norman situation.
00:32:30.500He also had a brief phone call with Trudeau himself.
00:32:36.120I'm not going to get into the details.
00:32:37.380I'm just saying the only organizations I've ever heard of with complex operations that don't take notes about important meetings, those are organized crime.
00:32:50.980Government take notes in quadruplicate, bilingual notes.
00:34:05.200I thought she was too much of a radical activist, but I now know that she had more integrity and more belief in the rule of law than anyone else in that cabinet,
00:34:15.700including the morally weak dozens who met with these lobbyists.
00:34:20.780And so for that, she paid the price for her integrity.
00:34:28.640But what's done in the dark will be brought to the light.
00:34:31.500Wouldn't it be something if her quiet act of courage led to the downfall of the most corrupt Quebec prime minister since, well, since the last Quebec prime minister?
00:34:50.780Now, Republicans and Democrats must join forces again to confront an urgent national crisis.
00:35:07.940Congress has 10 days left to pass a bill that will fund our government, protect our homeland and secure our very dangerous southern border.
00:35:21.740Now is the time for Congress to show the world that America is committed to ending illegal immigration and putting the ruthless coyotes, cartels, drug dealers and human traffickers out of business.
00:35:41.160As we speak, large organized caravans are on the march to the United States.
00:35:55.360We have just heard that Mexican cities, in order to remove the illegal immigrants from their communities, are getting trucks and buses to bring them up to our country in areas where there is little border protection.
00:36:14.300I have ordered another 3,750 troops to our southern border to prepare for this tremendous onslaught.
00:36:32.060The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security and financial well-being of all America.
00:36:41.100We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.
00:36:51.240This includes our obligation to the millions of immigrants living here today who followed the rules and respected our laws.
00:37:02.940That is a clip from Donald Trump's State of the Union address.
00:37:06.680He says he departed from his written script and in a throwaway line suggested that he actually wants more immigration than ever.
00:37:15.620That seems to be at odds with the whole idea of crackdown on immigration and the wall.
00:37:21.720Unless there's some way of squaring the circle, I'm slightly alarmed by this because I note that Donald Trump has not yet actually built one mile of his proposed wall
00:37:33.380between the United States and Mexico and his term is half done.
00:37:37.020Joining us now via Skype from Bright Bart World Headquarters is our best friend over there, Joel Pollack, the senior editor at large.
00:37:45.500Am I overreacting to that spur of the moment, impromptu deviation from the script?
00:37:51.300It's unclear how serious a proposal it is, but it is clear that the president is selling his immigration policy by talking about how he's very much in favor of legal immigrants.
00:38:08.520And there's no evidence to suggest that he isn't even his support for more restrictive legal immigration policies has to do with the fact that our current legal immigration policies prioritize family reunification rather than skills.
00:38:24.460So you can understand what he's saying as I want more skilled legal immigrants.
00:38:30.800I think he's being very careful not to create the impression or to reinforce the impression that he's opposed to immigration.
00:38:40.020And I think he hopes that by making clear in very explicit terms that he supports legal immigration, he will have an easier time selling his border wall policies to the other side.
00:38:53.880And I think that conservatives are concerned because they are worried about the cumulative effects of legal immigration.
00:39:01.940I shouldn't say conservatives, really.
00:39:03.280I should say immigration hawks on both sides because the issue does cut across parties a little bit.
00:39:08.740But I would say basically Trump supporters are a little bit alarmed, not because they don't like immigrants,
00:39:13.720but because the Trump phenomenon has partly been based on the legitimate grievance among the American working class that they are being forced to compete with labor that's being imported at a rapid rate from other countries, both legally and illegally.
00:39:36.360But I don't know if it's really such a big deal.
00:39:38.940I think he was just eager to make clear that he's in favor of legal immigration on a night where he was really trying to hit a theme of unifying Americans, reaching out across partisan divides.
00:39:53.260Well, I mean, the thing is, when you bring industrial jobs back, either through changing trade deals or through tariffs, or last week Trump announced a buy American provision,
00:40:05.060which is a form of discrimination against imports, let's be candid.
00:40:08.420When American unemployment is at some of the lowest rates in recent history, you are going to have pressure from some factories, from some employers saying, let us have more workers.
00:40:21.980We need someone who's going to work the drive-through.
00:40:24.800I mean, in Canada we had something called the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
00:40:28.780Basically, every Tim Hortons and a lot of bank tellers were foreign laborers that came in legally, they were legally processed.
00:40:35.680But it was because these employers said we need cheap labor because we don't want to pay $18 to have an indigenous, like an old stock Canadian do it.
00:40:45.700So we need to bring in foreigners to undercut it.
00:40:49.600The whole, in my mind, Joel, the whole promise of Donald Trump to the Midwest and to the working poor is,
00:40:56.360I'm going to give you higher wages by cracking down on foreign imports and cheap illegal workers.
00:41:03.620So, yeah, there's going to be some pain for employers, but hopefully the benefits to millions of working poor Americans will offset that.
00:41:11.800That's, to me, the whole Trump rust belt promise.
00:41:35.980And I also think that, in general, skilled immigrants create more American jobs because skilled immigrants create more value, start more businesses, that sort of thing.
00:41:45.520Not more than Americans, but you're bringing in people who are generally entrepreneurial if you can select those people.
00:41:51.820The problem with illegal immigration is it's unselected.
00:41:55.220People just come if they want to come, and they're entering sectors of the economy where they're competing with low-skilled and semi-skilled American workers.
00:42:04.060Very rarely do they compete in the professional fields, although we do have in California and elsewhere some illegal aliens who are registered members of the state bar and that sort of thing.
00:42:13.020But it's really a phenomenon of competition on the low end.
00:42:18.700My sources tell me that there's massive competition for entry-level warehouse jobs, for example.
00:42:26.940For the most part in our economy, there are more jobs than people right now.
00:42:31.720But for the entry-level jobs, it's still very difficult to get those positions.
00:42:36.620And so that's where you're seeing Americans competing with foreigners, and especially if those foreigners are illegal, but really even if they're legal, you're going to see some pushback against liberal immigration policies.
00:42:47.720So there's some truth to what Trump is saying economically, but I'm not sure that in general the phenomenon of legal immigration is always going to create more competition for American workers or drive down wages.
00:42:59.400I think as long as you're prioritizing skilled immigration, you're going to create more value, create more jobs, create more tax revenues, do all these good things for the American economy, which is why Canada has an immigration policy that prioritizes skills.
00:43:13.220There was an American critic of Trump who said that what we should do with our immigration policy is take Canada's law, stamp Made in America on it, and make it our own.
00:43:22.320Obviously, that's an oversimplification, and not everything is hunky-dory with immigration in Canada.
00:43:26.580I'm aware of that, but the Canadian approach makes more sense than the one we have in the United States, which is outdated by several decades.
00:43:34.840I'm not familiar enough with the American details, but I can tell you in Canada, Justin Trudeau is relaxing every requirement from language skills to the amount of time before a permanent resident can become a Canadian citizen.
00:43:49.140And, of course, his massive new immigration number is 340,000 per year, and we're a country one-tenth your size.
00:43:56.500So imagine 3.5 million migrants a year, half of whom are not economic, half of whom don't have skills.
00:44:02.960He just had a new announcement about bringing in grandparents, which is very sweet, but grandparents come and they go to the front line on pensions and Medicare.
00:44:12.120Anyway, we'll put that aside. I want to talk about your latest article on Breitbart.com called A Wall Deal Should Be Possible.
00:44:20.680That's what we thought during the shutdown. The whole point of the shutdown was to put pressure on the Democrats.
00:44:25.060There has been no wall deal. The Democrats seem to be very resilient on this point.
00:44:30.540I think that Trump's collapse on the shutdown from my perch up here in Canada looked like a sign of weakness.
00:44:39.100I know you said it maybe had some negotiating judo moves there.
00:44:43.680Do you really think there's going to be a wall deal?
00:44:46.000I can't imagine the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Nancy Pelosi would possibly go for it.
00:44:54.720Well, I think you're correct in that politically they may reject the deal.
00:44:59.260The point of my article is that a deal is possible.
00:45:03.520If you take the politics out of it and look at what both sides actually say they want, they're really not that far apart.
00:45:09.380In fact, what Trump is proposing is new border fence, not even a wall, new border fencing along basically 100 new miles of border that are currently unfenced.
00:45:23.620That's what the big fight is about right now.
00:45:26.300Our border with Mexico is about 2,000 miles long.
00:45:28.860So you're talking about 5% of the border.
00:45:32.640And already some two-thirds of that border is unfenced, but a third of it is fenced.
00:45:38.360Now, some of that's pedestrian fence, some of it's vehicle fence, some of the pedestrian fence is bad.
00:45:44.500But in terms of new fencing, he's not proposing that much, at least right now.
00:45:48.900So theoretically, you might be able to reach a deal.
00:45:51.460I mean, what is 100 miles of additional fence really in the long run, especially because it's in an area of Texas where the cartels are sending people across the border and making billions of dollars, presumably doing it.
00:46:05.740So I think that there's a zone of potential agreement that actually exists.
00:46:12.700The problem is Democrats don't want Trump to have a win of any kind.
00:48:25.000It may not be built by then because Democrats will sue and try to use the courts to stop him.
00:48:30.100But with so many Trump judges now on the bench, thanks to the way the Democrats destroyed the filibuster in the previous administration, hoping that Hillary Clinton would win,
00:48:38.800I think Trump will eventually get a good hearing at the Supreme Court or somewhere else where they say the president has the right to do this and the construction will begin.
00:48:46.360I do think there will still be unresolved questions about American asylum laws.
00:48:52.040There are going to be areas of the fence that still need to be upgraded.
00:48:55.440There are areas of our policy with Mexico that will need attention because right now we haven't done that much really to stop the cartels.
00:49:02.140The cartels are the ones who really keep this flow going.
00:49:04.920And that would require doing things that might alienate the Mexican government on economic issues.
00:49:12.520But in terms of actually building the structure, I think Trump's voter base will be satisfied, whether through legislation or emergency action,
00:49:20.220that the president is at least trying everything possible and risking everything to fulfill this promise.
00:51:12.360You've got to enforce red lines when you draw them.
00:51:14.360And you've got to follow through on promises when you make them.
00:51:16.340And that's what he understands, that his presidency will be weakened and his foreign policy will be weakened unless he can follow through on this domestic priority.
00:51:24.060Well, thanks very much for your time and your insight, Joel.
00:51:59.600Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about an Angus Reid poll that shows Canadians in Western Canada would support a separatist party.
00:54:52.560And you're so right it didn't have to be that way.
00:54:54.780You know, I read, just as an aside, I read today that the United States is now the largest exporter of oil to the United Kingdom in more than 50 years.
00:55:06.040And I read that and I thought, that should have been us.