Juno News - August 16, 2020


Another week of Liberal scandals


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

143.53766

Word count

683

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Another week in Ottawa, and some things just seem to remain the same. There are more details on the WE scandal that paints the government of Justin Trudeau in an even worse light. Trudeau has gone off on yet another vacation even though he missed one of the only four days this summer that he designated Parliament to sit. In a story reported on True North, the Prime Minister has logged 48 personal days and 91 days off in 2019.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Another week in Ottawa and some things just seem to remain the same.
00:00:10.140 There are more details on the WE scandal that paints the government of Justin Trudeau in an
00:00:15.360 even worse light. Trudeau has gone off on yet another vacation even though he missed one of
00:00:23.160 the only four days this summer that he designated Parliament to sit. In a story reported on True
00:00:29.720 North the Prime Minister has logged 48 personal days and a whopping 91 days off in 2019. This week
00:00:38.100 our part-time Prime Minister is in Ottawa taking personal time according to the official website
00:00:43.800 of the PMO. But he's been spotted in a small place in Ontario's cottage country on Georgian Bay and the
00:00:51.240 locals have posted photos of heavily armed RCMP tactical boats patrolling in the area. Reportedly
00:00:58.060 is some residents of the Weston family who own Loblaws. A company, oddly enough, that Trudeau gave
00:01:05.380 12 million dollars to last year ostensibly to install environmentally friendly refrigeration
00:01:11.420 in some of their stores. This is perhaps yet another conflict of interest scandal in the making.
00:01:18.480 Since the WE scandal broke, the Prime Minister has been in his office exactly twice. Once to hold a
00:01:25.620 press conference to explain and apologize for his behavior. The other was to testify before the
00:01:31.500 Standing Committee on Finance in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, while Trudeau was bagging
00:01:37.620 rays on the beach in Georgian Bay, the WE scandal continued to unravel. We learned that Youth Minister
00:01:44.860 Bardish Chaggar spoke to the Kielbergers just five days before the contract proposal was due to be
00:01:51.220 submitted. Chaggar testified she was alone on that call. Yet in the WE charity notes of the call,
00:01:58.160 it indicates her chief of staff, and perhaps others from her office, were on the call.
00:02:04.180 Quite apart from anything else, why would any minister communicate with somebody who was preparing a bid
00:02:11.080 to do business with government that was worth over 912 million dollars in advance of the presentation
00:02:18.680 being made? That's just wrong. That's not how good stewards of the public purse behave.
00:02:24.460 In the last couple of days, we have learned just what this scandal has cost the Kielbergers, 0.85
00:02:29.560 as they laid off staff in Ontario and in the UK. They were also said to be looking to divest some of
00:02:36.060 their not unsubstantial real estate holdings in downtown Toronto to help pay the bills now that
00:02:42.400 the government has turned off the money faucet. Then there was the report of someone yelling
00:02:47.680 obscenities at the constituency office of infrastructure minister Catherine McKenna.
00:02:54.500 Evidently, the male used a derogatory epithet in the process, calling her a vulgar name for female 1.00
00:03:01.300 genital genitalia. It has since been reported that the Ottawa police have opened up a hate crime
00:03:07.080 investigation in the wake of the incident. Hate crime is defined in the criminal code of Canada.
00:03:15.080 It involves race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. What McKenna was called may have been rude,
00:03:23.160 but it certainly doesn't meet the definition of hate crime as in the criminal code. Yet, the police are
00:03:30.580 investigating. So, if I have this straight, call the minister a nasty name and it triggers a police
00:03:36.820 investigation. Try to defraud the Canadian taxpayer of $912 million and nothing from the RCMP.
00:03:46.100 And then just last night, we learned of a $20 million contract to a company associated with
00:03:51.660 heritage minister Stephen Gilbo. In a story broken by the post-millennial, the Liberals awarded a contract
00:03:59.200 to cycle capital management to cycle capital management, who apparently paid Gilbo as recently
00:04:05.320 as 2018 for advice. It is not known at this point whether Gilbo recused himself from the cabinet table
00:04:12.600 when the contract was being considered. But the stench lingers. And what are the Liberals doing giving
00:04:20.620 taxpayer dollars to a venture capital company anyway? That in itself defies logic. And on what
00:04:27.780 government should be spending our precious tax dollars on. The Liberal machine grinds on. Scandal after
00:04:35.980 scandal. Corruption example on top of corruption example. For these Liberals, plus ça change.
00:04:42.620 For True North, I'm Leo Knight.