Juno News - September 15, 2019


Canadians deserve answers from the RCMP

Mentioned
Carmen Ortiz Jody Wilson-Raybould Jeffrey DeLille
Federal leaders are afraid of Quebec Government money is going to Liberal ridings

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

156.36

Word count

649

Sentence count

34

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the Prime Minister s office is being blocked in its efforts to investigate the involvement of senior members of government in a criminal obstruction of justice attempt. Meanwhile, a senior member of the National Security Agency has been charged with five counts under the Security of Information Act and the Official Secrets Act, including breach of trust by public officials.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.040 The RCMP have featured prominently in the news this week. First, because they are being blocked
00:00:16.720 in their efforts to investigate the involvement of the Prime Minister's office in the SNC-Lavalin
00:00:21.840 scandal and whether there was a criminal obstruction of justice attempt by senior
00:00:26.720 members of government, including the Prime Minister himself. Just as an aside, the RCMP released
00:00:33.560 a statement saying there wasn't an investigation, but rather an examination. Presumably they are
00:00:39.720 trying to stay at arm's length from the federal election campaign, but that is just terribly
00:00:44.700 disingenuous. Former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould has told us that she was interviewed
00:00:51.920 by the RCMP first last April, then more recently at some point in the past month. That says
00:00:58.160 the force has been involved looking into the circumstances for at least five months. That
00:01:04.160 said, it is important to understand the RCMP is an investigative and enforcement organization.
00:01:11.160 They do investigations. My doctor does examinations. In the same week, news broke that a senior person
00:01:19.160 in their organization, ostensibly the director of their IT security, Cameron Ortiz, had been
00:01:24.720 arrested and charged with five offenses, three counts under the Security of Information Act,
00:01:30.040 what was formerly the Official Secrets Act, and two criminal code offenses, including breach
00:01:34.480 of trust by a public official. And more charges are pending, according to prosecutors.
00:01:40.540 This is serious stuff. If convicted, he is looking at some very serious jail time. The last
00:01:46.580 time I remember a case like this was that of former Royal Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant
00:01:50.880 Jeffrey DeLille, who was convicted of passing information from the top-secret military intelligence
00:01:56.120 network, dubbed Sub-Ghost, to the Russian intelligence agency, the GRU. He got sentenced to 20 years
00:02:03.080 in jail. In this case, Ortiz was employed as the Director General of Intelligence responsible
00:02:08.560 for cybersecurity. In that role, he could see virtually everything that exists within the National
00:02:14.000 Police Forces computer network. It is alleged that he tried to sell top-secret information
00:02:20.040 back in 2015 and was preparing other files to do the same at the time of his arrest. There
00:02:25.960 is no information to indicate what that information was or who is preparing it for. Was it a criminal
00:02:31.340 organization like the Mafia or the Hells Angels, or was it a nation-state like China? We don't
00:02:36.840 know, and the RCMP has said nothing to tell us whether or not our national security had been
00:02:41.640 breached or what the risk is to Canada. I have a problem with all of this. The RCMP needs
00:02:48.180 to be more forthright with Canadians. In the first case, whatever they are doing and what
00:02:53.520 they know should rightfully be known to Canadians before they cast a ballot on October 21st.
00:02:59.780 We know from the Ethics Commissioner that, at the very least, the Prime Minister breached
00:03:03.760 at least one section of the ethics legislation. And even at that, he was not able to interview
00:03:09.700 some key people and review all requisite documents. Although it would also appear there also may
00:03:16.240 be a prima facie case to be met for obstruction of justice, if this has been borne out by the RCMP,
00:03:22.240 Canadians need to know. In the second case, the security of our nation may have been put at risk,
00:03:28.180 and we have no idea what, if any, damage has been done, and the statement made by the RCMP
00:03:34.460 doesn't do anything to reassure Canadians. While I understand the integrity of an investigation
00:03:41.000 must be maintained, keeping Canadians in the dark or trying to minimize what they are doing 0.75
00:03:45.920 by calling an investigation an examination is simply wrong. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.
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