00:00:00.000Fans of political drama sure got their fill on Tuesday, budget day, or as I like to call it,
00:00:10.520lav, scam, distraction, technique day. Although it didn't work. It backfired.
00:00:17.200So Tuesday morning, budget day, before Bill Marneau releases the budget, you have the
00:00:21.480Justice Committee set to meet to finally, finally talk about whether or not they would
00:00:26.500have Jody Wilson-Raybould back for a second testimony to talk about all the things that
00:00:31.180Michael Wernick and Jerry Butts had said where they basically said her original testimony was bogus,
00:00:36.900that it was all lies. Something we have to get to the bottom of because the issue is obstruction
00:00:42.260of justice is at stake. Did the PMO interfere with the justice system? Major question. Big ticket
00:00:48.500question. It can't be left to fester. Now the simple fact that they were having that meeting on Tuesday
00:00:54.760was in and of itself something of a scandal. Because the week before, Justice Committee had
00:00:59.840had a meeting, a televised meeting, one that media could be at, one that a lot of politicians were at,
00:01:04.840people were viewing it, I watched it on the live stream, everyone was live tweeting it, they said
00:01:09.620no, we're not going to have it here. And they voted to defer it, to close that meeting and push it back
00:01:15.600to the following week, which was Tuesday, which was budget day. And that was what first got people
00:01:21.260crying cover up. The Conservatives and the NDP outraged at what was going on.
00:01:26.340But that part of the cover up worked. It was rescheduled to Tuesday, to budget day. There seemed to be two reasons for this. One, it would not be televised.
00:01:42.420Canadians wouldn't be able to watch on live stream, and you wouldn't be able to get the clips of the arguments and the battles and just what went down on the public record for everybody to see. And of course, it would be budget day. So we'd all be talking about that. Now if the Liberals had just left it at that,
00:01:59.420if they had let this meeting happen, well, no big deal. I mean, the Conservatives, what would they do? Just shout cover up like they'd done last week because of what happened the week before? Well, they could have, but it would have been a little bit over the top.
00:02:26.640You have your committee meeting, and who knows what would have happened. Maybe they could have done another delay tactic, and perhaps the Liberal majority on the Justice Committee could just keep dragging the thing out
00:02:36.340so people lose interest, so it gets boring, so the public stop paying attention. That might have been a tactic that had worked. But no. Instead, what they had to do on Tuesday morning was vote to shut it down.
00:02:49.280Even though it was already secret. Even though they were already doing the delay tactics. Even though, who knows what would have happened when they'd met, but they voted to shut it down.
00:02:58.280Which got the opposition doubly, triply outraged than before, leading to calls of cover up while Bill Morneau was trying to make the budget speech.
00:03:07.580People shouting out questions of order, questions of privilege, stamping their feet, storming out the doors of the House of Commons.
00:03:13.840Now, I don't necessarily approve of this sort of behavior, but look, this is an unprecedented time. A flat out cover up.
00:03:34.620And it didn't work. Because we're not all talking about the budget. I mean, a lot of people are talking about this absurd thing where the Liberals want to give people 10% of a down payment on a new home.
00:03:46.600Even people in the housing market are going, that's kind of wild. We're not sure if that's the government's job.
00:03:52.400This could have some major unintended consequences. Face a lot of blowback for the economy.
00:03:58.380Isn't this the sort of thing that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did that helped play a role in precipitating the economic collapse?
00:04:05.080Why, yes. It's actually kind of similar. Not apples to apples, but maybe not the path you want to go down.
00:04:11.460So really, that's the whole budget conversation. People upset at a couple elements, and then they go back to talking about lab scam.
00:04:18.500So the lab scam distraction technique failed.
00:04:21.580But I'm watching all of this, and I'm still trying to figure out, why were they just so aggressive in shutting it down?
00:04:28.720I mean, they did this shameful thing where they put forward a motion, the Liberals, saying,
00:04:32.280we instead need to talk about hate crimes, and we need to use our time to study how hate crimes are on the rise on the Internet,
00:04:38.780and we've got to bring in Google and Facebook to clamp down on all this and regulate the Internet.
00:04:42.880This is something that they've been going on about a lot.
00:04:45.180Now, if you're genuine, and you're sincere, and they do believe they have a hate crime problem,
00:04:49.620why are they using it as a prop, just a cynical political device to kind of turn the page in all of this?
00:04:55.480So you've also got to question their sincerity on that angle.
00:04:59.640But I'm watching all of this, and I'm thinking, they are so aggressively shutting this down.
00:05:03.900They know there's going to be blowback.
00:05:05.840Why? If there's nothing to see here, if it really is just political turmoil, let it play out.
00:05:12.220Unless, of course, there actually are potential legal consequences.
00:05:17.760Unless, as Conservative MP Lisa Raitt has said,
00:05:20.480there's a reason why everybody in the PMO has lawyered up, not all of them, but some of them have lawyered up,
00:05:26.660and there are different lawyers for different individuals.
00:05:30.860Do they believe that there is going to be an RCMP probe?
00:05:34.160Is the Prime Minister's office concerned that there perhaps will be criminal charges
00:05:38.580for some of the people involved in this whole scene?
00:05:41.680Maybe, and maybe that explains exactly why they're pretty much involved in a fight for their lives right now.
00:05:48.720Why we saw such an aggressive attempt at a cover-up.