Juno News - April 09, 2019


Ethics investigator is Liberal cabinet minister's sister-in-law


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

172.84326

Word count

569

Sentence count

26


Summary

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

Jody Wilson-Raybould has accused the Prime Minister of pressuring her attorney general to take a particular decision in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution. And now, the Ethics Commissioner is taking a leave of absence for reasons that have yet to be explained or articulated to Canadians.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau is once again under investigation by Canada's Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner.
00:00:08.520 It's not the first time, and well, let's face it, it may not be the last time either that Trudeau has faced such an investigation,
00:00:15.380 but this one in particular I'd say is the highest profile of all of them.
00:00:19.180 It involves the allegations put forth by Jody Wilson-Raybould that Justin Trudeau and the Prime Minister's office
00:00:25.040 has put pressure on her as the Attorney General to take a particular decision in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution.
00:00:32.620 The problem is that as much as Trudeau likes to stand up and say he's cooperating fully with the office
00:00:37.660 and that Canadians can have faith in this institution,
00:00:41.180 there's a reason for all of us in this country to be very skeptical of what's going to happen.
00:00:46.040 You see, when this story exploded onto the scene in the first place and we knew that there was going to be an investigation,
00:00:51.340 not long after news came that the Ethics Commissioner was taking a prolonged leave of absence
00:00:57.700 for reasons that have still not been particularly explained or articulated to Canadians.
00:01:02.720 The Acting Director of Investigations right now is a woman by the name of Martine Richard.
00:01:08.980 Now, I don't know Martine Richard. I've never met her as far as I understand
00:01:11.940 and know nothing about her except one key detail that gives cause to question,
00:01:17.260 and that is that she is the sister-in-law of a Member of Parliament.
00:01:22.220 She is the sister-in-law of Dominic LeBlanc, not just an MP, but a Liberal MP.
00:01:27.200 Not just a Liberal MP, but a Liberal Cabinet Minister.
00:01:31.500 Yes, she's the sister-in-law of one of the hand-picked representatives of Justin Trudeau's government, Dominic LeBlanc.
00:01:38.100 Dominic LeBlanc's wife is named Jolaine Richard.
00:01:40.640 Her sister is Martine Richard, the Acting Director of Investigations for the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner's office.
00:01:49.340 Now, this story was initially broken by Democracy Watch,
00:01:52.400 and there were a few things in their initial reporting that gave me cause to question.
00:01:56.040 For example, they made a couple of factual errors.
00:01:58.200 Even the name of Mr. LeBlanc they got wrong.
00:02:00.680 And also, they couldn't completely prove that the two Richard women were actually related.
00:02:06.300 Well, the office in question has now confirmed this relationship to Blacklock's reporter,
00:02:12.180 a great resource of Parliament Hill reporters.
00:02:15.780 And this proves that there is a familial connection between the woman investigating the Liberal government
00:02:21.360 and a high-profile representative of that very government.
00:02:25.000 Now, how the office is going to avoid this conflict being an issue, I have no idea.
00:02:30.260 One suggestion that was proposed by Democracy Watch
00:02:33.020 is that the investigation is handed off to a provincial ethics commissioner
00:02:36.980 who has no interaction with this government
00:02:39.040 and thus is a little bit further from the degrees of separation
00:02:43.260 that we now see are limited to basically two.
00:02:46.740 So, my question to anyone in the Liberal government right now
00:02:51.020 is how can Canadians have trust in an investigation being done
00:02:54.560 by a relative of someone who's effectively part of the government being investigated?
00:03:01.220 This is not rocket science.
00:03:02.580 This is not trying to drag things that are very disparate and disconnected in nature
00:03:07.700 into one common thread.
00:03:09.320 This is a very easy and fundamental distinction
00:03:11.760 that the government, it seems like, was hoping that no one would notice.
00:03:15.860 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.