Juno News - August 23, 2020


Here's what we learned from the WE documents

Topics
WE scandal documents
Mentioned
Bill Morneau Justin Trudeau Chris Fox Kielbergers Minister Telford Claire Katie
The Trudeau government is an opioid dealer Erin O'Toole wins Conservative leadership

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

145.8

Word count

821

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of the document dump by the Liberal government, we take a look at the details of the WE scandal and try to figure out who was up to the job of running the project, and why. Finally, we hear that the Mounties are investigating the whole thing.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Earlier this week, after the Prime Minister parled Parliament effectively ending several
00:00:10.440 committee investigations into the WE scandal, a document dump was done by the Liberals providing
00:00:16.080 over 5,000 pages of mind-numbing bureaucratic dribble, memos, emails, and notes. I spent
00:00:23.240 several hours on Thursday and Friday after the document dump reviewing the whole trove of
00:00:29.000 documents, well those that weren't redacted at any rate. I will never get those hours back and I hope
00:00:35.320 to recover the IQ points I lost trying to decipher the bureaucraties. What is clear is that the
00:00:43.540 Kielberger brothers were up to their necks in this scheme from the get-go. Their first proposal for 0.75
00:00:50.000 the concept was done on April 9th, weeks before it was considered by cabinet on May 22nd, and only a
00:00:57.220 couple of weeks after the COVID-19 lockdown orders. It is also clear that the Prime Minister's office
00:01:03.540 was involved long before the day that Justin Trudeau says he was first informed of the deal.
00:01:08.800 So, was the Prime Minister lying, or were there elements within his office who went off on their
00:01:15.820 own tangent to work on a project worth nearly a billion dollars? In the private sector, which pays
00:01:22.340 all the bills and funds everything government, the amount of people in place for a job depends on
00:01:29.540 the amount of work there is to do. In the public sector, paid for by the private sector, the amount
00:01:35.780 of work increases based on the number of people there are to do it. It's backwards. That is so evident
00:01:43.780 in reviewing these documents. The talk about nothing important, planning a program which will accomplish
00:01:50.980 the square root of bugger all, and throw around huge numbers of taxpayer dollars as though they are
00:01:57.700 talking about peanuts. Clearly they are not good stewards of the public purse. Not that this is a surprise 0.95
00:02:06.100 when we are talking about a government that is running a deficit in excess of 300 billion dollars,
00:02:12.820 and a national debt of over a trillion dollars for a country of just 35 million people.
00:02:20.740 Claire as well are the Kielbergers are way too close and palsy with senior members of the 0.98
00:02:26.100 Liberal government. An email to Finance Minister Bill Morneau is started with the salutation,
00:02:32.340 Hi Bill, as opposed to Dear Mr. Minister, or to the Chief of Staff in the PMO as Hi Katie,
00:02:40.340 as opposed to Dear Ms. Telford, as one might expect in an official communication. There are so many
00:02:47.380 anomalies in the explanations offered by the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister in their testimony
00:02:53.140 before the Parliamentary Finance Committee. As well, starting with the claim by the Prime Minister that he
00:03:00.180 only heard of the project on May 8th. There was a COVID committee meeting on May 5th with all senior
00:03:06.980 players attending, which approved in principle the appointment of WE as a third party to deliver on
00:03:12.660 this incredibly expensive boonduggle, according to a timeline supplied by the Privy Council Office.
00:03:19.860 Not included in that timeline is any reference to a phone conference that occurred on April 18th,
00:03:26.100 which prominently mentioned WE according to the notes of that call. It is not clear who made the notes.
00:03:33.700 Also striking is what can only be described as a CYA memo authored by Christiane Fox,
00:03:38.820 the Deputy Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. It appears to be a memo to file in which she denies
00:03:45.380 a meeting described in an email included in the documents. It also says this, quote,
00:03:51.220 In addition, there is an April 20th email I authored that suggests the WE charity was working with the
00:03:56.900 offices of the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister at that time, and I wanted to indicate
00:04:02.820 that I have been informed these discussions did not take place, end quote. What?
00:04:10.820 The date of the memo was August 8th, weeks after the scandal broke and the Prime Minister was already
00:04:16.340 under fire from all sides. Whatever else may have been achieved by the document dump, it has not
00:04:23.780 cleared anything up. If anything, the documents further muddy the waters and show, at the least,
00:04:30.660 the PMO was up to their elbows in this whole mess very early on. It also shows how fast and loose
00:04:38.580 the Liberals and the bureaucracy play with taxpayer dollars. Finally, we've been told the RCMP is,
00:04:46.660 quote, examining, end quote, the whole Liberal slash WE charity deal. Well, I've been around the RCMP
00:04:53.060 in policing since 1975. I have never heard of the RCMP examining anything. They are either investigating,
00:05:00.660 or they are not. Why the Mounties would engage in such baffle gab is puzzling. The matter is under the
00:05:07.700 investigation by the National Police Force, or it isn't. You go to your doctor for an examination.
00:05:14.900 The police conduct investigations. The RCMP should be straight with Canadians on what it is exactly 0.99
00:05:21.540 they're doing in this. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.