Juno News - February 15, 2019


Is it time for Justin Trudeau to become his own man？


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

190.65591

Word count

623

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Jody Wilson-Ray Bould has been accused of lying to the Globe and Mail about his role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The PMO has denied the allegations and says they are false. What does that mean for the investigation? And what will happen next?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 The way I see it, there are two big things that need to happen on the SNC-Lavalin file.
00:00:09.920 We've got a lot of talk about the Justice Committee, what they're going to do and whether
00:00:13.360 or not the Liberal MPs are going to fulfill what a lot of people are calling them to do,
00:00:17.720 which is bring PMO staffers and senior bureaucrats to account at that committee.
00:00:22.840 I say it's all going to be a bit of a ruse, though, because the chair of that committee
00:00:26.240 is appointed by the Prime Minister, and you better believe any report that comes from
00:00:30.740 that committee, the PMO will have their hands all over it.
00:00:33.960 No, that doesn't suffice.
00:00:35.900 The first thing that we need to have here is some outside, respected person to come in
00:00:41.000 and tell us, is there something here or is there nothing to see here, folks?
00:00:45.280 Go home, this is false, as the Prime Minister says.
00:00:48.380 Most people are not too inclined to believe the latter.
00:00:51.120 So what options do we have?
00:00:52.460 Well, we have the Ethics Commissioner, but he was appointed pretty much by the Prime Minister.
00:00:58.060 Our other options?
00:00:59.460 We've got something that could be akin to the Gomery Inquiry, a public commission and inquiry
00:01:04.340 that is different than any other sort of committee.
00:01:06.940 The problem with the Gomery Inquiry, Paul Martin brought that in to basically investigate things
00:01:11.640 that happened during the Jean Chrétien years.
00:01:13.980 You're not going to call for something like that on yourself.
00:01:17.180 What does that leave us with?
00:01:18.560 An RCMP probe.
00:01:20.280 The challenge is, what is the specific evidence that they're going to be using right now to
00:01:24.140 justify opening the probe?
00:01:26.640 Right now, it's just media reports and questions about who said what to whom.
00:01:31.560 But we're going to have to get something because this story can't be allowed to fester.
00:01:36.080 Number two, and here's a really important one.
00:01:38.380 There needs to be a fall guy.
00:01:41.140 Heads must roll.
00:01:42.900 Because even if this story is false, as Trudeau says, and I don't believe that one minute,
00:01:47.640 but even if that's true, then someone should pay for spreading this story.
00:01:52.760 Maybe it was a senior staffer who didn't actually know what they're talking about.
00:01:56.720 That person has to get the boot. 0.64
00:01:58.180 Or a medium staffer, junior staffer.
00:01:59.760 Although I don't know why the Globe would run a story that hinges on a junior staffer's
00:02:04.760 word.
00:02:05.760 If this came from higher up, if this is true, if the PMO did press undue influence on Jody
00:02:12.760 Wilson-Ray Bould, at the very least, we're not talking about legal processes here, but
00:02:17.760 at the very least, someone in the PMO has to go.
00:02:23.260 Someone very senior.
00:02:26.500 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been relying on Jerry Butts for years.
00:02:30.660 You look back at different sources and he seems to be the guy who pushed Trudeau to enter
00:02:34.420 office and run for the leadership in the first place.
00:02:37.540 You know, there's an old saying out there, you dance with the one that brum you, but
00:02:40.800 eventually you have to cut things loose.
00:02:43.160 George W. Bush, he was accused for the longest time of being a puppet of Dick Cheney.
00:02:48.180 But finally, he isolated Cheney.
00:02:49.980 He said, sorry Dick, you're not in on the meetings anymore.
00:02:52.660 He became his own man.
00:02:55.220 Has the time come for Justin Trudeau?
00:02:57.740 To become his own man, to cut ties with those senior people.
00:03:01.780 They've been around him for a long time.
00:03:03.360 Usually you don't keep a chief of staff for your whole tenure.
00:03:06.460 You don't keep a principal advisor for your whole tenure.
00:03:09.160 Maybe this is Justin Trudeau's opportunity to make a clean break, but will he do it?
00:03:15.460 Don't hold your breath.