Juno News - March 02, 2019


Jody Wilson-Raybould exposes Trudeau in bombshell testimony


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

181.86465

Word Count

593

Sentence Count

25


Summary

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

At long last, former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould was able to speak her truth. She did so for hours in front of a Justice Committee hearing that at times was tense. But Canadians finally got to hear in Jody's own words how she alleges the Prime Minister s office and the Prime minister himself pressured her into trying to block a prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.300 At long last, former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould was able to speak her truth.
00:00:05.520 She did so for hours in front of a Justice Committee hearing that at times was a little bit tense.
00:00:10.520 But Canadians finally got to hear in Jody Wilson-Raybould's own words
00:00:14.180 how she alleges the Prime Minister's office and the Prime Minister himself
00:00:18.340 pressured her into trying to block a prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.
00:00:23.800 Now as far as information that we learned from this case goes,
00:00:27.140 there wasn't much that was new, but we did get a much more concrete example,
00:00:31.820 in fact several concrete examples from Jody Wilson-Raybould
00:00:35.300 of how the months leading up to her demotion and ultimately her resignation from Cabinet unfolded.
00:00:41.460 She detailed 10 phone calls, 10 in-person meetings involving her, her Chief of Staff,
00:00:46.880 and almost a dozen players in the Prime Minister's office,
00:00:50.080 including, as I mentioned, Justin Trudeau himself.
00:00:52.540 And all of these, which she's documented meticulously through emails,
00:00:57.120 notes, phone calls, and in-person meetings,
00:00:59.760 show that the government was trying to get her to take a particular decision,
00:01:04.260 not because it was in the legal best interests of the country,
00:01:07.720 but because it was in the interests of the Liberal Party of Canada.
00:01:11.780 And this is something that Jody Wilson-Raybould said in her testimony
00:01:15.240 she did not think was necessarily illegal.
00:01:17.640 But even so, the question has not been throughout this case whether we're talking about illegality,
00:01:23.160 but whether we are talking about a lack of ethics going up to the highest levels of the government.
00:01:27.940 And what do we see in this?
00:01:29.240 Justin Trudeau, according to Ms. Wilson-Raybould,
00:01:31.920 citing himself as a Quebec MP,
00:01:34.560 as somehow being relevant to the legal jurisprudence of the SNC-Lavalin case.
00:01:39.580 More concerningly, we have the Chief Privy Council Officer of Canada, Michael Wernick,
00:01:43.780 supposedly the head non-partisan civil servant in Canada,
00:01:48.220 running interference for Justin Trudeau in a political capacity.
00:01:53.500 Justin Trudeau has managed to overtake the civil service of the country,
00:01:57.280 and that's one of the most damning pieces of information that we get from Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony.
00:02:02.680 I happen to agree with Andrew Scheer here,
00:02:04.740 when he says that Justin Trudeau has lost the moral authority to lead.
00:02:08.620 Over this affair, he's now facing his fifth ethics investigation.
00:02:12.500 Remember, we're talking about the first Prime Minister in Canada's history
00:02:15.940 to have already been found guilty of ethics violations,
00:02:19.200 and that was, of course, for the Aga Khan Billionaire Island trip to the Bahamas.
00:02:23.300 This is much more problematic than that,
00:02:25.660 and I think Canadians are starting to see why.
00:02:28.080 Now, Trudeau has gotten up and he said with a straight face,
00:02:30.720 I therefore completely disagree with the former Attorney General's characterization of events.
00:02:37.880 This is the same Prime Minister who in the past says that he and a woman in Kokanee
00:02:42.480 just had different recollections of the same event.
00:02:45.340 Perhaps this is another one of those examples.
00:02:47.840 But one thing is for sure, Canadians cannot let this go.
00:02:51.600 Eight months is a long time away,
00:02:53.180 and there's a lot of things that Justin Trudeau is trying to try to do
00:02:56.100 to push this off of the table for Canadians.
00:02:58.660 We can't let him get away with it.
00:03:00.780 At True North, we're not letting the government get away with it,
00:03:03.260 but we need your support to keep this work going.
00:03:06.080 Please consider joining the Heritage Club or the Patriot Club
00:03:08.900 by making a small monthly contribution
00:03:11.120 allowing us to keep doing the work we're doing for you.
00:03:14.080 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.