Juno News - Justin Trudeau has a lot of explaining to do

00:00:00.000 There's a whole lot of questions still floating around about this WE Charity scandal up on

00:00:09.440 Parliament Hill, but if we only get an answer to one question, this is the one it should be.

00:00:15.200 Who was the public servant or public servants who randomly came up with this idea that WE

00:00:21.040 Charity must be given the sole source contract to administer this pandemic relief funding program

00:00:27.280 for students. Now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau originally said this has nothing to do with me,

00:00:32.000 it was entirely the public service. He made them the fall guy on the whole thing.

00:00:36.000 Then he finally fessed up and he said okay fine, it was a cabinet decision and I did not recuse myself

00:00:42.240 from it despite the fact that his own family, his mother mostly, but also his brother and his wife,

00:00:47.280 had had financial connections to the WE Charity. And to say it was a cabinet decision, let's be

00:00:52.560 honest, what this means is it was Justin Trudeau's decision. Because where does the buck stop at

00:00:56.880 cabinet at the guy at the top, at the prime minister himself? So he made the final call in it, but the

00:01:02.400 government still maintains that the public service originated the idea. Let's unpack that for a second

00:01:08.160 and let's take a look at really just how ridiculous and ludicrous that whole idea is. If it's true,

00:01:14.800 wow, you've got the public service basically stepping forward and saying they are incompetent and they

00:01:20.640 can't fulfill one of their core basic functions. I really don't believe that they said that.

00:01:27.440 So you have a whole bunch of coronavirus relief programs. You've got this one that WE Charity was

00:01:31.680 going to administer, you've got the CERB that we're all talking about, you've got the wage subsidy,

00:01:36.160 but there's a bunch of other niche ones. In total, there's well over 10 of them. And yet the public

00:01:41.120 service has stepped forward and picked one of these, just one of these more than 10 programs and said,

00:01:46.400 we can't possibly deliver this fund, even though they do this sort of thing for all different

00:01:52.000 sectors all across the country every day of their working lives. And not only did they say,

00:01:57.440 we can't possibly administer this program, which is something that we've been doing our entire careers,

00:02:02.480 programs similar to it, but WE Charity is the only one that can do it such that they need a sole

00:02:08.320 source contract. We can't even send it out to tender. That's a pretty hard thing to believe. So

00:02:14.960 produce the goods, produce the communications, the documents, name the names of the individuals

00:02:20.480 in the public service who proposed all of this. Now that's what the ethics commissioner may do.

00:02:26.640 Mero Dion is tasked primarily with looking at the ethics of Justin Trudeau's role in all of this,

00:02:31.440 but we've also got committees looking into it. They should produce these goods and these documents

00:02:36.400 because Trudeau maintains, yes, the public service floated the idea. Let's see proof in all of that,

00:02:42.800 because that is still a really hard thing to believe.

Juno News - July 20, 2020