Juno News - February 11, 2019


Justin Trudeau must be held accountable on SNC-Lavalin

Topics
SNC-Lavalin scandal
Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Jody Wilson-Raybould Justin Trudeau Harper
The True North Report： Andrew Lawton and Leo Knight discuss the latest on the PMO and SNC-Lavalin BREAKING： Jody Wilson-Raybould resigns from cabinet

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

153.51

Word count

553

Sentence count

29

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada's former attorney general, may have been demoted from her position because of her refusal to comply with pressure from the Prime Minister's Office to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin corruption case.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 It's been several days since the news broke that suggested Jody Wilson-Raybould,
00:00:06.860 Canada's former Attorney General, may in fact have been demoted from her position
00:00:11.180 because of a refusal to comply with pressure from the Prime Minister's office
00:00:16.160 to intervene in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering firm
00:00:21.440 that has quite a sordid track record when it comes to corruption probes and bribery scandals.
00:00:27.340 Since this story broke, no one in the government has deviated from Justin Trudeau's favorite talking points
00:00:33.680 that neither he nor anyone in his office directed Jody Wilson-Raybould to take any action in the SNC-Lavalin case.
00:00:42.220 The Trudeau government has, through Trudeau himself, through spokespeople to the Prime Minister,
00:00:46.740 through the new Attorney General, not deviated from that line
00:00:50.740 that Prime Minister's office staff did not direct Jody Wilson-Raybould.
00:00:56.140 The obvious questions when someone only uses one phrasing of a sentence is,
00:01:01.180 what are they trying to hide?
00:01:02.680 Did they pressure in some other way?
00:01:04.760 Did someone from a different department pressure Jody Wilson-Raybould?
00:01:08.120 These are questions to which we don't know the answer,
00:01:10.840 and currently there's no willingness from the government to provide transparency in this issue at all.
00:01:16.660 The former Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, is claiming solicitor-client privilege
00:01:20.840 prevents her from divulging what happened in the course of her representing Canada as its Attorney General.
00:01:26.380 But there's a problem with that.
00:01:27.860 You see, the Government of Canada exists for one reason only,
00:01:31.060 and that is to serve the people of Canada.
00:01:33.780 Which means that the Government of Canada's lawyer, the Attorney General,
00:01:37.720 is ultimately there to represent the people.
00:01:41.000 You can't represent the government without representing the people that government represents.
00:01:45.240 Which means the Attorney General needs to be accountable to the people.
00:01:49.080 This is not just her representing some corporation in ongoing litigation.
00:01:53.560 It's her serving as the country's lawyer,
00:01:56.200 which certainly should require some accountability to the country itself. 0.99
00:02:01.620 And what's worse than this is that we have Trudeau showing himself to be a hypocrite once again. 0.96
00:02:06.540 In 2013 and 2014, when he was just the third-party leader, 0.96
00:02:11.320 he would often talk about how the Harper government at the time was not being transparent.
00:02:15.920 And he said that he was going to be the new age of transparency.
00:02:20.180 He was going to bring that in.
00:02:22.080 Most notably, he promised that government information should be open by default.
00:02:27.340 Transparency by default.
00:02:28.920 He used those words as in everything should be for the public to know
00:02:31.920 unless there's a reason otherwise.
00:02:34.420 As opposed to picking and choosing what the government should be transparent about.
00:02:39.840 It's amazing how soon he forgot that promise.
00:02:42.320 Here we have a case where the government could very easily waive
00:02:45.180 that solicitor-client privilege to allow there to be transparency.
00:02:48.860 The government could comply with the calls from the opposition
00:02:51.760 for an open investigation and probe into this.
00:02:55.200 But instead, they're relying on one single line.
00:02:58.780 One single sentence that the Prime Minister denies
00:03:01.160 is that anyone was directed to behave in a certain way.
00:03:05.780 And if the media lets up on this, that one line may be enough.
00:03:09.820 But there's a lot more to the story here
00:03:11.740 and no one in the government is prepared to talk about it.
00:03:14.860 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:03:16.560 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.