Juno News - August 02, 2020


Justin Trudeau plays the hero

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Pierre Paglia Charlie Angus
Independent Press Gallery Fireside Chat： Derek Sloan Will Trudeau face any consequences？

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

191.87

Word count

609

Sentence count

48


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau says he's the hero in the We Charity scandal, but is anyone actually buying it? The Prime Minister tells the House of Commons Finance Committee that he was the first whistleblower in the scandal, and pushed for accountability.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It was quite a story Justin Trudeau told on Thursday, and he's sticking to it. But is anyone
00:00:11.760 believing him? So to recap, Trudeau appears before the House of Commons Finance Committee,
00:00:16.280 a rare affair. Trudeau has never been exposed to an environment like that before, where he could
00:00:20.860 have hostile questioners like Pierre Paglia from the Conservatives, Charlie Angus from the NDP.
00:00:25.700 Normally, it's just the question period, and it's media scrums, which don't have the same sparring
00:00:30.540 component to them. His story, though, kind of came out of the gates with a rather unexpected
00:00:35.900 flip side of a narrative. Did you know that Justin Trudeau was actually the first whistleblower in
00:00:41.840 the We Scandal affair? He was the one who first pushed for accountability. Yep, that's what he says.
00:00:48.240 So basically, the public service came to him and said, we got this program. We Charity has to do
00:00:53.860 it. He thought it could stay as an internal government program, he says. But they insisted.
00:00:59.420 In fact, they gave him, his words, a binary choice. They said to him, either the We Charity does this
00:01:06.360 student grant program, or it doesn't happen at all. So what's it going to be, Prime Minister? Are you
00:01:11.780 going to let students lose out? Are you that heartless? And, well, he really felt up against
00:01:15.820 the wall. But he still pushed back the virtuous, ethical man that he is. He pointed out, he said,
00:01:21.240 I don't know about this. I mean, my family has connections with this group, so maybe it doesn't
00:01:26.120 look so good. But they were insistent, those bullying public servants. So the Prime Minister,
00:01:31.500 well, he tried and he tried. And he said to them, please, make this as ethical, as accountable as
00:01:36.940 possible. We got to make sure this is of the highest thresholds. They continued to push him.
00:01:41.800 And finally, I mean, he's only human. He said, uncle. And he gave in and he submitted. He said,
00:01:46.340 fine. If the public service is so adamantly insisted that it can only be done this way,
00:01:52.040 so be it. The only thing he admits, the only thing he's willing to cut his opposition any slack on is
00:01:58.940 that, yes, he should have recused himself. And he regrets that, even though it was all for the
00:02:04.360 students. So that was the main narrative. We did not expect there to be a curveball there about how he
00:02:08.840 flips it around and tells a story about how he is the hero in all of this. But maybe we shouldn't be
00:02:14.180 surprised because we've heard in previous stories how this is an opportunity for us all to reflect
00:02:19.680 in previous scandals. For the SNC-Lavalin story, for the blackface story, it was not so much
00:02:24.900 his own personal wrongdoing, but it was a moment for us to all pause and all look at the way we
00:02:30.200 treat each other. So perhaps here, we don't even have a moment for us all to reflect. We have a moment
00:02:34.920 to acknowledge that Trudeau is actually a great ethical leader and the We Charity scandal show who's
00:02:41.140 just that. Do you believe it? Are you buying it? I think the problem with that is he's basically
00:02:47.040 acknowledging he had problems with it, but he still went ahead with it. And that's why if you're
00:02:54.320 admitting he had problems with it, if you're admitting it didn't pass the smell test, why did
00:02:59.020 you let it go through? And those are the questions that still remain, the ones that Trudeau's new
00:03:04.080 narrative has now provoked. Let me know. Do you think it passes muster? I don't think so.