Juno News - April 30, 2019


Liberal ties explain why SNC-Lavalin never faces consequences

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Jody Wilson-Raybould
Hands off our guns, Toronto! Let’s ask why Canada is part of China’s big bank

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

150.32

Word count

561

Sentence count

25

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

SNC-Lavalin, the Montreal-based engineering firm that s been embroiled in a global and domestic scandal for the last several months, never has to face punishment for its misconduct. The latest example of this comes in an exclusive CBC report detailing the names of 18 SNC employees, executives, and some of their spouses that were illegally contributing to the Liberal Party of Canada between 2004 and 2009.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Somehow, SNC-Lavalin, the Montreal-based engineering firm that's been embroiled in
00:00:07.520 global and domestic scandal for the last several months, never has to face punishment for its
00:00:13.200 misconduct. The latest example of this comes in an exclusive CBC report detailing the names of
00:00:19.440 the 18 SNC-Lavalin employees, executives, and some of their spouses that were illegally
00:00:26.240 contributing to the Liberal Party of Canada predominantly between 2004 and 2009. The scheme
00:00:32.480 has been known for quite some time. About $110,000 was illegally donated to Liberal
00:00:38.640 Riding Associations, the Liberal Party, the Liberal Leadership Campaigns, and this money was reimbursed
00:00:45.040 by SNC-Lavalin to get around the bans on corporate contributions. Well, up until this report from CBC,
00:00:52.480 no one knew the names or identities of the people that were involved in the scheme. In fact,
00:00:56.960 the Liberal Party, since 2016 when they got the list, has refused to share it with anyone. And
00:01:03.680 the Conservative Party, for its part, had received about $8,000 in illegal contributions. It refunded
00:01:09.120 the donations and provided the list of donors on request. But what's fascinating about this is that
00:01:14.960 SNC-Lavalin avoided being charged for this illegal contribution scheme by signing a compliance
00:01:21.840 agreement to Elections Canada saying, we won't break the law again. Sounds a lot like the deferred
00:01:27.760 prosecution agreement they want for the Libyan bribery allegations. That basically, if they just sign
00:01:34.240 something, all the troubles go away. And this is why it's important for, if we care about the rule of
00:01:39.840 law, the country to say, no, we're not going to keep giving you a pass. There's a lot of problems here, but
00:01:45.840 the Liberal Party does not have its hands clean. Beyond concealing this, even after it was made public,
00:01:52.240 the Liberals are also foolish to have even entertained the possibility, let alone pressured 0.91
00:01:57.760 Jody Wilson-Raybould into giving a deferred prosecution agreement, knowing how far back the 0.98
00:02:04.320 ignorance of the law spans when it comes to SNC-Lavalin. So here we have 18 people that were
00:02:10.640 legally contributing, a company that was facilitating it, and only one person in this entire mix faces
00:02:16.720 charges, not the company itself, and not the illegal donors. Most of whom have denied any knowledge of
00:02:22.880 wrongdoing, but some of them in the CBC article were explicitly candid. Yes, this was all organized by
00:02:28.880 SNC-Lavalin. So Canadians need to ask why this country is at all even entertaining the idea of doing
00:02:37.280 business with SNC-Lavalin. Why have they not been purged from the database of potential vendors and
00:02:43.520 suppliers for the federal government? Why is the federal government still entertaining the possibility
00:02:48.720 of entering into a deferred prosecution with them? And most importantly, why on earth has this gone on
00:02:54.640 so far and so long without anyone holding feet to the fire on this? Well, I think when you look at the
00:03:01.280 $110,000 donated to the liberals, it becomes very apparent why. And it wasn't just greasing the palms
00:03:08.560 of the party that was in power. Remember that from 2006 to 2009, there was a conservative government.
00:03:14.800 And even so, SNC-Lavalin was facilitating the illegal contributions of donations to the liberal party and
00:03:21.920 the liberal leadership race. You cannot sever SNC from the liberals. And it's becoming true, painfully so,
00:03:30.080 just how much that has meant an ignorance to the rule of law. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.