Juno News - August 02, 2020


Many questions remain unanswered in the WE scandal


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

132.14944

Word count

573

Sentence count

29


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance on Thursday. They faced questions about the timing of their decision to cancel a multi-billion dollar project and lay off hundreds of workers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 At this point in the Wee scandal, after the Kielberger brothers testified together,
00:00:10.540 why was that in the first place? And then the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister
00:00:15.960 testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance. Surely the Liberals
00:00:22.220 must realize that they have ridden their shiny pony as far as he can take them.
00:00:27.360 Between the three, there is still much confusion about what went on, and many questions.
00:00:35.920 Chief among them is why we started work on the project several weeks before the Cabinet
00:00:40.820 meeting to even consider authorizing it, and days before the Prime Minister said he even
00:00:47.680 heard about it. Why would any organization start on a project, including the apparent hiring
00:00:56.640 of 450 people, only to have to lay them off after the contract was cancelled? It defies logic.
00:01:05.200 Unless they had advance notice it was coming.
00:01:09.440 Thursday's testimony before the Committee is only the third time a Prime Minister has testified
00:01:15.840 before a Parliamentary Committee. Joe Clark did on spending estimates when he led a minority government
00:01:22.000 in 1979, and Stephen Harper did to discuss Senate reform. Neither of them were under investigation
00:01:29.200 at the time either. Trudeau's brand is badly damaged, and not just because he appeared before the Committee
00:01:36.960 looking unkempt and sloppy. During his questioning, his credibility was in tatters by the time he was done,
00:01:45.200 and he apologized yet again for not recusing himself from the Cabinet table before they considered authorizing
00:01:53.840 the spending of nearly a billion dollars on an organization seen as friendly to the Trudeau family
00:02:00.800 and the Liberal Party. On Friday, Trudeau gave a press conference, ostensibly to make a COVID-19 announcement.
00:02:10.400 He apologized again and said that he should have been aware there would be a, quote,
00:02:16.080 perception, unquote, of a conflict of interest if he did not recuse himself. Yet he did not do that,
00:02:24.000 feeding just that perception. And in the resulting time, from the announcement to the cancellation,
00:02:29.760 the howls of outrage were huge and have resulted in the Ethics Commissioner's investigations, both
00:02:37.120 into the Prime Minister and now the Finance Minister, the two most powerful positions in government.
00:02:45.120 The other aspect of all of this is the timeline of events. It does not add up after the Kielberger's
00:02:51.840 testimony, or Moreno's, or Trudeau's for that matter. Someone in all of this is not telling the truth.
00:02:59.840 The Prime Minister also essentially testified he didn't know what was going on in his own government,
00:03:06.000 and how the bureaucracy seemed to do what they wanted. Can the Prime Minister recover from all of this?
00:03:14.480 We don't yet know, but apparently he has taken the next two weeks off. He has, after all,
00:03:20.960 only appeared in the House for ten days this calendar year. He must be exhausted. A politician relies on the
00:03:29.040 perception of the electorate, not just the reality of what he has done. After all, we know the liberal
00:03:37.280 government of Justin Trudeau has not accomplished much, and the perception of his competence is in shreds.
00:03:43.760 Perhaps, on his vacation, he will consider his position before there is a palace coup,
00:03:53.200 much like what the UK Conservatives did to end Margaret Thatcher's tenure.
00:03:58.480 All politicians have a shelf life. Justin Trudeau seems to have reached the end of his.
00:04:04.640 Only time will tell, though, but even the staunchest supporters seem to be now wavering.
00:04:10.960 For True North, I'm Leo Knight.