Juno News - February 07, 2019


PMO accused of trying to interfere in prosecution of Liberal-connected corporation

Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Jody Wilson-Raybould Justin Trudeau Gerald Butts Matt Butcher Alejandro Mayorkas
True North's Newest Fellow： Leo Knight Canada's largest union supports socialism

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

158.9

Word count

821

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A bombshell report suggests corruption may have seeped into the highest levels of Canada s government. The Globe and Mail published an exclusive report with damning allegations about the relationship that former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould had with key players in the Prime Minister s Office, including Gerald Butts.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A bombshell report suggests corruption may have seeped into the highest levels of Canada's government, the Prime Minister's office.
00:00:10.000 The Globe and Mail published an exclusive report with very damning allegations about the relationship that former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould had with key players in the Prime Minister's office, including Gerald Butts, the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister himself.
00:00:26.000 According to the Globe and Mail report, Jody Wilson-Raybould was being pressured by the PMO to flex her muscle as Attorney General into getting the prosecution to abandon its case and to settle. 0.87
00:00:41.000 But doing so would intervene from a political body into an independent or what's supposed to be an independent prosecution.
00:00:51.000 The ongoing case is about an allegation made by prosecutors in 2015 that SNC-Lavalin paid millions of dollars in bribes to Libyan officials over a period of 10 years in order to secure government contracts.
00:01:05.000 Now, what SNC-Lavalin says is that executives who were involved in that have left the company, which has since reformed its ethics and compliance rules.
00:01:15.000 And they've been looking for what's called a deferred prosecution, which is basically the opportunity to make a big trial go away in exchange for them paying a fine, saying they're going to clean up their house and moving on.
00:01:28.000 Jody Wilson-Raybould, of course, said that she thought prosecution was necessary.
00:01:33.000 She trusted the independent prosecutor's judgment.
00:01:36.000 Unfortunately, the report alleges that she was up against a wall in the Prime Minister's office.
00:01:42.000 So, why on earth would the PMO be going to bat for SNC-Lavalin?
00:01:47.000 Well, to answer that question, we have to look at other news stories.
00:01:51.000 In particular, one going back to May of 2018, when a former senior executive, former vice president of the company, was charged with soliciting illegal campaign donations from employees and reimbursing those employees from company coffers.
00:02:06.000 The allegations made by prosecutors involve more than $100,000 in donations to the Liberal Party of Canada and to Liberal Riding Associations and to Liberal leadership contenders,
00:02:17.000 as well as about $8,000 to the Conservative Party, money that was illegally covered up because it actually came from a corporate account.
00:02:26.000 According to the Federal Lobbyist Registry, SNC-Lavalin officials have had 14 visits to the Prime Minister's office since 2017, including to Gerald Butts and also to Matthew Bouchard, who's the senior advisor on Quebec issues.
00:02:41.000 And Elder Marquez, a senior policy advisor for Trudeau, also met with SNC officials.
00:02:47.000 So we have a few different connections here that are important to explore.
00:02:51.000 Number one, tens of thousands of dollars that's flown from SNC-Lavalin coffers into the Liberal Party.
00:02:57.000 What looks like huge and potentially unprecedented access between the company's lobbyists and the Prime Minister's office while there is an ongoing criminal investigation.
00:03:08.000 And then Jody Wilson-Raybould, remember, was turfed from the Attorney General position.
00:03:14.000 And it sounds from the Globe and Mail report like this dismissal happened one month after her standoff with the PMO about the SNC-Lavalin case.
00:03:22.000 And it brings into clearer focus the statement that Jody Wilson-Raybould issued upon her move to Veterans Affairs.
00:03:29.000 She said in the statement,
00:03:31.000 It is a pillar of our democracy that our system of justice be free from even the perception of political interference and uphold the highest levels of public confidence.
00:03:41.000 As such, it has always been my view that the Attorney General of Canada must be nonpartisan, more transparent in the principles that are the basis of decisions, and in this respect always willing to speak truth to power.
00:03:53.000 This is how I served throughout my tenure in that role.
00:03:57.000 In a very brief statement, the Prime Minister's office denied there was any such directive given to Jody Wilson-Raybould.
00:04:03.000 Wilson-Raybould, now the Veterans Affairs Minister, similarly had no comment to offer.
00:04:07.000 And the new Attorney General was not willing to say anything as to whether there would be a change in the investigation or proceedings against SNC-Lavalin.
00:04:16.000 Now that this story is out and we see what is evidence of, at the very least, the appearance of a conflict, which can be just as powerful as a conflict of interest.
00:04:27.000 But this goes beyond the ethics scandal on which Justin Trudeau was already found guilty regarding the Bahamas vacation.
00:04:34.000 There's a big difference here because now we are talking about genuine subversion of the rule of law and of a transparent justice system that's being alleged.
00:04:44.000 And if true, there needs to be resignations en masse.
00:04:48.000 It's paramount that we hold governments to account, all governments, and in particular this one.
00:04:54.000 And that's exactly what we're doing at True North.
00:04:56.000 We can't do it alone. If you can support our work and our coverage with an ongoing monthly contribution through the Heritage Club,
00:05:02.000 it would go a very long way to standing up for the values on which Canada was founded and continues to thrive.
00:05:08.000 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.