Juno News - September 19, 2020


The Liberals have a history of corruption


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

131.06229

Word Count

672

Sentence Count

35


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Another week, another liberal scandal. This week, Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion
00:00:10.200 released a finding that David McNaughton, the former Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenty Potentiary
00:00:16.440 of Canada to the United States, and found that he had breached Section 33 of the Conflict of
00:00:23.340 Interest Act. Dion also cited nine senior Liberals, including two senior cabinet ministers,
00:00:29.840 and the Chief of Defence Staff, who were told to have no further dealings with McNaughton.
00:00:35.840 McNaughton served as ambassador from March 2016 to August 2019. He is a lifelong Liberal,
00:00:44.000 and was appointed as ambassador by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. McNaughton, again a lifelong Liberal,
00:00:52.040 has served as senior advisor in the office of Don Jameson, who served sequentially as Minister of
00:00:58.520 Transport, Industry, and ultimately Foreign Affairs. When he left the Federal Government,
00:01:04.520 he became Principal Secretary to Ontario Liberal Leader and Premier Dalton McGuinty.
00:01:10.520 He is a Liberal backroom boy. He was one of the architects of the 2015 Liberal election campaign
00:01:18.520 that saddled this country with Trudeau as the Prime Minister. After he left office as ambassador,
00:01:24.520 he began working with a private company, bent on getting lucrative government contracts in the
00:01:31.000 area of data mining and analysis. That's when he started lobbying Liberal officials and ministers,
00:01:37.560 including the current Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland. But none of this should really surprise
00:01:43.960 anyone. The Liberals have a long history of corruption and ethics violations. Just in recent history,
00:01:50.920 it tracks back to then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who was embroiled in the Shawinnegade scandal,
00:01:56.920 which resulted in an RCMP investigation and meandered its way through the courts for nearly 15 years.
00:02:05.160 Then there was the HRDC scandal, the billion-dollar boondoggle, Chuck Guite funneling money to Quebec
00:02:11.720 companies, Alfonso Galliano, a cabinet minister, and his mob connections. There were no shortage of scandals with
00:02:18.840 the Liberal Party. In a February 2019 column for True North, after the firing of then-Justice Minister
00:02:26.760 Jody Wilson-Raybould by Trudeau for not doing his bidding in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, I wrote about
00:02:33.560 the many Liberal scandals, many of which were subject of RCMP investigations. At one point in the early 2000s,
00:02:41.480 there were five separate RCMP investigations into the Chrétien government scandals. That culminated
00:02:48.120 with the ad scam scandal, and ultimately in the Gomory inquiry, and the prosecution and conviction
00:02:55.080 of several Liberal Party insiders, and ultimately the fall of the Paul Martin government.
00:03:02.120 The Liberals don't seem to believe that the rules apply to them. Certainly not the Prime Minister,
00:03:08.280 who has already fallen afoul of the Ethics Commissioner three times, and is currently
00:03:13.800 under yet another ethics investigation in the WE scandal. As we speak, there may be two separate
00:03:21.080 investigations by the RCMP into senior Liberal Party insiders, including the Prime Minister. Are
00:03:27.720 Canadians becoming inured to all the corruption? I suspect so. In June, the Parliamentary Budget Office
00:03:37.320 reported it was unable to find evidence relating to a whopping 20,000 infrastructure projects out of
00:03:45.320 an announced program costing 187 billion dollars. It says that not just no information on projects,
00:03:52.600 there is no accounting from Minister Catherine McKenna's office on at least two billion dollars
00:03:58.280 that remain totally unaccounted for. Two billion! It was precious little coverage in the mainstream media.
00:04:05.960 Independent media sources like Black Locks broke the story. It was covered by outlets such as Rebel News
00:04:12.600 and True North, but mostly ignored by the mainstream media, who are so busy carrying water for the Prime
00:04:19.080 Minister. McNaughton has been in or around Liberal governments most of his adult life.
00:04:24.200 He knows the rules, and he clearly should have known that he couldn't lobby ministers for government
00:04:31.720 contracts once he left a federally appointed position of an ambassador to work for a private company.
00:04:39.080 Equally, the senior party members involved, including the ministers, should have been aware of the rules
00:04:46.040 and guided themselves accordingly. But that's not the Liberal way. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.
00:04:54.200 You know, it doesn't seem to be a legal. The first thing that he's doing is Richard