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

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

Another week, another liberal scandal. This week, an Ethics Commissioner found that David McNaughton breached the Conflict of Interest Act, and nine senior Liberals, including two senior cabinet ministers and the Chief of Defence Staff, were told to have no further dealings with him.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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