Juno News - February 28, 2019


The SNC-Lavalin Debacle and Mark Norman Affair are beginning to converge


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

179.07347

Word Count

862

Sentence Count

36

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 An interesting thing is starting to happen right now in terms of Canadian political scandals.
00:00:09.420 That is the SNC-Lavalin saga and the Mark Norman Affair are starting to converge in very interesting
00:00:16.320 ways. Now the Norman Affair, it's been around before. It's the original one, but the SNC-Lavalin
00:00:21.640 story is the one that's dominated most of the scandal, the intrigue, and the headlines.
00:00:26.060 What is at stake ultimately at the SNC-Lavalin affair, and I've said this before, is not
00:00:31.040 whether or not this shows Trudeau is a hypocrite when it comes to dealing with women or the
00:00:36.160 roots of crisis communications and changing your narratives and so forth, although those
00:00:40.980 are all parts of the story. No, the bigger issue is that you can have the Prime Minister's
00:00:45.980 office come in and say, allegedly, perhaps is what the original news reports say, that
00:00:52.080 they come in and say, do not prosecute this one company, that you can have judicial partiality,
00:00:58.880 that you can have political interference in a justice case, basically obstruction of justice.
00:01:04.480 And some experts have said, yes, the criminal code has been violated before, violated right
00:01:09.880 here in this instance. And that's a big problem because this brings Canada, even just for the
00:01:14.860 shortest amount of time when Trudeau was having that conversation or someone from the PMO was
00:01:19.320 having that conversation with Jody Wilson-Raybould, that brings Canada into line as being one of
00:01:26.680 those shady countries that does this stuff more frequently. And if we let one thing pass,
00:01:31.620 well, then we get a feeding frenzy. We start to do it even more. It becomes a thing that can
00:01:35.940 happen. And Canada suddenly slips. We have democratic backsliding where we are no longer the
00:01:42.020 outstanding country that we have been for decades. So how does the Mark Norman trial fit into all of
00:01:47.200 this? Well, what his defense is going to be arguing is that this is also political interference and
00:01:52.860 that the entire charges that he faces are bogus charges. He's facing one count of breach of trust
00:02:00.000 for leaking cabinet confidences, basically a leak, telling the media or telling other people,
00:02:06.120 here's what happened. Now he's defending himself against all of this, but a lot of observers have
00:02:10.500 also pointed out, hold on a second, this happens all the time in Canada, hundreds of times a year,
00:02:16.100 thousands of times a year. People have scratched their heads going, well, to our knowledge,
00:02:20.200 no one has ever faced a criminal charge for this. So why a decorated former head of the Navy? Why would
00:02:27.520 he be a person who faces these charges? People say because the PMO wanted to see it that way. And that
00:02:34.160 is why his defense lawyer, Marie Hynden, is filing to subpoena a whole bunch of text messages and
00:02:38.800 other messages and correspondence between people in the PMO to prove just that. Well, wait a second,
00:02:45.300 what if that is true? Well, that means the PMO in this case said, charge this guy, go after this guy.
00:02:52.520 They instructed the justice system to do just that. Then we've got the allegations of SNC-Lavalin that
00:03:00.420 they got on the phone and said, don't prosecute this company. Then we've got the questions about
00:03:05.880 Huawei concerns about whether or not there would actually be political interference there,
00:03:10.300 even though it is the Attorney General's call as to whether or not all of that goes through.
00:03:15.320 Wait a second, this is not, not a good trend at all to see that the Prime Minister's office under
00:03:21.720 Justin Trudeau is actually being accused of interfering in the normal landscape of justice
00:03:27.820 multiple times. So what's going to happen next? Are they going to say, oh, I don't like this guy's
00:03:34.060 Facebook comments. So tell the Minister of Revenue, maybe this person made a problem on their tax
00:03:38.780 returns, didn't cross their T's and dot their I's. Next thing you know, they're coming after you.
00:03:43.340 This is why when you read the latest developments on these stories and the details of solicitor-client
00:03:48.080 privilege and all these things that might make people want to gloss their eyes over and say,
00:03:52.120 yeah, I got news fatigue. I'm not paying attention to this anymore. It matters because we have a
00:03:57.160 situation on our hands here. And thinking of the Mark Norman case makes one appreciate why Jody
00:04:02.460 Wilson-Raybould is so reticent to speak. Because all Mark Norman is accused of doing is speaking about
00:04:08.900 the wrong thing to the wrong people. He faces a criminal charge. This is why she's lawyering up and
00:04:14.560 looking very carefully at things, not just to be cagey, not just about bringing out maximum political
00:04:19.700 damage to Trudeau or minimum political damage to herself, but to see, hey, wait a second. If I say
00:04:26.060 something that the government doesn't like, could they Mark Norman me? Could I be criminally charged?
00:04:32.240 Could I face consequences? Maybe this is what she's thinking about. Quite frankly, it's sad that Canada's
00:04:39.420 become a country where people have to worry about this and political interference in the justice system
00:04:44.820 is something that we are seriously talking about as being a possibility.