Juno News - December 15, 2022They couldn't care less
Episode Stats
Words per minute
188.43387
Harmful content
Misogyny
6
sentences flagged
Toxicity
1
sentences flagged
Hate speech
3
sentences flagged
Summary
In the latest ethics scandal, Minister of Small Business and International Trade Mary Ng was found guilty by the Independent Ethics Commissioner for contravening conflict of interest rules. She was also ordered to pay back $23,000 to a company called Pomp and Circumstance.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome, everyone, to Ratioed. My name is Harrison Faulkner. Well, in the least surprising
00:00:11.680
news of the year, another cabinet minister in this government has been found guilty of
00:00:15.840
breaking the ethics laws. This time, Mary Ng, this lady, gave $20,000 of taxpayer money to
1.00
00:00:22.640
her good pal for some media training. It's starting to become a pattern with this government,
00:00:26.720
who have given up, it appears, on any attempt to try and look ethical in the eyes of Canadians.
00:00:31.280
We're going to get into this latest scandal and see how it shocks up to all the others that this
00:00:34.400
government have gotten themselves into. And that leads us perfectly to the common question for
00:00:38.320
this episode. Of all the great ethics scandals that this government have found themselves in,
00:00:42.480
which, in your mind, is the most egregious? We're going to get into all of them later on in the show,
00:00:46.880
but let me know in the comments what ethics scandal, in your opinion, is the absolute worst,
00:00:51.360
the most egregious, that this government have found themselves in. Drop a like on the video,
00:00:55.280
help us out by subscribing to the True North YouTube channel, and let's get into it.
00:00:58.400
So, here we go, number six, ladies and gentlemen, the sixth ethics scandal that this government
00:01:02.880
have gotten themselves into. Earlier this week, Mary Ng, the Minister of Small Business and
00:01:07.360
International Trade, was found guilty by the Independent Ethics Commissioner for breaking the
00:01:12.080
law by contravening conflict of interest rules. Mary Ng gave over $20,000 of our money, our taxpayer
0.94
00:01:18.960
dollars, of which they take far too much to begin with, to her good friend Amanda Alvaro's company
00:01:24.880
called Pomp and Circumstance. I mean, just come on, the jokes write themselves, don't they?
00:01:29.280
So, in this report by the Ethics Commissioner, there are two contracts that Mary Ng gave to Pomp
0.98
00:01:34.480
and Circumstance, one in 2019 and one in 2020. Now, the money that she gave to Pomp and Circumstance
00:01:40.880
was for media training, which, in better terms, is paying someone to teach you to speak English
00:01:46.480
better in front of the camera. Such a great place to put our money, right? By the way, have you ever heard
00:01:50.720
one of these ministers speak on camera? They have about as much charisma as a wet rag. $20,000 isn't
00:01:55.520
going to do it, and, frankly, neither is $100,000. Anyways, the Ethics Commissioner, Mary O'Dean,
00:01:59.840
absolutely slammed Mary Ng in his report, and rightly so. She gave our money, our taxpayer dollars,
0.99
00:02:05.760
to her good friend, her former colleague, from back in the day. Now, this is taken straight from
00:02:09.920
the report, but just read what the Ethics Commissioner has to say about this.
00:02:13.200
Minister Ng twice failed to recognize a potential conflict of interest involving a friend,
00:02:17.920
and oversight of her obligations under the Conflict of Interest Act. There is simply no excuse
00:02:23.120
for contracting with a friend's company. Now, this is how Mary Ng responded to the controversy.
00:02:28.160
As the Commissioner's report indicates, and I repeat now, I take full responsibility for my actions.
00:02:33.360
I should have recused myself and apologized to all for not having done so. At no time was there
00:02:38.080
an issue of any personal benefit for me, nor any intention for anyone to benefit inappropriately.
00:02:43.360
My sincere efforts in the moment fell short of my own high personal standards for transparent
00:02:47.600
and accountable conduct, which Canadians have right to expect from their elected officials.
00:02:52.240
I am sorry for the shortcoming, and it will not happen again.
00:02:54.800
Just to show you how brazen this government has become about routinely breaking the law over
00:02:59.120
conflict of interest violations, just watch how Justin Trudeau responds to a reporter
00:03:05.440
Mary Ng and ethics, you know, another one of your ministers, you've been dinged twice on ethics rules.
00:03:12.080
Is it time for people to start resigning once they've been convicted of ethics?
00:03:15.280
We thank the ethics commissioner for his hard work, and the minister spoke directly to that,
00:03:22.400
And perhaps even worse, in question period, Pierre Polyev doesn't even ask if Mary Ng should resign.
00:03:28.080
He simply asks the prime minister if she should do the honorable thing and pay back the $20,000
00:03:33.760
to all of us, the taxpayers, for wrongly giving the money to her good pal, her good friend.
00:03:39.200
From incompetence to bad ethics, we have another liberal minister found guilty of violating the
00:03:45.360
Ethics Act, this time for giving a $23,000 contract to one of her best friends at a company called
00:03:53.760
Pomp and Circumstances. It reminds us of the prime minister giving a half billion dollars to an
00:04:00.400
organization called the WE Charity that gave his family a half million dollars. So, Mr. Speaker,
00:04:06.080
will this minister be held accountable, and will she be required to pay back the $23,000 in improper
00:04:13.760
Mr. Speaker, in this House there's a lot of debate and back and forth, but every now and then there's
00:04:21.920
an opportunity for Canadians to weigh in directly on what's going on in federal politics. And
00:04:26.480
yesterday, the residents of Mississauga Lakeshore had a choice. They could choose between the
00:04:32.160
Conservative Party's politics of division and reckless proposals that included recommending
00:04:38.400
you opt out of inflation by investing in crypto, or our government's approach of being there for
00:04:44.080
Canadians every step of the way and putting more money back in their pockets. Well, Mr. Speaker,
00:04:49.120
the people of Mississauga Lakeshore have spoken and elected a Liberal member of Parliament.
00:04:56.400
Now, maybe this isn't the case, but it sounds an awful lot like he is justifying an ethics violation,
00:05:01.040
an ethics breach, the sixth of his government, by the way, because voters in Mississauga decided to
00:05:06.960
choose a Liberal over a Conservative in a by-election the night before. Strange. Now, folks, shall we break out
00:05:12.800
the scoreboard and take a trip down memory lane to see if we've got the numbers right, if we've got the
00:05:17.680
six, right? Because once you reach five, right, what's another one to the whole list? Now, in 2017,
00:05:23.360
the government decided to test the waters to see what they could get away with when Justin Trudeau
00:05:27.760
took a private vacation on the Aga Khan's island. Now, the Aga Khan, the guy is a registered lobbyist,
00:05:33.760
so, I mean, it's a pretty obvious ethics violation, right? You'd think at least. And this is funny,
00:05:39.360
you can see how fresh they are, you can see how new to the whole game they are of breaking ethics laws,
00:05:44.240
when Justin Trudeau could barely respond to a question from Rosemary Barton, of all people. Yes,
00:05:49.920
Rosemary Barton of the CBC. He could barely get through a very basic question from Rosemary Barton.
00:05:56.480
With all due respect, you were going to take a free holiday from someone you consider a friend,
00:06:00.880
but obviously you have a different definition of a friend than the commissioner. You knew that
00:06:04.880
they had a lobbying registry, that they were set up to lobby the government. How could it not have
00:06:09.040
occurred to you that that might not have been okay? The fact is, we work, sorry, let me just try to
00:06:17.840
reorder the thoughts. We worked with the lobby conflict of interest commissioner on a regular
00:06:30.560
basis on a broad range of issues when the issues come up. On this issue of a family vacation with a
00:06:36.880
personal friend, it wasn't considered that there would be an issue. Notice how he struggles with
00:06:42.000
this one compared to how he casually brushes off the new ones. Like they're just like it's water off
00:06:47.200
a duck's back. And in that same year, then finance minister Bill Morneau was also found guilty by the
00:06:52.960
ethics commissioner for failing to disclose a corporation that he owned that held a lavish
00:06:58.240
French villa for him and his wife. Now for that ethics violation, Morneau, who was a multi-millionaire
00:07:04.080
many times over, had to pay a dangerously high fine of, wait for it, $200 and he remained finance
00:07:12.560
minister. The next year, then fisheries minister and now minister of intergovernmental affairs,
00:07:17.920
Dominic LeBlanc was also found guilty by the ethics commissioner of breaching conflict of interest
00:07:23.360
rules. This time he awarded a fisheries contract to a relative. His punishment? Well, some might say he
00:07:29.040
got a promotion because he went from fisheries to intergovernmental affairs. Starting to see a
00:07:34.320
pattern here? And now this is where all the fun begins. In 2019, Justin Trudeau was found guilty
00:07:40.400
for a second time of breaking the ethics law. This time for politically pressuring Jody Wilson-Raybould,
00:07:46.640
then attorney general of Canada, to offer a deferred prosecution agreement to Quebec-based SNC-Lavalin,
00:07:52.880
the construction firm, in order to protect them from an ongoing criminal case. A big deal,
00:07:59.120
a big time violation. Now Trudeau offered to apologize for the first ethics violation.
00:08:04.480
This time, of course not. Are you apologizing for anything today?
00:08:09.920
Um, I will be making an Inuit apology this afternoon, but in regards to, uh, and in regards to standing,
00:08:16.400
in regards to standing up for jobs and defending the integrity of our rule of law, um, I continue to
00:08:26.080
say that there was no inappropriate pressure. Now we get to the WE Charity scandal. In 2020,
00:08:30.800
the Trudeau government awarded a contract to the WE Charity Group, a sole source contract,
00:08:35.280
for a government project that would cost taxpayers up to $912 million. The WE Charity,
00:08:41.280
by being awarded this contract, were to receive $30 million. Now, without getting into the
00:08:46.080
details, which you already know about, the WE Charity paid Trudeau's family nearly $300,000
00:08:52.000
in speaking fees alone. And his wife, Sophie Trudeau, hosted a WE Charity podcast. Well,
00:08:58.560
the Ethics Commissioner actually cleared Justin Trudeau of any wrongdoing in this case,
00:09:02.320
but not Bill Morneau. The Ethics Commissioner found that Bill Morneau broke three conflict of
00:09:06.960
interest rules, three ethics violations in one scandal. And it turns out actually that if you break
00:09:12.160
three conflict of interest rules in one Ethics scandal, that is what is enough to get you booted
00:09:16.640
from the Liberal cabinet. Sure enough, Bill Morneau announced his resignation shortly after the result
00:09:21.680
of that report. And thanks to the WE Charity scandal, we got one of the absolute best battles between
00:09:27.440
Pierre Polyev and Justin Trudeau during the WE Charity hearings. Now, you've already seen this clip,
00:09:31.920
but since we're on this trip to memory lane, why don't we watch it for old time's sake?
00:09:35.200
Your 16 seconds are up. Your 16 seconds are up. I'm going to ask you again, because nobody believes
00:09:43.200
you when you say you don't know how much money your family has got from the WE Group. You've had a month
00:09:49.920
to look into that. You knew you were going to testify here. Again, how much money total have your brother,
00:09:57.440
mother and spouse received from this organization? How much?
00:10:02.240
That information has been publicly shared, but I will highlight…
00:10:06.000
Well, then tell me what it is. My mother has…
00:10:10.800
Throughout her life… The dollar figure, Prime Minister.
00:10:13.360
…in various ways and is proud of the work that she's done and I'm proud of her.
00:10:19.840
We can get that number for you if you like. It's been out in the media.
00:10:23.440
It's been in the media, but you don't know it? I don't have it in front of me.
00:10:26.640
You don't know how much your family has received from this organization, which you tried to give a
00:10:36.080
I'm waiting. You haven't done an answer so far. Let's make this the first one.
00:10:45.120
I've come to learn that the chairperson's power has gone out and is no longer part of this meeting.
00:10:57.520
I suspect that that might be a problem. It's very convenient timing for the lights to go out.
00:11:01.840
Look, I got a message to the effect that his power has gone out. I have no reason to distrust him.
00:11:09.520
Yeah, well, look, there's no intent in my own private home here in the middle of a pandemic.
00:11:15.280
Mr. Fraser, the general process is that the Vice Chair assumes the chairing of the meeting, so we'll continue.
00:11:26.960
So we'll continue the meeting. And I now give the floor to the member for Carleton.
00:11:32.000
Now look guys, you know it's really bad for Justin Trudeau when the Globe and Mail of all places,
00:11:36.560
the Globe and Mail editorial pages are calling for Mary Ng to resign over this.
00:11:43.040
There are no grey areas in Mary Ng's ethics breach. Apologizing is not good enough.
0.95
00:11:48.240
What Ms. Ng did was what the law prohibits. She had a ministerial decision that benefited a friend.
00:11:53.680
She apologized, but there has been no consequence. There was no grey zone area in Ms. Ng's case.
00:11:59.120
And this was no marginal friendship with some obscure contractor. They are both veterans of
00:12:03.440
the inner circle around the person who sets the accountability standards in this government,
00:12:07.680
Mr. Trudeau. But the problem is not in politicians having friends. It is when ministers arrange public
00:12:12.720
business with their friends. When Mr. Eggleton did that 20 years ago, he was bounced from cabinet.
00:12:17.840
Ms. Ng faces no consequences. That's not enough. And it's not like Justin Trudeau's ethics scandals
00:12:23.520
haven't gone unnoticed around the world. It is having a real-world impact on Canada's perception
00:12:29.520
for being an ethical country. The Global Corruption Perception Index, which basically ranks the entire
00:12:35.760
world on a leaderboard for most ethical, least corrupt to most corrupt, ranks Canada 14th in the
00:12:43.040
world. Now, you might think to yourself, well, 14th, that's not that bad, actually. And actually,
00:12:46.400
in a way, 14th isn't that bad. But you also want to look at the year-over-year numbers to see how the
00:12:51.040
world perceives Canada. And it's actually not the best-looking picture. The rankings are done on a
00:12:56.000
point basis, 100 being the least corrupt, 0 being the most corrupt. And since Justin Trudeau took over
00:13:02.880
as Prime Minister in 2015, Canada's Global Corruption Perception Index ranking was at 83. Again, not very
00:13:11.120
bad. In fact, if you took 83, that would place us a lot closer to the top of the global leaderboard.
00:13:16.880
But now, our score has fallen down to 74. So our perception around the world has gotten worse over
00:13:23.840
this period of time. And it's not just by party either. It's across the board in this country.
00:13:28.720
And if you zoom out even further and you go back to 2000, to see where our country was 22 years ago,
00:13:34.640
our ranking on the Global Corruption Perception Index was 92. So we were at 92. We were the fifth
00:13:41.600
least corrupt country in the world. And now we're down to 14th. Sure, it's not the United States with
00:13:46.720
a score of 67. But I think we can do better. And I think all of us should have higher standards.
00:13:51.680
All right, ratio of the week time, the most coveted prize in Ottawa. This week,
00:13:55.520
it's going to a man who really should spend less time on Twitter, and perhaps more time working for
00:14:01.120
his constituents. I'm, of course, talking about Mark Gerritsen. Now, Mark Gerritsen, as many left-wingers
00:14:07.760
have been prone to do over the past few months, had a complete meltdown over Elon Musk owning Twitter.
00:14:14.160
I mean, he's a bit late to the party, right? It's kind of, it's kind of almost past the news cycle
00:14:18.080
now. But earlier this week, Mark Gerritsen just had a complete hissy fit, a complete meltdown on
00:14:23.760
Twitter and dropped a long thread about how Elon Musk attending Queen's University in Kingston
00:14:28.640
was a stain on the city. Check out this thread. Someone should tell at Elon Musk his $44 billion
00:14:35.040
experiment is failing. I can't believe he once lived in Kingston and attended at Queen's U,
00:14:39.760
a real stain on our city. Imagine the world's richest person bending over backwards to impress
0.82
00:14:44.800
Donald Trump, only to be snubbed. And of course, like any man who is confident in his beliefs,
00:14:50.160
he blocks responses on Twitter. But that didn't stop the ratio, and that's why he's the real worthy
00:14:55.280
winner. 388 likes in that first tweet, 582 quote tweets. The tweet when he wrote,
00:15:01.280
a real stain on our city. Well, he got 186 likes and 320 quote tweets. So he's been getting
00:15:07.520
absolutely blasted for this, as you can imagine. What an absurd thing to write on Twitter. I'm going
00:15:12.000
to pull some of the some of the funniest comments we got from it all. Aaron Woodrick of the McDonnell
00:15:16.640
Laurier Institute quoted this, as an MP, perhaps you should worry a little bit less about billionaires
00:15:22.000
who waste their own money and a little bit more about governments that waste tax dollars. The great
00:15:26.880
Spencer Fernando also got in on the action. This really says it all. At Elon Musk is one
00:15:31.600
of the most influential people on earth, helping humanity make great strides further into space.
00:15:36.400
He's also a Canadian citizen. Instead of taking pride in this, a liberal MP is calling him a stain.
00:15:42.000
This attitude holds Canada back. And this Twitter user writes, Mark, pick a lane. You're an idiot.
00:15:47.600
And he pulls up a post from Mark Gerritsen from, what, back in 2016, when Mark Gerritsen wrote this.
1.00
00:15:53.920
Here's something you might not know. Elon Musk, who invented PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX,
00:15:58.800
went to Queen's University back in the early 90s. So it seems like back in 2016, Mark Gerritsen was all
00:16:04.480
pretty excited about that fact. He wasn't a stain on Kingston then, but now, of course,
00:16:08.080
because Musk stands up for free speech, because Musk is taking aim at Bill C-11, it appears. Well,
00:16:13.840
now Elon Musk is a real stain on Kingston. Now, if I could say one thing to Mark Gerritsen, it would be
00:16:17.760
this. You've got such bad takes that if you do decide to open up your replies, well, we're not going to
00:16:22.400
have much of a ratio of the week award because you're just going to take it home every single
00:16:26.400
week. So maybe for your sake, and maybe for our show's sake, best to keep them blocked like any
1.00
00:16:31.920
confident man would. All right, everyone, that's going to do it for us this week on the show.
00:16:35.440
Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Harrison Faulkner.
00:16:37.920
I'll catch you next Monday, and this is Racial.
0.64