Juno News - March 07, 2019


Trudeau and Butts pretend protecting Quebec jobs isn't political

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Gerald Butts Michael Wernick Jody Wilson-Raybould Clerk Cody Wilson
Justin Trudeau has rigged political advertising rules Tommy Robinson might be headed back to jail

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

176.0

Word count

576

Sentence count

23

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau, Gerald Butts, and Michael Warnick have all basically accepted the premise that they did what Jody Wilson-Raybould said they did, while still maintaining their innocence. This is a very confusing turn of events.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau, Gerald Butts, and Michael Warnick have all basically accepted the premise
00:00:08.460 that they did what Jody Wilson-Raybould said they did while still maintaining their innocence.
00:00:14.160 This is a very confusing turn of events.
00:00:17.180 You may remember last week, former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould said that she
00:00:21.140 was unduly pressured by people in the Prime Minister's office, including Justin Trudeau
00:00:25.900 himself, Gerald Butts, a number of staffers that work for Gerald Butts, and even the Clerk
00:00:30.860 of the Privy Council, Michael Warnick.
00:00:33.180 And a couple of the points that she made in her testimony, which was quite explosive and
00:00:37.720 quite credible, were that Justin Trudeau made a reference to being a member of Parliament
00:00:42.740 in Quebec when talking about the Quebec jobs component of this, that the Clerk of the Privy
00:00:47.540 Council referenced the fact that there was a Quebec election going on as being a mitigating
00:00:52.260 factor in the employment situation about SNC-Lavalin and whether they should be given a deferred
00:00:57.700 prosecution agreement.
00:00:59.400 And in Michael Warnick's testimony, he says, well, yes, I did talk about the Quebec election,
00:01:04.320 but that wasn't partisan.
00:01:05.640 That wasn't political.
00:01:06.540 No, that was entirely appropriate.
00:01:09.520 And then Justin Trudeau, in a press conference the day after Gerald Butts' and Michael Warnick's
00:01:14.120 testimony, said that, you know, all his office tried to do was give an outside opinion and
00:01:20.220 give a further cause to question and reconsider to Jody Wills and Raybould as though, even
00:01:27.100 though she'd made up her mind, they still needed to continue to convince her of this.
00:01:32.620 And Justin Trudeau said this while simultaneously claiming that there was no pressure.
00:01:38.160 Well, how is trying to get someone to change their mind after they've made it when they're
00:01:43.040 the one who has the final decision, not a form of pressure?
00:01:46.300 And this is where Justin Trudeau is so far into this himself that I'm convinced he may
00:01:52.320 even believe the excuses that his governments have been putting on anyone else.
00:01:56.760 We saw very different testimonies from Jody Wilson-Raybould than we did from the people
00:02:02.240 that are holding up the Prime Minister's office's end of things here.
00:02:05.580 Not only do we learn that, yes, the Clerk of the Privy Council has been running what very
00:02:09.580 much looks like political interference for the Liberals, but the Liberals are claiming that
00:02:15.040 their political concerns were completely appropriate because public policy is not politics.
00:02:22.000 This is what Michael Wernick was saying.
00:02:23.840 This is what Justin Trudeau was saying.
00:02:25.680 And yeah, this is what Gerald Butts was saying, that no, no, no, when we stand up for jobs in
00:02:29.760 Quebec, when there's a provincial election going on, when Trudeau has to run for re-election
00:02:34.360 in Quebec, that isn't politics.
00:02:36.700 And what we have here is a very prime example of a government splitting hairs to try to save
00:02:41.760 face. When they're making a decision about jobs, they're concerned about optics.
00:02:47.820 So public policy is the same as politics in the context of these concerns.
00:02:53.440 Now, what's going to happen with this controversy moving forward, we don't quite know.
00:02:57.280 But we have heard very marked confirmations from the players in the Prime Minister's office
00:03:01.820 that they've said what they were accused of saying.
00:03:05.180 They're just claiming there's nothing wrong with it. 0.80
00:03:07.400 And I think that ignorance and arrogance is something that Canadians need to be acutely 0.99
00:03:11.460 aware of as we move forward with this scandal.
00:03:14.740 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.