Juno News - August 19, 2019


Trudeau broke the law. Where's the punishment？

Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jody Wilson-Raybould
Bureaucrats target seniors' euchre game Catherine McKenna says the carbon tax creates jobs

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

168.65

Word count

728

Sentence count

30

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau has been found to have violated federal law for the second time in his four-year term by yet another report from the Conflict of Interests and Ethics Commissioner. The finding detailed in a 63-page report shows that not only Trudeau but also numerous agents in his office tried to interfere in an independent investigation of SNC-Lavalin. But even with this finding, there is no penalty for Justin Trudeau apart from public relations questions he has to answer.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau has been found to have violated federal law for the second time in his four-year
00:00:07.980 term by yet another report from the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. This report
00:00:13.620 looking into the improper and yes illegal pressure that was put on Jody Wilson-Raybould
00:00:19.520 to try to secure a sweetheart deal for SNC-Lavalin. The finding detailed in a 63-page report
00:00:26.220 shows that not only Trudeau but also numerous agents in his office tried to put pressure on
00:00:32.020 Jody Wilson-Raybould to interfere in an independent or what was supposed to be an independent
00:00:37.720 prosecution. But even with this finding there is no penalty for Justin Trudeau apart from the
00:00:45.040 public relations questions he has to answer. None whatsoever. You see the Conflict of Interest and
00:00:50.860 Ethics Commissioner has only a limited ability to levy a punishment on some aspects of Conflict of
00:00:57.820 Interest law namely when it comes to failing to disclose certain things he can impose a financial
00:01:03.520 penalty. The cap on that penalty $500. Yeah that's it that's all he can do and even then only on some
00:01:12.740 offenses. You see Justin Trudeau actually had a financial penalty on a previous violation from
00:01:19.060 the commissioner's office over his refusal to disclose a gift of sunglasses from the premier
00:01:24.440 of Prince Edward Island. Trudeau was fined $100 but his Bahamas vacation no punishment. The SNC-Lavalin
00:01:32.580 affair no punishment whatsoever. So you have this scathing report that has a very serious and severe
00:01:39.400 finding that should have anyway wide-ranging implications and it is up to Canadians to levy the
00:01:45.620 punishment. Now this means we need desperately a much more toothy approach to these things. How can
00:01:52.880 we have a Conflict of Interest and Ethics office if it doesn't actually have the ability to enforce
00:01:58.680 the ethics that we as Canadians are supposed to demand from our public officials, from our leaders?
00:02:04.900 Now I'm not here to say what the punishment should be or even if there should be one but certainly having
00:02:11.080 a commissioner that does not even have the ability to put one forward eliminates what it is that this
00:02:17.020 office is supposed to do which ideally would be to serve as either a deterrent or as a punitive measure
00:02:23.960 when someone does break the law. Right now it's not even a slap on the wrist it's a wag of the finger
00:02:29.460 which does not discourage anyone from breaking this law in the future because they know they can just
00:02:34.820 skate by if they have a good PR team to help them spin it. And we've already seen this out in full force 0.79
00:02:40.400 for Justin Trudeau claiming that he just disagrees with the report that he accepts it but at the
00:02:46.260 same time not the part that actually acknowledges his wrongdoing. Now this isn't to say that the
00:02:51.920 report marks the end of the saga. Jody Wilson-Raybould has acknowledged that back in the spring she was
00:02:57.920 paid a visit by the RCMP. The RCMP have indicated they are at the very least looking into this and will
00:03:04.620 in their words do whatever is necessary as the case moves forward. Whether this will result in
00:03:10.580 charges or not no point speculating we have no idea but there is another level of possible wrongdoing
00:03:17.640 that could be unearthed here. But the whole point is we shouldn't have different agencies and
00:03:22.380 investigators kicking the can down the road and trying to pass a hot potato between one another
00:03:27.440 when we have this body the conflict of interest and ethics commissioner that does have the final
00:03:32.960 authority to determine a violation of federal law. This is not an insignificant feat. This office has
00:03:39.200 money, this office has resources, and this office has expertise. So when at the end of this there is
00:03:45.360 zero punishment for Justin Trudeau it appears that there are two scandals here. There's the scandal of
00:03:51.460 the interference in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin and then there's the other scandal that even doing
00:03:57.240 that apparently carries no consequences. This is all the reason that True North is standing up for Canadians
00:04:03.880 during this election covering the stories the mainstream media isn't. We can't do this alone. If you can
00:04:09.240 pitch in to our election coverage fund please click on the link in the description box or head on over to
00:04:15.560 tnc.news. For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.