Juno News - March 03, 2019


Trudeau's spin assault has begun


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

167.61151

Word count

749

Sentence count

39


Summary

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

Jody Wilson-Raybould's bombshell testimony about SNC-Lavalin shocked the entire Liberal caucus, and many of them didn't know what to do. They tried to spin it as a matter of principle, but the truth is much darker.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 So we're at a pretty interesting point now in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
00:00:09.320 Initially, there was the shock after Jody Wilson-Raybould gave her damning testimony.
00:00:13.960 For a period of approximately four months between September and December of 2018,
00:00:22.100 I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government
00:00:27.160 to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion
00:00:32.700 in my role as the Attorney General of Canada in an inappropriate effort
00:00:37.220 to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin.
00:00:41.460 A bombshell, not just that, a napalming of the entire PMO.
00:00:45.920 A lot of MPs, a lot of Liberal caucus members didn't know what to do.
00:00:49.920 And it's still unclear how many of them ally with the Prime Minister.
00:00:53.640 It seems a number of them are not pleased.
00:00:56.060 But many of them are more than happy to play a tack dog,
00:00:59.360 and they now have their messaging, their distraction technique, their spin.
00:01:05.180 And the big one? This is all about jobs.
00:01:09.620 One of the fundamental responsibilities of any government
00:01:13.640 is to look for good jobs, to defend jobs,
00:01:18.380 and to make sure that our economy is growing in ways that give a real and fair chance to everyone.
00:01:23.100 This is something that every Canadian expects their government to work hard on,
00:01:27.400 and it's a role and a job that we take very seriously.
00:01:30.660 We, of course, do that at all times,
00:01:33.480 in respecting the independence of our judiciary,
00:01:36.300 in respecting the rule of law,
00:01:37.780 in upholding and defending our institutions,
00:01:40.280 and we will always do that.
00:01:42.320 It's been pretty shameless, actually, to see,
00:01:44.580 being asked questions about legal matters,
00:01:46.940 about criminal code issues,
00:01:48.240 about obstruction of justice.
00:01:49.480 And the Prime Minister turns around and says,
00:01:52.000 I will always stand up for jobs,
00:01:53.780 in a lawful manner.
00:01:55.420 On Thursday night,
00:01:56.380 the emergency debate that was convened in the House of Commons,
00:01:59.320 it was a little bit of a bust,
00:02:00.740 because Justin Trudeau wasn't there,
00:02:02.340 Jody Wilson-Raybould wasn't there,
00:02:04.020 Andrew Scheer, Jagmeet Singh,
00:02:05.220 they didn't show up,
00:02:06.020 not even Justice Committee members,
00:02:07.600 hardly any of them actually showed up.
00:02:09.940 Arif Varani, the Liberal MP,
00:02:11.820 was the one who did most of the stick handling for the government.
00:02:14.800 So we didn't learn too much there.
00:02:16.920 Not too much eventful happened.
00:02:18.560 But what we did begin to see,
00:02:21.540 is what the main Liberal narrative would be.
00:02:24.520 Many MPs got up,
00:02:26.020 and quite a few Quebec Liberal MPs,
00:02:28.900 to argue,
00:02:29.920 this is all about jobs.
00:02:31.500 We would stand up for jobs.
00:02:33.120 We would stand up for Canadians.
00:02:34.940 One Quebec Liberal MP spoke about
00:02:36.740 how her husband was proud of having worked for SNC-Lavalin for many years.
00:02:41.640 And you know,
00:02:42.040 if you're just a regular employee working for a company
00:02:44.480 that's done a lot to build the foundations of Canada,
00:02:47.260 build infrastructure and so forth,
00:02:48.680 well, by all means,
00:02:49.480 be proud of having done your job at that company.
00:02:53.140 That's not the issue, though.
00:02:55.000 This is a total red herring.
00:02:58.380 The issue is whether or not advocating for jobs
00:03:01.960 stepped across that line.
00:03:03.680 Now, when we want to talk about, say,
00:03:05.360 another favorite Quebec company,
00:03:07.060 Bombardier,
00:03:07.920 maybe we can have that argument there,
00:03:09.740 because Canadians are tired that time after time,
00:03:12.560 Bombardier keeps coming back to the trough
00:03:14.780 to ask for more money.
00:03:16.980 Now, you may think that's wrong,
00:03:18.680 but there's nothing illegal about that.
00:03:20.680 The government can and does hand out money to corporations.
00:03:23.380 So let's have that debate about whether the ends justify the means
00:03:27.560 in terms of bailing out Bombardier time and time again.
00:03:30.780 I do not think they do,
00:03:31.920 but that's a subject for a different day.
00:03:34.420 This isn't the issue, though.
00:03:36.800 The SNC-Lavalin story is not the Bombardier story.
00:03:40.820 The SNC-Lavalin story is about whether justice stopped being impartial,
00:03:46.560 whether the prime minister's office behaved like some banana republic country
00:03:50.500 or those Eastern European countries where leaders are actually criminally charged
00:03:54.400 and locked up for taking money from corporations
00:03:57.280 and from other rich people and other world leaders.
00:04:01.220 That is what is at stake here.
00:04:03.660 So Canadians are going to have to be prepared
00:04:05.420 because that's the conversation the Liberals are going to push us to have.
00:04:09.040 That is the narrative that they're going to continue to throw at us
00:04:12.360 day after day, week after week, that we need jobs.
00:04:16.980 That old Justin Trudeau narrative from 2015
00:04:19.860 fighting for the middle class,
00:04:22.260 except this time he's doing it with a specter of potential criminality
00:04:26.780 surrounding the argument.