Juno News - April 08, 2019


Trudeau threatening to sue his opponent for telling the truth

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Scheer Jody Wilson-Raybould Kathleen Wynne Michael Wernick Julian Porter Patrick Brown Harper
Where the real problem lies in the SNC-Lavalin debacle Ethics investigator is Liberal cabinet minister's sister-in-law

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

154.98

Word count

637

Sentence count

30


Summary

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

Andrew Scheer accuses Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of trying to silence him over his criticism of the SNC-Lavalin scandal. Andrew Scheer has called Trudeau's bluff and said, "All right, let's take this to trial."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It's been apparent throughout the entire SNC-Lavalin scandal that Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are afraid of the truth.
00:00:08.900 Well, that was no more apparent than this past weekend when Canadians learned that Justin Trudeau is trying to silence who is supposed to be, by law, his biggest critic, the leader of Her Majesty's loyal opposition, Andrew Scheer.
00:00:22.920 At the very end of March, Justin Trudeau had his lawyer, Julian Porter, send a libel notice to Andrew Scheer, basically saying that you are put on notice, which the Prime Minister confirmed in a statement just the other day, that we may sue you if you don't cut out the allegations that Justin Trudeau interfered or tried to interfere in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.
00:00:46.420 The libel notice is based on a statement that was issued by Andrew Scheer, where he said that Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony offered, quote,
00:00:54.800 concrete, unquote, evidence that Justin Trudeau was personally involved in trying to pressure the Attorney General at the time, as Wilson-Raybould, to interfere in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution.
00:01:06.460 The fact that Jody Wilson-Raybould was subjected to pressure has been affirmed in her testimony, in the testimony of Michael Wernick, quite frankly, and also in the release of a phone call recording between Wernick and Jody Wilson-Raybould.
00:01:20.540 This has been proven that the highest rankings of the federal government, including the Prime Minister's office, were trying to put pressure on Jody Wilson-Raybould.
00:01:28.960 Andrew Scheer doesn't have any inside knowledge of this.
00:01:31.240 He was responding to the facts that have been put out, that have been made publicly available, and drew the same conclusion that every thinking Canadian would draw, that Justin Trudeau was involved, that Justin Trudeau overplayed his own hand in this.
00:01:47.300 But the Prime Minister says this is libelous.
00:01:49.940 Now, one key distinction here is that truth trumps libel.
00:01:54.380 If something is true, it cannot be libelous.
00:01:56.620 So, if Trudeau were a private citizen, I'd say there's enough evidence out there that essentially allows people to draw the conclusion that Andrew Scheer drew.
00:02:04.940 But the bigger issue here is that Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada.
00:02:08.600 He's a public figure.
00:02:09.900 The threshold for free speech in Canada to become libelous is already very high, even higher when we're talking about political speech, things that fall within the boundaries of political debate and discussion.
00:02:21.780 This has been affirmed time and time again by judges at most levels of courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada, that politicians and political commentators have the right to speak freely.
00:02:32.280 Now, a lot of liberals are saying, oh, but Harper did this as well.
00:02:35.620 A couple of things.
00:02:36.480 Firstly, two wrongs don't make a right.
00:02:38.900 Secondly, the cases are fundamentally different in that what Trudeau is suing for are comments that are reasonably and demonstrably proven to be consistent with the public record on this.
00:02:50.640 But, ultimately, Trudeau is taking a page out of Kathleen Wynne's handbook.
00:02:54.960 Remember, the Premier of Ontario at the time, Kathleen Wynne, tried to silence the opposition leader at the time, Patrick Brown, with a similar threat of legal action.
00:03:04.380 Now, Andrew Scheer has called Trudeau's bluff.
00:03:06.380 He said, all right, let's take this to trial.
00:03:09.060 Because that would mean that Trudeau is all of a sudden put in a situation where he has to be on the hot seat.
00:03:14.160 He has to answer under oath questions that right now he has only been skirting and avoiding.
00:03:18.360 So, I share Andrew Scheer's comments in that if Trudeau wants to play this game, let's actually play it.
00:03:24.320 But, right now, we've got a letter that seems to indicate Justin Trudeau is so far into his own muddled approach to this that he can't even remember what's true and what's not.
00:03:34.940 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:03:36.640 So, let's go.