Juno News - December 17, 2018


＂Two-faced＂ Trudeau contradicts himself on Saudi arms deal


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

172.84296

Word count

824

Sentence count

48


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau can t seem to get his own story straight when it comes to the $15 billion worth of Canadian military vehicles being exported to Saudi Arabia. Andrew Lutton takes a look at the history of the deal, and how Trudeau has repeatedly changed his mind on the matter.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau can't even get his own story straight when it comes to the $15 billion worth of light armored vehicles that are being exported from Canada to Saudi Arabia.
00:00:09.940 The deal between the Saudi military and General Dynamics land systems in London, Ontario was actually inked under the previous Conservative government,
00:00:18.860 but Justin Trudeau has eschewed numerous opportunities along the way to slam the brakes on it.
00:00:23.280 He has, by inaction, and in some cases by very specific action, ratified this deal along the way.
00:00:30.560 But now he's finding himself at odds with, well, himself.
00:00:35.680 Trudeau said in a recent interview his government is looking for a way out of the deal to block further export of the vehicles that Saudi Arabia, again, may be using against civilians.
00:00:46.600 But wait, I thought Justin Trudeau said he couldn't do anything about it.
00:00:51.140 That's been one of the recurring themes in the Liberal defense of this plan.
00:00:56.140 Let's take a look at the history of this, shall we?
00:00:59.100 When the deal was signed, Trudeau literally did not say a word about it in the House of Commons.
00:01:05.060 No Liberals did.
00:01:06.260 In fact, my research shows that the first time anyone brought it up in the House was more than a year and several months after the deal was announced.
00:01:14.000 Liberal Marc Garneau, who's now a minister in Trudeau's cabinet, spoke up and asked if Canada had received assurances that this was not going to be used against civilians.
00:01:24.520 The Conservatives said they were assured that human rights obligations were being met and there was nary a follow-up from Marc Garneau or anyone else.
00:01:31.620 Once the Liberals were in power, Stéphane Dion was the Foreign Affairs Minister, he was asked about this and said that it was not, in his view, his role to intervene in the affairs of a private company.
00:01:44.620 His words, a private company.
00:01:46.720 But that backfired.
00:01:47.800 And a day later, I think it was, he changed his tune and started to say, well, you know, he can't actually do anything about it because it was a conservative deal.
00:01:56.140 So it was the typical liberal playbook, blame Stephen Harper and get rid of all personal responsibility.
00:02:03.020 Either way, he personally signed the export permits.
00:02:06.280 He personally put his signature on there to say, all right, well, I guess that we're going to send these pieces of equipment to Saudi Arabia.
00:02:14.040 This is what the Globe and Mail had to say about Stéphane Dion's role.
00:02:18.660 The Liberal government has taken full ownership of the decision, which they once said they were unable to stop.
00:02:26.540 So Trudeau can't even get on the same page as himself here.
00:02:30.780 This is something Justin Trudeau said about the deal earlier this year in March.
00:02:35.940 Permits are only approved if the exports are consistent with our foreign and defense policies, including human rights.
00:02:42.880 Our approach fully meets our national obligation and Canadian laws.
00:02:49.340 Now in October, right after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a murder that we now know goes right up to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
00:02:56.720 This is what Trudeau had to say then.
00:02:58.980 The contract signed by the previous government makes it very difficult to suspend or leave that contract.
00:03:05.720 This is what he said to CBC going back to the previous playbook of blaming the conservatives.
00:03:11.580 But then he said we could get out of it.
00:03:13.500 We would just have to pay the $1 billion bill that goes along with that.
00:03:17.620 And now Trudeau is singing yet another tune, saying he thinks we can get out of it and his government is going to find a way.
00:03:24.720 They're looking at their options right now.
00:03:27.060 I get dizzy trying to keep up with all of the different conflicting and contradictory positions that the liberals, the same party, are putting out on the same issue.
00:03:35.600 Not just the same party, the same person.
00:03:37.860 Justin Trudeau has continuously changed his mind on whether this is a good deal, a bad deal.
00:03:43.400 Something he supports, something he opposes, something he can change, something he can't change.
00:03:47.960 My goodness, the guy is two-face all in one.
00:03:50.860 The left hand doesn't know what the far left hand is doing.
00:03:53.160 And look, as I've said from the get-go here, nobody can be surprised at the Saudi Arabia human rights record.
00:04:00.000 The conservatives never should have let this deal be inked in the first place, and the liberals never should have followed through on it.
00:04:05.840 They doing so surrendered their moral high ground to criticize the deal, which is where we find ourselves here.
00:04:12.800 The Saudi Arabia human rights record is abysmal, almost as bad as Justin Trudeau's consistency record.
00:04:18.660 For the True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:04:23.160 I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:04:27.880 You're reading that column.
00:04:29.980 The cheaperы is the best of Miracle Antons'ficiente world.
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