Juno News - May 15, 2019


Where are the Trudeau government's priorities？


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

190.6297

Word count

887

Sentence count

44


Summary

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

In the wake of the announcement that Mark Norman won't be charged with a breach of trust charge, there are two questions that remain: Why did the Privy Council Office refer the case to the RCMP in the first place? And why did it take so long for the prosecution to drop the charge?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 We're learning a few more drips and drabs about the Mark Norman affair as the days go by,
00:00:13.280 but there are two big questions that still remain, and I think they're the most pressing
00:00:17.500 ones that we need to get an answer to. They both relate to things that Marie Heinen said
00:00:21.900 at that press conference with Mark Norman right after the news broke that the prosecutor had
00:00:27.320 decided to stay the charge. And those two questions are, one, why did the PCO, the Privy Council Office,
00:00:35.580 refer the charges to the RCMP in the first place? So this was not a situation where the RCMP was for
00:00:42.520 some reason independently poking around into the issue of military procurement and naval deals and
00:00:48.360 so forth and then stumbled upon what they thought was a breach of trust issue and then decided to
00:00:53.160 lay charges. I mean, that never happens in crimes like this. Somebody has to call up the RCMP and say,
00:00:59.580 hey guys, take a look at this. Maybe we have a problem. And we know that the PCO are the ones
00:01:05.660 that actually did that in this case. The PCO being the top bureaucrats who report directly
00:01:10.900 to Justin Trudeau, that office that was up until very recently held by Michael Wernick.
00:01:16.060 Why do that? Because when the PCO does it, it's somewhat similar to regular folks just calling
00:01:22.460 up the cops and saying, oh, there might be a crime going on, but there's the added weight of the fact
00:01:26.680 it is coming from the Privy Council Office. So it cannot be seen as a sort of disinterested phone
00:01:32.740 call. It's always inherently going to look like some version of political interference when the top
00:01:38.820 bureaucrat office tied to the PMO picks up the phone and makes that call. So number one, why did they do
00:01:44.780 that? Because this issue, this breach of trust issue, clearly was one that was open to interpretation.
00:01:50.600 So much so that when the prosecutor took another look at it, they decided their interpretation was
00:01:55.520 now revised, downgraded, and that they weren't going ahead with the prosecution. They were going to stay
00:02:01.520 the charge. This is not like a case when you find a dead body and then you absolutely must find out,
00:02:06.740 well, who killed the body? Who's responsible for that? To charge someone on a breach of trust related
00:02:12.000 to cabinet confidences, that is a discretionary choice. You have chosen very much so to pursue
00:02:18.440 this case and to go after it. Why did they refer this case and why did they have a dogged pursuit
00:02:25.120 of Mark Norman up until it became clear that the case was falling apart? So that's one question we
00:02:30.680 don't have the answer to and a very, I think, complex one, but a very important one. Part two,
00:02:36.180 also a troubling one. So Mark Norman was suspended for a year without reason, without being charged with
00:02:41.600 anything. And then he was charged and the charge hung around for a year until it was stayed. In that
00:02:46.360 year when he was suspended, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made some comments on the case. Now
00:02:51.040 Procurement Minister Carla Qualtrough, she's already acknowledged that the Prime Minister's comments were
00:02:55.180 less than ideal in this situation. But what Trudeau basically said was, well, guys, I think we'll see
00:03:00.400 this winding up in court soon, so I shouldn't comment. And you go, well, hold on a second. How do you know
00:03:06.900 that? What information do you have where you think this may wind up in court? Because you are not
00:03:12.460 supposed to be interfering with the justice system and you're not supposed to know what the prosecutors
00:03:17.120 are thinking or about to do and so forth. So perhaps Minister Qualtrough will chalk that up to
00:03:22.360 the Prime Minister basically musing on it publicly when he shouldn't have been doing that. That in
00:03:27.480 itself is a problem. But why did he feel so vindicated in saying that? So that's one of the big
00:03:33.220 questions there to be asked. I mean, ultimately, this whole thing is a study in contrasts and a
00:03:39.400 question of proportionality. And what I mean by that is it's very interesting that the government
00:03:44.540 has been able to say for the past couple years, oh, these dozens of ISIS guys walking around freely
00:03:49.540 on Canadian soil. We can't possibly charge those guys. I mean, we're not going to secure a conviction.
00:03:54.380 It's really difficult to get the evidence. We can't do it. So why give it the old college try even?
00:03:59.420 Shrug their shoulders. Nothing to see here, folks. With Mark Norman, oh yeah, some documents were seen
00:04:05.040 by people they weren't supposed to be. Throw everything at them. Try and lock the guy up,
00:04:10.280 which is actually what could have happened. One breach of trust guilty charge can have a five-year
00:04:16.280 jail term. Why the discrepancy there? Why the confusion of priorities? Because that's certainly
00:04:22.700 what it looks like. And I think Canadians need to keep asking these questions because attempting to
00:04:27.840 basically lock up the former head of the Navy on a charge like this and then suddenly dropping it
00:04:33.460 and walking away from it all, it's not good. And the public deserve a right. They have a right to know
00:04:38.400 what happened.