Juno News - April 07, 2019


Where the real problem lies in the SNC-Lavalin debacle


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

157.56738

Word count

532

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott being expelled from the Liberal caucus, the question of whether or not the Prime Minister had the right to expel them from caucus has become a hot-button issue.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Much of the discussion surrounding the expulsion of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott
00:00:10.320 from Liberal Caucus has been surrounding whether or not the Prime Minister had the right to
00:00:16.240 expel them without consulting caucus, or indeed should caucus have had a vote.
00:00:20.200 A lot of the other discussion concerns, as the Prime Minister said, the supposed lack
00:00:26.820 of trust, or whether or not Wilson-Raybould had the right to record a phone conversation
00:00:33.640 held with Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council Office.
00:00:37.640 To me, a lot of those things are side issues.
00:00:40.520 The salient issue here should be the issue of prosecutorial independence, and that is
00:00:47.660 where I think the Prime Minister has really gone astray.
00:00:51.580 The prosecutorial independence is a basic tenet of a democracy.
00:00:55.460 There are three pieces to the judicial system.
00:00:59.040 There's the police who investigate crimes, the prosecutorial system, which prepares the
00:01:04.860 case and decides whether or not charges should be laid, and if so, what charges.
00:01:09.200 And then finally, there's the judiciary, which hears the cases and then decides guilt or innocence.
00:01:16.280 At any level, no one in a position of power should be able to call the police and say things
00:01:22.260 like, hey, I don't like SNC-Lavalin.
00:01:25.200 Why don't you start an investigation against him and see if you can get him charged?
00:01:29.320 Or any more than they should be able to call a judge hearing a case and say, you know, how's
00:01:35.320 that case going, judge?
00:01:36.700 You know, this is the way I'd like to see it head.
00:01:39.620 And that sort of thing.
00:01:40.780 Well, that's exactly what the Prime Minister did in this case.
00:01:43.760 And not only the Prime Minister, but also Gerald Butts and Michael Wernick, too.
00:01:47.680 And possibly even Katie Telford, we're not positive on that one yet.
00:01:52.240 But realistically, any representative of the Prime Minister or the Prime Minister himself
00:01:56.720 in the September meeting he had with then Attorney General Wilson-Raybould, to try and
00:02:02.820 get her to change the mind of the Director of Public Prosecutions is interference at the
00:02:08.380 worst level.
00:02:09.220 And it should not be tolerated, and in fact was not tolerated by Wilson-Raybould.
00:02:13.600 Now, she ultimately fell on her sword on that principle, but I think good on her. 0.51
00:02:19.880 And I think shame on the Prime Minister for trying to interfere in the independence of
00:02:25.300 the prosecutorial system.
00:02:27.080 And in fact, it may be well up to the RCMP to determine whether or not that was an attempt
00:02:32.740 at obstruction of justice.
00:02:34.740 There's much more to this, but very little of it, in my view, has to do with the optics
00:02:40.500 or the politics of the situation.
00:02:42.260 I think it has a lot more to do with the attempt at interference from the most powerful office
00:02:47.200 in this country with the prosecutorial independence of the Attorney General's office.
00:02:52.160 I think that's where the real problem lies, and I think that's where the focus should be
00:02:56.880 by the pundit class and certainly by the public and the major media.
00:03:01.660 For True North, I'm Leo Knight.
00:03:03.260 All right.
00:03:04.720 To be continued...
00:03:05.540 All right.
00:03:06.320 All right.
00:03:06.820 Thank you.
00:03:07.320 All right.
00:03:07.600 All right.
00:03:08.340 Let's do it.
00:03:09.180 Let's do it.
00:03:22.100 All right.