Juno News - November 08, 2018


Why are taxpayers subsidizing lucrative private sector careers for former governors general？

Topics
taxpayer subsidies for former governors general
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Adrienne Clarkson Julie Payette
Five Brits arrested for making ＂vile＂ social media video 100 Years - Lest We Forget

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

171.2

Word count

522

Sentence count

23

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Since leaving office more than a decade ago, former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson has billed taxpayers more than $1.1 million, plus another few hundred thousand that wasn t publicly declared for... well, it's not quite clear.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.040 Since leaving office more than a decade ago, former Governor-General Adrienne
00:00:04.380 Clarkson has billed taxpayers more than 1.1 million dollars plus another few
00:00:10.480 hundred thousand that wasn't publicly declared for... well it's not quite clear.
00:00:17.640 I mean this is not just her although it sounds like she's been particularly
00:00:21.640 problematic as far as how much she's been racking up in bills for which the 1.00
00:00:25.920 taxpayers are on the hook but Adrienne Clarkson is taking advantage of a 1.00
00:00:30.600 program that gives lifetime administrative support to former
00:00:34.800 Governors-General. The rationale behind this is that a Governor-General is never
00:00:40.320 quite finished being a public figure and even when he or she leaves office they
00:00:44.720 still have all of these things that they're doing for the people of Canada.
00:00:47.580 Well as a Canadian I'd rather just have the money back and I think that's
00:00:51.780 probably where most Canadians are on this. Now the current Governor-General
00:00:55.700 doesn't even like doing any public appearances even the ones for which
00:00:59.840 she's paid to do as the Governor-General but I would hate to imagine that say
00:01:04.580 Julie Payette after leaving office would be given an indefinite and seemingly
00:01:09.060 infinite amount of resources when the role isn't quite clear. Adrienne Clarkson gave a
00:01:15.740 very half-hearted defense of what she did in the Globe and Mail in which she
00:01:19.940 chalked it up to some unpaid speaking engagements she's done, pieces she's written
00:01:25.160 for free and all of this we're supposed to be grateful for her doing. She said she
00:01:30.260 could have just played golf but that wasn't an option. Well at this point I'd
00:01:33.920 say the golf course is beckoning because I'd rather her spend some time doing 18
00:01:37.820 holes than racking up expenses when I'm not as a Canadian benefiting from it. And I
00:01:43.220 say this as someone who has very low expectations for the Governor-General. It's a
00:01:47.240 ceremonial role but do I want you know four, five, six former Governors General at
00:01:52.700 some point conceivably all going around billing the taxpayers because they still
00:01:58.200 believe they're a public figure despite no longer having the title or the
00:02:02.740 official residence that suggests they are public figures. Because that's what's
00:02:06.840 happening. And for former Prime Ministers in Canada there's an expectation that
00:02:11.480 they go into the private sector and that's where their money is supposed to come
00:02:15.360 from. We give Prime Ministers who have left office a pension of course which as
00:02:19.500 much as government pensions are out of hand I think is reasonable but at the
00:02:23.640 same time these do not extend to office supports or administrative benefits. You're
00:02:30.040 in the private sector you deal with it yourself. And for Adrienne Clarkson I'd say
00:02:34.260 the same is true. She has a speaking agent which means that she's able to bring in
00:02:39.060 significant amounts of money for public speaking. She's got a foundation which 0.90
00:02:43.440 receives a great deal of money and corporate sponsorship. So I don't like the
00:02:47.400 idea of Canadian taxpayers subsidizing what is now a private sector career. So
00:02:54.440 to all former Governors General the message is simple. Cut them off. For the 0.96
00:02:59.140 True North Initiative, I'm Andrew Lawton.