Juno News - February 24, 2019


Why the SNC-Lavalin debacle matters


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

171.66655

Word Count

845

Sentence Count

46

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We're getting to week three in the SNC-Lavalin debacle,
00:00:08.420 and I think it's important we take a bit of a time out,
00:00:11.280 sit back, and talk about why this story matters.
00:00:15.440 Because we're at the point now, or several weeks in,
00:00:17.940 some people might get a bit of news fatigue.
00:00:19.980 They might lose interest in all the ups and downs and say,
00:00:22.580 I'm going to tune that out. I'm tired of it.
00:00:25.380 And that's probably what the Prime Minister and his associates are hoping,
00:00:28.360 that people will get tired of it, and it will slowly shuffle to the back pages.
00:00:32.720 But this story is very different than some of the previous scandals the Prime Minister has faced.
00:00:37.120 Let's take the Gropegate saga.
00:00:38.980 Did he or did he not 18 years ago grope a reporter at an event he attended?
00:00:44.000 Well, he's more or less fessed up that he has,
00:00:46.540 but said that odd thing about men and women experience things differently and so forth.
00:00:51.700 Not a good scene at all.
00:00:53.100 But I think the essence of this is that
00:00:57.020 people can experience interactions differently.
00:01:01.320 And part of the lesson we need to learn in this time of collective awakening
00:01:05.940 is a level of respect and understanding for the fact that
00:01:11.020 people, in many cases women, experience interactions
00:01:15.920 in professional contexts, in other contexts, differently than men.
00:01:20.220 But regardless of what we learned about that, regardless of what happened there,
00:01:24.260 and I'm not trying to make light of sexual harassment or any of those issues,
00:01:28.800 but that story, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things
00:01:32.860 when it comes to the integrity of the Canadian government.
00:01:36.000 All it really does and mean is that Trudeau is perhaps a hypocrite on feminism,
00:01:40.040 and he has a double standard when it comes to having zero tolerance for these issues
00:01:44.240 for some people, and then for himself, oh no, that story's different.
00:01:47.760 No, when it comes to SNC-Lavalin, we're in a whole different ballgame here.
00:01:53.800 Now, the alleged offense, whether or not Justin Trudeau pressured Jody Wilson-Raybould
00:01:59.500 to drop criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin,
00:02:03.380 that's a conversation that perhaps, that part of it,
00:02:07.180 perhaps only lasted 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds.
00:02:11.020 I don't know.
00:02:11.680 It might have been very brief, but in that very brief period
00:02:16.560 where they were having that discussion,
00:02:19.040 what Canada did for that brief period
00:02:23.120 was step across the line into being a type of country that we don't want to be.
00:02:30.480 We briefly became one of those shady countries
00:02:33.560 where the prime minister or the president or whoever
00:02:36.500 can influence the justice system,
00:02:39.020 where corporations can bribe people,
00:02:41.680 where they can pay people off.
00:02:43.480 It's a phenomenon called democratic backsliding,
00:02:46.460 where you think the country's working well and going rosy,
00:02:49.660 but then suddenly things start to slip.
00:02:51.760 Maybe the integrity of your elections,
00:02:53.780 maybe the impartiality of your justice system.
00:02:56.360 And that's what has happened here for this brief moment.
00:02:59.420 And that's why even if Justin Trudeau wants to fess up and say,
00:03:03.000 okay, fine, it happened.
00:03:04.420 I apologize.
00:03:05.500 I wish I could take it back.
00:03:07.040 Give me a break, guys.
00:03:08.140 It's not a big deal.
00:03:09.680 That's why we just can't tolerate it.
00:03:12.580 Because if this happens more regularly,
00:03:15.360 if we let this one thing pass,
00:03:18.540 Canada suddenly loses what we are.
00:03:21.620 Our reputation for being what I think is the best country in the world.
00:03:26.600 It's interesting times out there in world affairs right now.
00:03:29.840 We're getting closer and closer to many other countries.
00:03:32.840 We're having this spat with China,
00:03:34.540 situations with Saudi Arabia and other countries.
00:03:37.700 And these are countries that are not like us.
00:03:40.720 And these are countries that we do not want to at all become like.
00:03:44.260 It would be great if Justin Trudeau used the UN pulpit
00:03:46.800 to encourage these countries to be more like us.
00:03:49.340 Unfortunately, he's not doing that.
00:03:50.900 But that's beside the point.
00:03:53.260 They're like that, and we don't want to be like that.
00:03:56.800 But when we start doing things like this,
00:03:59.220 what is alleged the prime minister to have done,
00:04:02.380 we start ever so slightly becoming like those countries.
00:04:07.140 And what if those countries, and what if those companies,
00:04:09.640 places like Huawei, other corporations,
00:04:12.060 competitors of SNC-Lavalin,
00:04:13.860 they see this instance and they go,
00:04:15.460 oh, I see Justin Trudeau in the news saying it didn't happen,
00:04:17.840 but we get you, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
00:04:20.500 We see it happen.
00:04:21.740 We didn't know Canada was that sort of a country.
00:04:24.380 We didn't know that was possible there,
00:04:26.100 that we could lobby the government
00:04:27.600 to encourage them to have criminal charges dropped against us.
00:04:31.800 Why didn't we think of that?
00:04:34.000 And then the feeding frenzy begins.
00:04:37.580 And that's why this story matters,
00:04:39.720 and why we have to get to the bottom of it,
00:04:41.760 and why we need something more than just a justice committee hearing
00:04:45.180 or an ethics commissioner investigation.
00:04:46.600 It's why we need a public inquiry or even an RCMP probe,
00:04:50.660 because the very integrity of the foundations of our country are at stake here.