Juno News - February 24, 2019


Why the SNC-Lavalin debacle matters

Topics
SNC-Lavalin scandal
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jody Wilson-Raybould Gropegate
Canada needs blood plasma, but the NDP is looking ban paid plasma donations More schools must let kids be kids

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

171.67

Word count

845

Sentence count

46

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The SNC-Lavalin scandal continues to swirl around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his office, and we're here to talk about why it matters, and why we need to get to the bottom of it. We're getting to week three in the saga, and I think it's important we take a bit of a time out, sit back and wonder why this matters.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 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. 0.98
00:01:36.000 All it really does and mean is that Trudeau is perhaps a hypocrite on feminism, 0.97
00:01:40.040 and he has a double standard when it comes to having zero tolerance for these issues 0.96
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, 1.00
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.