Juno News - August 03, 2020


Will Trudeau face any consequences?


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

197.71442

Word count

594

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau has been accused of a conflict of interest in his dealings with a charity run by his family. The Prime Minister's Office says he did nothing wrong, but the ethics commissioner is still investigating the matter and could find him guilty.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 A lot of people are asking, will Justin Trudeau skate on the We Charity scandal this time around?
00:00:10.800 Like he skated on so many other scandals. Here's the thing though, I don't think he is going to
00:00:15.620 skate. I think he's going to face full repercussions, the full force of the law. And you go, wow,
00:00:22.500 well what does that mean? That must be something. Is he going to be incarcerated? Is he going to
00:00:26.220 be frog-marched out of the Prime Minister's office? No, I think what's going to happen is he will be
00:00:31.180 found in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act, which is a law. It's not the criminal code,
00:00:36.200 but it is still a law. And he is going to be fined a whopping, wait for it, $200, give or take $100 on
00:00:44.940 either side of the ledger. That's of course the amount of funds that Bill Morneau was fined for a
00:00:50.800 previous breach of conflict of interest rules. And then you go, how is this possible? Well,
00:00:55.720 there's a simple answer to that because that's what the law actually says right now. That's how
00:01:01.040 the system is set up. Now the current ethics commissioner, that's Mario Dion, and he's
00:01:05.320 probing this. And based on everything we know, and Justin Trudeau's happy to admit that he did
00:01:11.240 not actually recuse himself and he admits that he should have recused himself, I think there's a
00:01:15.700 fighting chance that Mario Dion is going to find him guilty. Mary Dawson, she was the previous ethics
00:01:21.480 commissioner and she did the ruling in the Aga Khan fiasco. And she actually said in media interviews
00:01:27.780 as she was departing from the position, she was reflecting on the role and said, you know, I think
00:01:33.320 there should be greater teeth to all of this. I mean, all we can really do is issue a judgment,
00:01:38.120 a finding that says, yes, you are guilty. And well, there you go. You can't even call it a slap on the
00:01:43.620 wrist because there's no consequences. Oh, and we can give you a fine. I think the highest they can give
00:01:48.500 is $500. So Justin Trudeau found to have made this really bad decision to go and award the We
00:01:56.380 Charity contract to this group that was connected to his family, that had given a lot of money to his
00:02:01.800 mother and other funds to other family members. The rules actually state right now that the worst he
00:02:07.440 can face is a couple hundred dollars fine. Of course, the general public, the voters can say we're tired
00:02:12.840 of all these scandals we hear about. We're going to throw the bums out next time around. So that's 1.00
00:02:17.760 also there. The more straws being added to the camel's back. But according to the way the system
00:02:22.280 actually works, well, Justin Trudeau probably will face full repercussions. And the full repercussions,
00:02:28.260 they just ain't that bad. And former ethics commissioners say they should be strengthened.
00:02:34.020 Well, they can. You can increase the financial fines to be much larger amounts. You can be fining
00:02:38.740 people in the thousands of dollars, in the tens of thousands of dollars. There's also other directions
00:02:43.580 things to head. Things can be more rolled into the criminal code. What do you think? What should
00:02:48.540 happen in all of this? Because there will be consequences for Justin Trudeau. They're just
00:02:53.360 going to be so tiny that they're not really going to mean anything to him. And they're probably not
00:02:57.800 going to mean anything to the rest of the Canadian public.