Juno News - Will Trudeau face any consequences？

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.

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.

Juno News - August 03, 2020

Will Trudeau face any consequences？

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