Juno News - Will Trudeau testify at committee over the WE scandal？

00:00:00.800 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:00:07.280 Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:00:11.100 Midweek edition here.

00:00:12.500 It is Wednesday and we are going to put the we in Wednesday.

00:00:16.660 I've been waiting since Monday to use that joke and I finally get to now.

00:00:20.640 You know, Justin Trudeau put out his daily itinerary for Wednesday and it was private meetings.

00:00:25.480 So no public itinerary, no public announcements, no press conferences, no media avail.

00:00:30.880 And all I could think of is, you know, how it looked like the we, the W and the E were 0.74

00:00:34.880 capitalized in Wednesday.

00:00:36.300 But I digress.

00:00:37.360 I'm going like full QAnon conspiracy theory on this.

00:00:40.500 In any case, the scandal is continuing to balloon and this is a big problem right now.

00:00:45.920 We know that Justin Trudeau was giving a multi-million dollar contract, almost worth a billion dollars

00:00:51.840 of government money under the control of a charity that has been paying his buddies and

00:00:57.260 his family members and all that stuff.

00:00:59.700 And then Justin Trudeau finally apologized.

00:01:02.720 Now this comes after being rather unrepentant last week.

00:01:06.160 He said he made a mistake.

00:01:07.920 He did the wrong thing.

00:01:09.360 He should have recused himself from the discussions.

00:01:11.840 This is what he said on Monday.

00:01:13.840 This morning, I know people want to hear more about the Canada Student Service Grant Program

00:01:18.840 in particular, I know there are many questions and problems with the way this program has

00:01:24.620 run out, run about, and I know people have concerns about it.

00:01:29.060 I get that.

00:01:30.460 I made a mistake in not recusing myself immediately from the discussions given our family's history.

00:01:38.560 And I'm sincerely sorry about not having done that.

00:01:42.520 Now there are two options here.

00:01:44.080 It's either better late than never or too little too late.

00:01:47.180 And I'm going to probably side with too little too late because of how Justin Trudeau and

00:01:52.960 the Prime Minister's office were talking about this last week by saying, listen, it's only

00:01:57.240 about serving children.

00:01:58.580 It's not about who benefited.

00:02:00.040 They had an option to clean this up weeks ago.

00:02:02.360 They had an option to clean it up last week and they didn't.

00:02:05.360 So I don't think we can really give them too much credit for doing the right thing if

00:02:09.380 it's coming after attempting to deflect and muddle and muddy the discussion for several

00:02:14.720 days.

00:02:15.240 That's my take on this.

00:02:16.700 And now we have another development of this in the National Post that it was the Trudeau

00:02:21.720 government itself that organized and contributed over $1 million to a We Day event in 2017,

00:02:29.620 during which the Post says, we likely gave some of that money to Margaret Trudeau to speak.

00:02:35.480 Now, I don't think this is that, you know, this was orchestrated by the PMO.

00:02:39.140 I don't think it's that, you know, they said, all right, we're going to invite you guys to

00:02:42.620 Ottawa.

00:02:43.060 We're going to pay you, but you have to invite my mom to speak.

00:02:46.120 That's the rule.

00:02:47.120 No, but I think it shows the deep and intricately linked ties that exist between we and the

00:02:55.040 government, the longstanding ties, financial and familial.

00:02:59.020 And it really reinforces the question of why on earth did Trudeau think that it was his

00:03:02.860 right to not recuse himself from this discussion?

00:03:05.840 Why did Bill Morneau not think that as well?

00:03:08.340 And by the way, Seamus O'Regan and Katie Telford, also two very high ranking liberals, one in

00:03:13.920 cabinet, one in the PMO, also have fundraised hundreds of thousands of dollars for We.

00:03:19.240 We found this out last week as well.

00:03:21.780 So all of this is coming to a head right now.

00:03:24.580 And as a taxpaying Canadian, I think most people are looking at this and saying, like,

00:03:28.340 what?

00:03:30.080 You could not get away with this in any other sector.

00:03:33.540 You could not get away with it in any other space.

00:03:35.500 But this is what passes for integrity in Justin Trudeau's government.

00:03:38.940 And look, Mary Dawson, who's the former ethics commissioner, says she's fairly certain that

00:03:44.300 he's going to have been found to have contravened the rules.

00:03:47.760 But I would look at, again, Mary Dawson's thing and say, look, she may be right.

00:03:52.540 But this reinforces why it is so dangerous right now that we have an ethics regime that

00:03:57.600 has absolutely no teeth.

00:03:59.460 It'll cost him 500 bucks.

00:04:01.420 He can cover it by doing just a five minute speech for We and that will be enough.

00:04:06.380 And that makes it go away.

00:04:07.400 There's no real remedy that the ethics commissioner can force.

00:04:11.880 And more importantly, there's no real punishment for breaking the rules, even if you are, as

00:04:16.440 Justin Trudeau is when it comes to federal ethics rules, a repeat offender.

00:04:21.060 So the conservatives on the finance committee are calling Justin Trudeau to the committee

00:04:25.760 to testify.

00:04:26.680 This is what the conservatives are trying to seek here.

00:04:29.580 Pierre Paliyev is the conservative finance critic and a member of parliament.

00:04:33.260 He joins us on the line now.

00:04:35.100 Pierre, good to talk to you.

00:04:35.960 Thanks for coming on today.

00:04:37.400 Good to be with you.

00:04:38.920 So let's talk about, I mean, there are a lot of aspects to this.

00:04:42.740 I mean, I made a comment on the show the other day that I think we should be getting a bulk

00:04:46.300 discount on ethics investigations.

00:04:48.040 But we're talking about a situation here that I think is continuously rearing its head, which

00:04:54.740 is just a fundamental disrespect for the federal ethics laws and just, I'd say, for political

00:05:00.200 integrity in general.

00:05:01.100 I agree with you.

00:05:03.540 I think the problem we have here is that the prime minister thinks he's a king.

00:05:12.680 He has been told his whole life that he's a prince.

00:05:15.520 And princes and kings often don't think that the rules of the realm apply to them.

00:05:23.620 So he would probably subconsciously anyway say, yes, normally it would be unethical for a prime

00:05:31.320 minister to direct a billion dollar sole source contract to a group that had paid his family

00:05:37.200 $300,000.

00:05:38.720 But I'm not, I'm no mere mortal.

00:05:43.360 I'm not a normal prime minister.

00:05:45.540 I'm a prince and a king.

00:05:47.580 And I can do whatever I want.

00:05:49.580 I think that is the prime minister's personal sentiment.

00:05:53.720 I think that's how he views the world.

00:05:55.580 And the media, the mainstream media on Parliament Hill, not the media out in the real world,

00:06:02.380 but those around him in the precinct, reinforced that notion.

00:06:06.440 And they were doing everything they could during the pandemic to treat him as though he was a

00:06:12.160 king who would come out of his castle and grace us all with his presence daily, giving

00:06:18.980 declarations and edicts for us all to follow.

00:06:23.500 And that even questioning his conduct was completely, almost treasonous.

00:06:30.460 And I think through that experience, he started to think that he could just do anything he

00:06:34.840 wanted.

00:06:35.300 And he did.

00:06:37.140 And when you mentioned questioning, the Conservatives have now tried to get him before the Finance

00:06:42.300 Committee to answer questions.

00:06:44.600 I mean, there are two aspects of this.

00:06:46.340 Number one, how likely do you think it is that that'll happen?

00:06:48.860 And number two, what is it that you can really get out of this?

00:06:51.720 I mean, it does seem plain as day what happened.

00:06:54.620 What more is there that you think we need to learn?

00:06:58.680 Well, we want to know where this idea came from.

00:07:01.240 I mean, he continually claims that the public service concocted this scheme.

00:07:06.600 Andrew, I used to be the minister responsible for employment and training.

00:07:11.700 And I can tell you there's no way the bureaucracy in that department would have concocted this

00:07:17.300 idea.

00:07:17.700 It just doesn't make any sense, especially given that the purported purpose of the program

00:07:23.940 is to pay young people to help charities and non-for-profits.

00:07:29.780 But there's already a program that does that.

00:07:32.060 It's called the Canada Summer Jobs Program.

00:07:34.040 In fact, the amounts that they subsidize hourly wages is similar to what Trudeau proposes with

00:07:42.420 this new scheme.

00:07:44.420 So in other words, it's basically a duplication of something already done within the public

00:07:50.500 service.

00:07:51.440 I would be stunned if public servants, knowing that, and they do, would have recommended

00:07:57.080 farming the program out that they already run inside.

00:08:00.040 And so I believe that we need to find out where this idea originated.

00:08:06.320 And I suspect that what we will find as we follow the breadcrumbs is that it was the Trudeau,

00:08:13.100 the Team Trudeau, the elites around him, and those who stood to profit from this transaction

00:08:19.900 who concocted it rather than public servants.

00:08:23.320 You mentioned something interesting there about the pre-existing program.

00:08:26.980 If you were to take out the Trudeau-We connections and all of the connections between Bill Morneau

00:08:32.480 and We and Seamus O'Regan and We and take out all of those things, does it seem like it

00:08:38.000 was just a bad program in general?

00:08:40.100 I mean, or something that was unnecessary, even if you take out the conflicts of interest?

00:08:44.900 Oh, absolutely. 0.91

00:08:45.680 It's a ridiculous concept. 0.84

00:08:47.420 I mean, you know, Orwell warns us that whenever governments abuse language, they're probably 0.89

00:08:52.920 abusing other things at the same time.

00:08:55.720 And to start with, he calls it a paid volunteer program.

00:08:59.400 Well, that's impossible.

00:09:01.000 I mean, you can't, you can't, you can either be paid or you can volunteer, but you can't

00:09:05.740 be paid to volunteer.

00:09:06.900 If you're paid, then you're not, by definition, a volunteer.

00:09:11.060 Then it's a summer job, a la Canada summer jobs program.

00:09:13.580 Exactly.

00:09:13.800 It's a summer job.

00:09:14.760 Now, they needed to invent a new name, though, in order to justify a new program.

00:09:20.380 And that was the only reason why this program, why this name was created.

00:09:26.360 They would have loved to just say it's a summer job program.

00:09:29.540 But if they did that, then they wouldn't have been able to justify creating a separate

00:09:33.000 billion dollar sole source contract.

00:09:35.700 Everyone would have said, well, why wouldn't you just use the program that already goes by

00:09:38.920 that name?

00:09:39.480 So, so whenever you see language that is abused, you'll see other abuses.

00:09:46.160 You know, the other thing, Andrew, I would point out is that so often with these scandals,

00:09:51.180 they result from governments doing things that they have no business doing in the first

00:09:57.480 place.

00:09:58.740 Right.

00:09:59.180 Like the sponsorship program, you know, was it really justified for any government to

00:10:04.840 be putting advertise, advertorials and advertisements up at these events all over a particular province?

00:10:13.100 No, not really.

00:10:13.700 That's not the role of government.

00:10:15.620 A billion dollar gun registry.

00:10:17.280 Well, I mean, even if it had cost one dollar, it was something the government should not have

00:10:21.100 been doing.

00:10:21.640 And here again, we have government interfering with the charitable sector to effectively corrupt

00:10:29.000 the very meaning of a benevolent word like volunteer.

00:10:32.920 Again, not the role of government.

00:10:35.740 And so whenever governments venture outside of their core purpose, they tend to attract

00:10:42.680 corruption or perhaps it's the other way around.

00:10:45.840 Perhaps corruption attracts government outside of its core mandate.

00:10:50.840 Yeah, that's a really great point on this.

00:10:53.540 And, you know, I'm all for finding ways that we can, you know, perhaps download the bureaucracy's

00:10:58.780 responsibilities and find private sector delivery of services.

00:11:01.820 But that doesn't seem at all like what this was.

00:11:04.140 This was really just expanding the bureaucracy to a group that wouldn't even have the accountability.

00:11:09.360 You're absolutely right.

00:11:10.280 And this is something we always have to watch out for.

00:11:12.060 You know, this happens again and again.

00:11:15.140 We as conservatives, we say, look, let's remove government and allow either the private sector

00:11:20.980 or the societal sectors like charity and philanthropy to replace it.

00:11:27.500 And then what happened?

00:11:28.340 But we have to be careful that we don't get the opposite of what we are looking for.

00:11:31.940 So instead of, in this case, instead of vacating the space, the government vacating the space

00:11:39.420 so that the volunteer and charitable sector could fill it, they tried to nationalize the

00:11:45.420 volunteer and charitable sector.

00:11:47.840 And instead of expanding the role of society and shrinking the role of government, they did

00:11:54.620 exactly the opposite.

00:11:56.660 And we see this, for example, with the infrastructure bank.

00:11:58.880 We'd all like to see more private sector investment in infrastructure.

00:12:03.680 But with the infrastructure bank, what they're doing is the opposite.

00:12:06.620 They're taking things that are already privately financed and nationalizing the risk.

00:12:11.820 So we have to be very careful to watch the real meaning of words and actions to determine

00:12:19.360 if government is, in fact, just grabbing more power and controlling more and more of our lives.

00:12:25.500 I mentioned earlier on in the show, one of the big problems is that our ethics infrastructure

00:12:31.220 that we have for investigating and pursuing these doesn't really have any teeth.

00:12:35.240 And we know this because Justin Trudeau has been found to have violated this multiple times

00:12:39.520 and other parts of his government as well.

00:12:41.620 What do you think needs to be done to reform the ethics and conflict of interest process

00:12:46.480 so that there's actually some heft behind it when they go after lawmakers that have broken

00:12:51.240 the rules?

00:12:51.720 Well, listen, I don't know that there are I think that the problem with the previous violations

00:12:59.040 is that the police didn't do the job and we have law enforcement for to to apply the criminal

00:13:06.720 code.

00:13:07.240 In the case of the Aga Khan Island, the police simply just didn't do the job.

00:13:12.220 There are provisions in the criminal code that ban government officials from accepting benefits

00:13:17.060 from entities that are that are seeking assistance from government.

00:13:24.640 And so in the case of the Aga Khan Billionaire Island vacation, Trudeau took two hundred thousand

00:13:31.740 dollars of vacations from someone asking him personally for a 15 million dollar grant.

00:13:38.200 That's a criminal code violation.

00:13:41.840 The RCMP doesn't disagree with me on that, by the way.

00:13:45.460 We wrote them.

00:13:46.220 They wrote back and they didn't say, you know, no, he didn't break the law.

00:13:49.080 We found exculpatory evidence.

00:13:51.140 They said, no, we can't productively pursue an investigation.

00:13:53.940 Those are the words that the letter said.

00:13:55.980 So what the hell does that mean?

00:13:57.580 You can't productively pursue an investigation.

00:13:59.920 Were you were you stopped?

00:14:01.080 Did someone in the government block you from doing your job?

00:14:04.860 You know, so in other words, the RCMP did not do its job.

00:14:09.620 And frankly, if the Mounties felt they were implicated in that scandal, they should have

00:14:13.720 just referred it to a different police force to do an independent criminal investigation.

00:14:21.200 And so and I think maybe that's what the Mounties are going to have to do in this case,

00:14:25.300 to simply say we're too close to the prime minister.

00:14:28.560 The cabinet appoints the RCMP commissioner.

00:14:32.000 Maybe the Mounties ought to simply redirect the complaint to the OPP, the QPP, the Ottawa

00:14:39.260 Police Service or some other police entity that is not compromised by prime ministerial

00:14:44.620 power.

00:14:45.780 So do you think the police should be involved in this situation as well, then, just to be

00:14:49.720 absolutely clear?

00:14:50.820 I do.

00:14:51.320 I don't I'm not saying I haven't concluded that there was a criminal code breach.

00:14:55.780 I'm neither a police officer nor a judge, so I don't have the and we don't all we don't

00:15:02.760 have all the facts yet.

00:15:03.660 But I certainly think that the police should examine whether or not there was a breach of

00:15:10.920 trust, whether or not the prime minister considered the payment to his family to be an inducement,

00:15:17.500 you know, that that motivated him to create this extremely unusual contract.

00:15:26.020 And and so there should be a high level inspector investigator with a police force

00:15:32.280 go in, establish all of the facts and determine whether or not the criminal code applies.

00:15:37.380 Just turning before we wrap things up here to the broader financial state of Canada right

00:15:43.500 now, we found out last week a deficit to over three hundred and forty billion dollars.

00:15:48.420 I know that a lot of that was inevitable just given government forcing people to shut down

00:15:53.100 their businesses.

00:15:53.620 So you have to have a bit of relief there.

00:15:56.020 How much of that do you think was avoidable, though?

00:15:58.760 I mean, I mean, I know that you've been critical, as has the leader of the Conservatives right

00:16:02.480 now, Andrew Scheer, about a lot of the programs and how they were delivered.

00:16:06.340 Do you think that we could have had an even smaller deficit?

00:16:10.800 Oh, there's no doubt we should have gone into this with a balanced budget from 2016 until

00:16:17.640 2019, the world economy was hot.

00:16:21.480 And for for some of that time, not all of it, some of that time, commodity prices were high

00:16:27.360 and the U.S. economy, which we have the privilege of neighboring, was on fire.

00:16:33.540 And therefore, we had all the winds blowing at our backs.

00:16:38.160 And there's no reason we ought not to balance the budget in that time period.

00:16:42.940 If we had, then the balance going in would have been strong.

00:16:46.760 The deficit would have been smaller.

00:16:48.380 And the debt load we carry, total debt load, would have been about 80 or 90 billion dollars

00:16:53.220 smaller than it is right now.

00:16:55.640 The other thing I would point out is that the programs that are designed to respond to

00:17:01.660 COVID have serious anti-growth, anti-work attributes.

00:17:07.240 Like if you're on this CERB program, you go back and earn more than $1,000.

00:17:11.620 They kick you from the CERB to the curb.

00:17:14.180 So a lot of workers are saying that they can't go back to work and they can't earn money for

00:17:19.600 16 weeks.

00:17:21.060 We should remove that anti-work penalty, let people earn more than $1,000 and let them

00:17:25.900 phase out their CERB as they earn more with their jobs.

00:17:29.840 Same with the rent and wage subsidies.

00:17:32.500 Both of them require businesses keep their revenues down 30 or in some cases 70 percent

00:17:39.180 below pre-COVID levels.

00:17:41.460 So that requires businesses to artificially suppress revenues in order to get government

00:17:47.820 support.

00:17:48.840 They should remove that and make those scalable programs so businesses are always better off

00:17:53.960 with an extra sale or an extra dollar of revenue.

00:17:57.220 Those kinds of pro-growth policies would allow businesses and workers to recover.

00:18:03.220 It would reduce dependence on government and increase the taxes that businesses and workers

00:18:09.420 pay under the existing rates.

00:18:12.760 And so we need a pro-growth agenda now.

00:18:16.060 We cannot, the government and the Bank of Canada cannot simply pay the wages of the nation

00:18:21.000 forever.

00:18:22.140 And I guess that just in closing, we know there's a conservative leadership race on right now.

00:18:26.720 The election could be theoretically at any point in the next couple of years.

00:18:30.700 What do you think the conservatives moving forward need to do, either in running for an election

00:18:35.920 or even if they form government, to get the books in check?

00:18:39.260 I mean, because obviously you have to close that deficit somehow.

00:18:42.480 You don't want to raise revenues by increasing taxes.

00:18:45.280 And certainly cutting spending is going to be something that will unleash the mass of criticism

00:18:50.600 that conservatives are so accustomed to.

00:18:52.720 What's the answer there?

00:18:54.860 Well, I think we need a pro-growth free market agenda that will unleash the economy.

00:19:00.420 We have trillions of dollars in natural resources locked beneath the ground because of anti-development

00:19:09.200 legislation like C-69, C-48.

00:19:12.640 We have a tax system that punishes work and business earnings.

00:19:18.720 We have some of the slowest approvals for normal economic activity.

00:19:24.940 It takes almost three times longer to get a warehouse approved for construction in Canada

00:19:29.760 as it does in the United States.

00:19:31.600 Just as one example, we need to remove all of those obstacles to unleash the full power of

00:19:39.660 free enterprise.

00:19:40.420 That will generate the wealth necessary to phase out our deficit over time

00:19:46.880 and enable our people to carry the enormous debt load that governments have thrust upon them.

00:19:57.580 Conservative finance critic Pierre Polyev joining me on the line.

00:20:00.900 Pierre, thanks so much for coming on today.

00:20:02.440 Great to talk to you.

00:20:03.220 Yeah, great to be with you, Andrew.

00:20:04.340 Thank you very much.

00:20:05.060 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:20:07.760 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - July 17, 2020

Will Trudeau testify at committee over the WE scandal？

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