The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - July 20, 2017


Liberal cash-for-access continues

Topics
cash for access cash for access continuing
Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau John Broussard Tony Clement Speaker Barry
Gord Brown advocates for Thalidomide victims Leader’s Speech

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

143.2

Word count

845

Sentence count

58

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Just when you thought things were changing, they are still the same. It turns out, there have been Liberal registered lobbyists registered to lobby for Justin Trudeau and his office who are still making it and attending cash for access events. This whole cycle keeps repeating itself.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:09.000 Well, they thought they were going to have an easy day over there today, but not so fast, Mr. Speaker.
00:00:16.640 What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:25.320 And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:31.240 Welcome back to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:35.540 It's great to be your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:37.480 And our third topic today is just when you thought it was safe with cash for access, of course, the Liberal wheel keeps on spinning.
00:00:45.480 It was over a year ago that Justin Trudeau was called out for his cash for access fundraisers where well-heeled lobbyists who were lobbying the Prime Minister, his office, other cabinet ministers were paying for access at ritzy joints and houses throughout the country to gain that special access to the Prime Minister.
00:01:05.780 When this came to light, the Prime Minister Trudeau at first defended it and then said, oh, I'm going to make things better anyway with this new piece of legislation, which is going to clamp down on this.
00:01:18.880 Of course, the legislation did no such thing.
00:01:20.860 It just merely sanctified what the Liberal Party was already doing.
00:01:23.800 And now there are new reports that, hey, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
00:01:29.480 Just when you thought things would be changing, they are still the same.
00:01:32.960 It turns out that there have been Liberal registered lobbyists registered to lobby for Justin Trudeau and for his office who are still involved in cash for access, still making it and attending cash for access events.
00:01:50.620 Mr. Trudeau himself as Prime Minister was still a featured guest at two recent cash for access events, one in Montreal, one in Vancouver.
00:02:00.820 More than half a dozen lobbyists were on either of those events' guest lists.
00:02:06.240 Some specifically registered to lobby Justin Trudeau and his office.
00:02:12.540 So here again, the Liberal government says they're doing one thing, but of course, Justin Trudeau and his government are doing something very, very different.
00:02:20.980 Our critic of this, John Broussard, has been very, very articulate at explaining why this is a problem.
00:02:31.040 You know, he said, if you're a registered lobbyist, you're not going to flip a switch at these events.
00:02:35.740 You're going to go there with a specific goal in mind.
00:02:37.980 If you're a lobbyist and you are going to these events, you're not suddenly not a lobbyist, is his point.
00:02:43.720 Of course, you're going to go there and try to lobby for your specific pet projects. 0.97
00:02:48.140 And, you know, he has gone very floridly to say, you can't put lipstick on a pig.
00:02:56.340 These events are what they are.
00:02:58.180 People are paying for access and they're paying to bend the prime minister's ear or a minister's ear.
00:03:04.220 The new rules just provided for a cover for an activity that fills the Liberal coffers.
00:03:09.860 That's John Broussard, our Barry MP, who, of course, hits the nail right on the head.
00:03:15.780 The fact is simple. These fundraisers by the Liberal Party are still ongoing.
00:03:20.780 They're still going on. Cash for access involving lobbyists attending these events.
00:03:26.680 When the Liberals get caught, they say, oh, sorry, our mistake won't happen again.
00:03:31.020 And then it happens all over again. This is part of how outrageous this is.
00:03:36.000 It's not just that they're doing this still.
00:03:38.440 They continue to do this. They continue to get caught doing it.
00:03:42.820 They continue to say as Liberals, oh, we won't do it again.
00:03:45.260 And then they continue to do it again.
00:03:46.560 This whole cycle keeps repeating itself time and time again, despite the fact that they table legislation supposedly to fix this,
00:03:54.380 which, of course, it has done no such thing.
00:03:56.620 So these are the issues that make this still an issue.
00:03:59.740 You know, as a conservative opposition, we're talking about a lot of things.
00:04:04.460 We're talking about the free trade rules.
00:04:07.280 We're talking about the Cotter settlement.
00:04:09.520 We're talking about things that Canadians are concerned about.
00:04:12.940 But this cash for access is still happening.
00:04:15.500 So we still have to raise this as an issue and try to get better behavior from this government.
00:04:20.940 There's a sense of entitlement coming from Liberal cabinet members.
00:04:25.300 But they don't – look, as a former cabinet member myself, you take your lead from the first minister, from the prime minister.
00:04:35.260 Unless the prime minister puts his foot down and says this is not acceptable behavior,
00:04:40.460 this kind of thing seeps through every part of government until the rot sets in.
00:04:46.020 And that's exactly what is happening with the Trudeau government with this cash for access, unfortunately, continuing issue, continuing scandal.
00:04:56.120 And that is why we will continue to raise these issues in Parliament when it resumes in September.
00:05:00.920 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative podcast.
00:05:15.420 To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
00:05:19.700 search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.
00:05:24.060 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint.