Justin Trudeau offers a FAKE apology for going to Tofino
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Summary
Justin Trudeau's ill-advised Tofino vacation is starting to look eerily similar to his illegal vacation on the Aga Khan's private islands in 2016. We ve got all the details on the show today with Candice Malan ( )!
Transcript
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Justin Trudeau's ill-advised Tofino vacation is starting to look eerily similar to his illegal 2016 vacation on the Aga Khan's private islands.
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We've got all the details on the show today. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
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So there have been some pretty major revelations about this trip that Justin Truro took to Tofino on Truth and Reconciliation Day last Thursday.
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Now, let me just start by saying, when this story first broke, I thought that it was outrageous.
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To me, the biggest component of it was the fact that Justin Trudeau lied, the fact that his itinerary said that he was in Ottawa in private meetings,
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when the reality was that his office knew damn well that he was not in Ottawa, he was out in Tofino,
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or at least he was on his way out to the west coast of British Columbia, as far west as you can get, the west coast of Vancouver Island in Tofino.
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And so to me, it was the duplicity, the lies, the trying to cover up where the prime minister is and what he is actually doing.
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The fact that he decided to go and take a little bit of R&R with his family in a quiet, serene location out in British Columbia,
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He just, after all, fought a grueling campaign.
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And, you know, he's only human. We all need some time, downtime with our families.
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I don't think it's a big deal that he went to British Columbia.
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He's sort of from British Columbia. I know he, you know, grew up in Ottawa and he's from a Montreal family,
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but his mother is from British Columbia. His mother's entire side of the family is from British Columbia.
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He spent quite a bit of time growing up and in his, as a young adult in British Columbia.
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So BC is sort of like a second or third home to him.
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And I don't think that it's scandalous in and of itself that he was there.
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But now as more details are coming out, it's pretty clear that it wasn't just a lapse in judgment.
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It wasn't just the fact that his office lied about where he was and what he was doing.
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And the entire legacy media, every journalist in Canada, is now looking into it.
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And again, this is looking really, really, really bad for Justin Trudeau.
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So I'm going to start by talking about two explosive reports that came out of the Journal de Montreal today,
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looking into the background and the history of the owner of the house.
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And so I'll explain to you what I mean when I say this is looking eerily similar to the Aga Khan scandal
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that the ethics commissioner found that he was guilty of violating the ethics rules.
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So let's start with Norm Spector's tweet this morning.
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Norm is a former chief of staff in the prime minister's office.
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I believe he was chief of staff in the Mulroney years.
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And he just spends a lot of time on Twitter posting really interesting things.
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the owner of Trudeau's Tofino Beach House has links to a company in a tax haven
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and another that lobbied PMO to legalize cannabis.
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PMO confirmed that Justin Trudeau paid for the rental but would not say how much.
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So the first story that comes out about this owner, the owner of this house,
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is basically that the guy has links to some things that are pretty sketchy,
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controversial stay, Trudeau on vacation with man linked to Paradise Papers,
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the husband of the owner of the villa where Trudeau stayed in Tofino
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has been associated with firms in the Paradise Papers.
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And my apologies if the translations are a little bit rough.
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But it says that the luxurious home that Justin Trudeau and his family occupied
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last week in British Columbia is owned by a Calgary woman married to a businessman
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who has been linked to companies that were established in a tax haven,
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The businessman, James McRoberts, also founded a company which registered in 2017
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to lobby for pro-cannabis, in particular with the cabinet of Justin Trudeau.
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The name of James McRoberts, the husband of Maren McRoberts,
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the owner of the Tofino House, appears in the Paradise Paper list
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disclosed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2017.
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We learned that he was a shareholder in two companies,
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Pagia Limited and Rx Payments Limited, incorporated in Malta in 2005,
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The firms specialize in internet payment systems.
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The man who ran Rx Payments, Nathan Jacobson, was convicted in 2008
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in the United States for conspiracy to launder money.
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It says, note that the Paradise Papers should not be confused with the Pandora Papers,
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which were disclosed this week by the consortium,
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and which also revealed a list of individuals and companies involved in tax evasion activities.
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The first one, the big one, was the Panama Papers,
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and then these other ones were the Paradise Papers, and now the Pandora Papers.
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So these are just a series of investigative reports
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looking at sort of the world's rich and famous people
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and where they keep their money, how they have these really complicated schemes.
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Some of them are legal, some of them are illegal,
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and they're all designed to avoid punitive, heavy taxes
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in North American and Western European jurisdictions.
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But anyway, so the individual who owned the house
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may have been involved in some sketchy business dealings himself,
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or at least one degree removed from sketchy business deals.
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and in relation to Justin Trudeau going and staying at this house,
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was registered, his company was registered to lobby the federal government,
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not just the federal government, but the prime minister's office.
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And this takes us to the second story that was in the Journal de Montréal today,
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and this one is more information on James McRoberts.
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In the months leading up to cannabis legalization in Canada,
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businessman James McRoberts and his company Merco
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lobbied across Canada to promote and oversee the sale of pot online
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was listed in the Canadian Lobbyist Registry in 2017.
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Merco payments intended to lobby directly to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office,
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and the Departments of Justice and Public Safety in particular,
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so that the online sale of cannabis could be allowed.
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So of course, Ottawa already legalized cannabis.
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Ottawa legalized the use of cannabis in October 2018,
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but its online sales is still regulated by the provinces.
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Merco has notably lobbied Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia too.
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And this is where you get into some really dicey territory.
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This is where the Prime Minister is really in hot water,
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it says that Justin Trudeau paid for the rental himself,
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And so we can look at the listing of this house.
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Now, hilariously, the name of the house is called Surfer's Paradise,
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which, again, doesn't really help the optics of this story.
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six-bedroom, seven-bathroom home, 6,000 square feet,
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It is an absolutely spectacular, beautiful home set on 1.2 acres.
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And so the idea that this home is selling for nearly $20 million,
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it's hard to imagine what the nightly rate on a place like this.
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My guess is that it would probably go for about $50,000 a night.
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So we're talking about potentially up to, what,
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a quarter of a million dollars to rent this house for a long weekend,
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But really, a house like this would go for a huge, huge premium.
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And at this point, we don't know how much Justin Trudeau paid for it.
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And again, this is where we get into dicey, dicey territory for the prime minister
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because he is staying at the home of a person who once lobbied him
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for a decision that the government ultimately did, right?
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He runs the payment platforms for selling marijuana.
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And he was lobbying the government back in 2017,
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likely lobbying them in favor of legalizing pot.
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That's what Justin Trudeau ran on in his campaign.
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So potentially, Justin Trudeau's decision to legalize marijuana
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could have made this individual a lot of money.
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And then now we have this individual renting his luxury home to the prime minister.
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Was there some kind of a quid pro quo going on here?
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But again, the optics of this are just so bad for the prime minister
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because we don't know if there's a quid pro quo.
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And of course, Justin Trudeau has a long history of doing these kind of things.
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It's starting to sound like the Aga Khan vacation,
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where he went and had this beautiful, luxurious vacation
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at the Aga Khan's private compound, private island in the Bahamas.
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Justin Trudeau, of course, was found guilty by the ethics commissioner
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So out of the whole part of that illegal vacation,
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the thing that the ethics commissioner dinged him on
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He's not allowed to ride in a private aircraft and he had to get to this private island.
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Of course, to the Canadian public, the bigger, bigger concern
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was that the Aga Khan lobbies the prime minister.
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The federal government gives huge grants to the Aga Khan Foundation.
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And so you have all of this money being passed back and forth.
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And in return, Trudeau is on this luxury vacation.
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And that was at the very beginning of his tenure as prime minister.
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He's still taking luxurious vacations from people who are lobbying his office,
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from people who potentially could be in a conflict of interest.
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where he refused to recuse himself from meetings in Cabinet,
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where the Cabinet was making decisions on whether to give the We Charity
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this huge, huge hundreds of millions of dollars,
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from a charity that has also paid the Trudeau family privately for speaker's fees.
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The fact that Justin Trudeau thinks that he is above the rules,
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really, really bad stuff from the prime minister.
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And so, like I said, the media is all over the story.
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And this is starting to look perhaps like his worst offense
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in terms of these really, really silly lapses in judgment
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What made you decide to take a personal trip to Dofino
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to honor the victims and survivors of residential schools?
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Like I said, it was a mistake to travel on that day.
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and for Canadians to reflect not just on the past,
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I was in error to choose to travel on that day.
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for not having attended the event that she invited me to,
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which is why I'm looking forward to going to the community
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and sitting down with them in the coming weeks.
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And we wouldn't be in the situation we were in.
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It's like he is the one that created this holiday,
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So he doesn't really take personal responsibility.
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We're not worried about the country doing better.
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And second, like I mentioned earlier in our show,
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It says the Native Women's Association yesterday