Western Standard - February 27, 2024


ArriveScam： Contractors worked on federal 'Covid Alert' app contract prior to ArriveCan

Mentioned
Lawrence McCauley Dave
Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse enters Alberta NDP leadership race Trudeau Accused of Political Interference and Obstruction in SNC-Lavalin Affair

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

216.02

Word count

506

Sentence count

32

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this week's episode, the guys discuss the latest scandal involving a company that defrauded Canadian taxpayers out of millions of dollars. They discuss the lack of accountability from the government, and why it's so hard to hold senior officials accountable.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Setting aside the principle of personal responsibility that's lacking, and looking at, again, the political covering of the butt.
00:00:07.880 I mean, if they want to try and make senior bureaucrats the scapegoats and say, you know, it's not my fault it happened under my watch, but it's their fault, fine.
00:00:16.240 If the liberals felt, though, that truly all roads are going to lead to senior bureaucrats, why are they showing fear at having the owners of that company showing up before a committee?
00:00:24.840 You would think, we want to bring these guys out, point the finger at those bureaucrats and bury them so we can say, see, we caught the culprits, we'll make sure to make procedures so this doesn't happen again.
00:00:34.660 But instead, they don't want those guys speaking publicly, they don't want to have the public see exactly what happened, which starts to make me think there might be something tied in there a little close.
00:00:45.280 It's a bad look, they're being obstructionist.
00:00:47.760 Yeah, and as you just said, why don't they want to get to the bottom of it, too?
00:00:51.500 I'm just speaking again of the cold political outlook.
00:00:53.900 You know, I just, you know, if I were the prime minister, I want to be able to say that those dastardly fellows, they ripped off Canadian taxpayers during an emergency.
00:01:02.280 You know, I wish I'd have caught it at the time, but we were just so busy saving the world that we missed it.
00:01:06.880 But we're going to hold them accountable.
00:01:08.200 But instead, they're like, yeah, there's nothing to see here.
00:01:10.380 We're going to.
00:01:10.840 And in paragraph two, and my minister was negligent in his duty of supervision of the people in his department.
00:01:18.140 And I have his resignation right here.
00:01:20.280 Or you can move that as well.
00:01:22.000 How the prime minister can hold the minister in response.
00:01:24.140 Well, it's actually a pretty dirty pool.
00:01:25.600 If you're a senior politician and you just say, oh, it all went wrong because I had, you know, dishonest people working for me.
00:01:33.020 And they don't have a, they don't have any opportunity to come back and say, well, just a second.
00:01:37.220 We did this, this, and this.
00:01:38.560 Everything was covered, sir.
00:01:40.460 You know, now what?
00:01:41.300 You know, when we had pictures this week of Agriculture Minister Lawrence McCauley dining on a huge lobster while on a taxpayer-funded trip to Malaysia, they don't resign because they don't want to give up their entitlements that they're entitled to.
00:01:56.380 Well, Dave, it's probably cheaper to eat lobster in Malaysia than it is to eat steak in Alberta. 0.99
00:02:02.260 That may be, but you don't, in this day and age, when millions of people are going to food banks and inflation's hitting hard, how stupid do you have to be to put that on Twitter? 0.99
00:02:13.040 I mean, just absolutely. 0.99
00:02:14.260 It's a lapse of political instinct and optics.
00:02:16.700 I mean, they don't feel, I don't begrudge.
00:02:18.420 Or they don't care.
00:02:19.360 Or they don't care anymore.
00:02:20.440 I mean, they don't care anymore.