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Professor of political
science at the University of Calgary
from
C2CJournal Website was driven by a sole Senator and those who tried to pay back the piffling $90,000 in question.
Yet that misstep plagued them for years and contributed to their 2015 defeat.
It seems they're just not like the Liberals.
Those guys know how to do scandal.
They think big - the Sponsorship Scandal alone totaled $100 million - their habits are well-honed and their expertise is inter-generational.
You could say it's in their political DNA.
Chronicling it all could fill a multi-volume history. Fearless muckraker Ezra Levant has made a start with a new book focused on the most recent phase, the Justin Trudeau years.
The title comes from a cover story he published some years ago in his now-defunct biweekly magazine, The Western Standard.
It was borrowed from Kate McMillan, whose blog "Small Dead Animals" is still going strong.
She used it to suggest a similarity in style and even substance between the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Jersey-based Mafia crime family in the fictional "Sopranos" TV series.
Levant's book concerns the current Canadian regime, a combination of corrupt and mendacious policies put into effect by (mostly) men with the character and ethical sensitivity of so many Good Fellas.
Like the proverbial fish that rots from the head, it starts with the Prime Minister, who sets the tone for his subordinates.
Levant's tale of the Trudeau government's ethical and legal
breaches.
Often called Rebel Media or just The Rebel, the online multi-media venture is not to everyone's taste. But what Levant and his team report is not about taste.
It's about facts and the narratives that make sense of them, often in ways far more persuasive than Canada's mainstream media or the "Media Party" as Levant calls them.
These are people who would prefer to snap a selfie with Justin over asking him a serious question.
And although they (as well as the government and other elites) despise The Rebel, habitually describing it as "far right" and implying that it's bigoted, that hasn't stopped the little outfit from becoming hugely popular, with a reported 1.2 million YouTube subscribers.
fearless muckraker, founder of Rebel News
and
author of The Librano$.
Back then Justin Trudeau declared,
What happened...?
The voting-reform committee didn't get the message and failed to recommend what the Librano$ wanted, a ranked-ballot system.
For normal people, electoral systems are the most boring aspect of politics - but they're critical to who forms governments, and how strong and stable (or entrenched, if you will) those governments tend to be.
In this instance, changes to the electoral system were intended to ensure that,
The committee had other plans, however, recommending not the expected ranked or preferential ballot system but one of proportional representation, which would not do that.
Trudeau was on record as favoring a preferential system, which is why, according to Levant, he rejected the alternative.
The Aga Khan Foundation received $50 million from Canadian taxpayers, the Trudeaus vacationed on his private island.
Trudeau promised many other things in 2015.
These are,
And yet, in 2018 the Liberals used just such a bill to present a 582-page budget that on page 527 hid an amendment to the Criminal Code designed to favor one company, SNC-Lavalin.
As we now know, this move
involved far more than just the usual issue of the reliability
accorded a politician's promise.
Before the following winter was out, Trudeau had arranged to receive an illegal bribe from the Aga Khan IV in the form of a gift, namely a free visit to Bell Island (his 349-acre private getaway in the Bahamas) for Trudeau's wife, Sophie Grégoire, and their kids.
What turned these gifts into bribes was the fact that the Government of Canada, on behalf of Canadian taxpayers, had provided the Aga Khan Foundation with $55 million for its work in Afghanistan.
The matter is still under federal investigation, although that process was interrupted in June so as not overtly to disrupt the coming election.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau
and his
faulty memory.
Nor did he put his substantial stake in his dad's company, Morneau Shepell, into a blind trust as also required by law. He did, however, introduce Bill C-27 that changed Canada's public sector pension plan from a defined-benefit to a targeted-benefit structure.
Morneau Shepell specializes in administering the latter sort.
Dominic
LeBlanc.
LeBlanc reallocated about $24 million worth of Arctic surf clam quota from Clearwater Seafoods Inc. (itself the beneficiary of a federal monopoly) to something called Five Nations Clam Corporation.
It sounds vaguely aboriginal and was touted as part of a "reconciliation" package, but had no First Nations involvement.
A cousin of LeBlanc's wife, however, was involved.
This behavior, along with
Leblanc's routine acceptance of gifts from the Irving family, was
business as usual for the Librano$.
Happy times: The globe-trotting Trudeaus
usually manage to do it on another's dime.
Such rules, remember, do not refer to behavior but to a situation, namely being in a position where individual and public interests conflict.
You are required by law to avoid these altogether. Even if you don't actual do anything that's otherwise illegal, the situations themselves are against the law.
As Levant noted, these people are shameless because they don't believe such rules apply to them.
So complex and extensive is this corrupt Quebec company that it takes Levant three chapters to unravel the story.
SNC-Lavalin has an ecumenical reputation for bribery, with evidence of wrongdoing in,
Between 2004 and 2009, it
ran an illegal donation scheme whereby its employees sent money to
the Librano$ and SNC-Lavalin reimbursed them along with a bonus
equal to the original donation.
So did Elections Canada...
The Elections Commissioner then said all would be forgiven if the Liberals gave back the money.
Nor does the episode say much for the Elections Commissioner or Elections Canada.
It might also be worth
noting that in the much smaller-scale (though more heavily
publicized) scandal over former Conservative Senator Mike Duffy,
attempts by Harper PMO staff to "give back the money" were portrayed
as scandalous if not criminal.
What has the sparkling gemstone been up to lately?
For starters, in exchange for a mere $160 million gift to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi's son, Saadi, SNC-Lavalin received several billion dollars' worth of engineering contracts.
Recall that the Colonel's Libya was the scene of secret prison massacres, state-sanctioned rape- and sex-dungeons, torture, kidnapping, and extrajudicial execution of political opponents, to name just a few of its outrages, as well as instigating the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270.
Quebec based SNC-Lavalin paid $160 million to another "family business": the criminal, terrorist regime in Libya.
No wonder the company also gets on so well with the Librano$.
After SNC-Lavalin had been charged with corruption under Canadian law, its CEO, Neil Bruce, lobbied Bill Morneau (at Davos, of all places) to change the law. The Liberals agreed.
That was the origin of
the Deferred Prosecution Agreement hidden on page 527 of the
2018 budget. It would have allowed SNC-Lavalin to get off the hook
with a fine and a promise to behave itself in the future.
These two women held the quaint opinion that the Public Prosecution Service should be in fact independent of the government, as it is in law.
The real problem, Levant notes, was that Wilson-Raybould,
This made her an outsider
to the prevailing Laurentian-Librano mentality.
Trudeau's Principal Secretary, Gerald Butts, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick and Bill Morneau all tried to get her to change her mind, while no fewer than three former Supreme Court justices were approached in the hope they'd do the same (details remain murky).
Farther down the food chain, several other aides kept trying to "negotiate" with officials in the Justice Department.
What was the matter with
that damned woman?
Rather than pushing back, the Liberals were growing more subservient.
Normal people might be forgiven if they thought that the behavior of SNC-Lavalin was just the latest manifestation of what (mostly Anglophone) journalists (see Martin Patriquin's Maclean's column "Quebec: The Most Corrupt Province") and scholars (see Ralph Heintzmann and David R. Cameron, "Of Patrons and Patronage," Journal of Canadian Studies, 22/2 (1987), pages 212-14) have called 'a culture of corruption'...
Of course, some Quebecers
see things differently (see Gilbert Larochelle, "Le Québec sous
l'Emprise de la Corruption," Cités, 53 (2013), pages 159-64).
Suddenly, he looked like a poseur.
When Wilson-Raybould testified before a parliamentary committee last February (2019), for the first time in three years what pollsters call the "right-track/wrong-track" numbers (reflecting whether poll respondents feel Canada is on the right track or the wrong track) started to move.
More and more people had
doubts about Trudeau's feminism as well.
The woke feminist at his best: Ruth Ellen Brosseau got an elbow from the PM right in the House of Commons.
All these events, along with persistent rumors of equally "inappropriate" - which is to say, predatory - behavior by the Prime Minister (Trudeau), pretty much shredded his reputation as an individual who cared much about women.
Especially among those
who still thought that public service actually meant public service.
And, if the latest gossip swirling in the U.S. press is to be given
any credence, there may be worse to come.
So ask yourself some of the following questions:
Albertans may well conclude that the Laurentians deserve Justin Trudeau, but we don't.
What comes next...?
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