Police admit Canadian bribery scandal was nixed without talking to Trudeau, reviewing records

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police believed there was political pressure to dismiss a government bribery case against engineering firm SNC-Lavalin in 2019 but claimed there was insufficient evidence to proceed.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) confirmed that it never talked with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or was able to view secret cabinet records before dismissing charges in a bribery scandal involving the large engineering firm SNC-Lavalin.

The RCMP’s admission came after intense questioning before the House of Commons ethics committee late last month.

As per Blacklock’s Reporter, RCMP commissioner Michael Duheme testified, “No one is above the law,” adding that there was “insufficient evidence to proceed” with the investigation.

In a 2021 memo titled RCMP Assessment Report: Obstruction of Justice SNC-Lavalin Affair obtained from Access to Information requests last October by Democracy Watch, the RCMP noted that it did not doubt there was indeed political pressure to stop criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

“However, for it to be an offence under the Criminal Code, there must be more than a technical violation,” the 2021 memo read.

During the House of Commons ethics committee meeting in February, Duheme said he had considered the SNC-Lavalin case routine, noting, “We approach every investigation in the same manner.”

Staff Sergeant Frédéric Pincince, who serves as a director of investigations, admitted that the RCMP never questioned Trudeau in the SNC-Lavalin case but gave no reason.

“He was not interviewed,” testified Pincince, to which Conservative MP Larry Brock asked, “Was there at least an attempt to interview Justin Trudeau?”

“No,” Pincince replied.

In October 2023, Canadian Liberal MPs on the ethics committee voted to stop the RCMP from testifying about the SNC-Lavalin bribery scandal.

In June 2023, LifeSiteNews reported that the RCMP denied it was looking into whether Trudeau and his cabinet committed obstruction of justice concerning the SNC-Lavalin bribery scandal.

SNC-Lavalin was faced with changes of corruption and fraud concerning about $48 million in payments made to Libyan government officials between 2001 and 2011. The company had hoped to be spared a trial and prosecution deferred prosecution agreement.

However, then-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould did not go along with Trudeau’s plan, which would have allegedly appeared to help SNC-Lavalin. In 2019, she contended that both Trudeau and his top Liberal officials had inappropriately applied pressure on her for four months to directly intervene in the criminal prosecution of Montreal-based global engineering firm SNC-Lavalin relating to its scandal involving corruption and bribery charges connected to government contracts it once had in Libya.

Commissioner mum on whether there was ‘reluctance’ to charge a sitting PM

During the ethics committee meeting, Brock asked Duheme if there was an “overall general reluctance in charging a sitting Prime Minister?”

“I would say to that, we follow the evidence and if the evidence warrants charges, we charge,” Duheme replied.

Brock then asked if the RCMP obtained “all relevant documents to further the investigation?”

Duheme admitted that “we were limited with the information that we had access to.”

Brock pressed him, asking, “Is that a yes or no, sir?” to which Duheme replied, “I don’t know,” adding, “We didn’t know.”

“We don’t know, we still don’t know to this day all the information that is out there,” Duheme responded.

Brock then pressed Duheme, asking why the RCMP did not “exercise its absolute statutory right under the Criminal Code to obtain a production order or search warrant from a justice to obtain those cabinet documents?”

Duheme said the RCMP were not “able to obtain enough information or evidence.”

As for the initial investigation concerning SNC-Lavalin, Wilson-Raybould testified in early 2019 to Canada’s justice committee that she believed she was moved from her then-justice cabinet posting to veterans’ affairs due to the fact she did not grant a request from SNC-Lavalin for a deferred prosecution agreement rather than a criminal trial.

Of note is that a criminal conviction would have banned the company from landing any government contracts for 10 years.

Trudeau flat-out denied it was being investigated by the RCMP.

Less than four years ago, Trudeau was found to have broken the federal ethics laws, or Section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act, for his role in pressuring Wilson-Raybould.

On February 12, 2019, Wilson-Raybould resigned from her veterans’ affairs post and Treasury Board president Jane Philpott quit in March 2019. They both cited a lack of confidence in the Liberal government’s handling of the scandal.

Then, in April 2019, Trudeau turfed Wilson-Raybould and Philpott from his caucus, meaning they were no longer part of the Liberal Party.

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Bad Research Still Costs Good Money

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Bad Research Still Costs Good Money

Published on February 23, 2025

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By David Clinton

I have my opinions about which academic research is worth funding with public money and which isn’t. I also understand if you couldn’t care less about what I think. But I expect we’ll all share similar feelings about research that’s actually been retracted by the academic journals where it was published.

Globally, millions of academic papers are published each year. Many – perhaps most – were funded by universities, charitable organizations, or governments. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of those papers contain serious errors, irreproducible results, or straight-up plagiarized or false content.

Not only are those papers useless, but they clog up the system and slow down the real business of science. Keeping up with the serious literature coming out in your field is hard enough, but when genuine breakthroughs are buried under thick layers of trash, there’s no hope.

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Society doesn’t need those papers and taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their creation. The trick, however, is figuring out how to identify likely trash before we approve a grant proposal.

I just discovered a fantastic tool that can help. The good people behind the Retraction Watch site also provide a large dataset currently containing full descriptions and metadata for more than 60,000 retracted papers. The records include publication authors, titles, and subjects; reasons for the retractions; and any institutions with which the papers were associated.

Using that information, I can tell you that 798 of those 60,000 papers have an obvious Canadian connection. Around half of those papers were retracted in the last five years – so the dataset is still timely.

There’s no single Canadian institution that’s responsible for a disproportionate number of clunkers. The data contains papers associated with 168 Canadian university faculties and 400 hospital departments. University of Toronto overall has 26 references, University of British Columbia has 18, and McMaster and University of Ottawa both have nine. Research associated with various departments of Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital combined account for 27 retractions.

To be sure, just because your paper shows up on the list doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. For example, while 20 of the retractions were from the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada, those were all pulled because they were out of date. That’s perfectly reasonable.

I focused on Canadian retractions identified by designations like Falsification (38 papers), Plagiarism (41), Results Not Reproducible (21), and Unreliable (130). It’s worth noting that some of those papers could have been flagged for more than one issue.

Of the 798 Canadian retractions, 218 were flagged for issues of serious concern. Here are the subjects that have been the heaviest targets for concerns about quality:

You many have noticed that the total of those counts comes to far more than 218. That’s because many papers touch on multiple topics.

For those of you keeping track at home, there were 1,263 individual authors involved in those 218 questionable papers. None of them had more than five such papers and only a very small handful showed up in four or five cases. Although there would likely be value in looking a bit more closely at their publishing histories.

This is just about as deep as I’m going to dig into this data right now. But the papers I’ve identified are probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lousy (and expensive) research. So we’ve got an interest in identifying potentially problematic disciplines or institutions. And, thanks to Retraction Watch, we now have the tools.

Kyle Briggs over at CanInnovate has been thinking and writing about these issues for years. He suggests that stemming the crippling flow of bad research will require a serious realigning of the incentives that currently power the academic world.

That, according to Briggs, is most likely to happen by forcing funding agencies to enforce open data requirements – and that includes providing access to the programming code used by the original researchers. It’ll also be critical to truly open up access to research to allow meaningful crowd-sourced review.

Those would be excellent first steps.

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Business

DOGE asks all federal employees: “What did you do last week?”

Published on February 23, 2025

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MxM News

Quick Hit:

Elon Musk said Saturday that all federal employees must submit a productivity report if they wish to keep their jobs. Employees received an email requesting details on what they accomplished in the past week, with failure to respond being treated as a resignation.

Key Details:

Musk stated that federal employees must submit their reports by 11:59 p.m. on Monday or be considered as having resigned.
Musk emphasized that the process should take under five minutes, stating that “an email with some bullet points that make any sense at all is acceptable.”
FBI Director Kash Patel instructed agency employees not to comply with the request for now, stating that the bureau will handle reviews internally according to FBI procedures.

Diving Deeper:

Federal employees have been given a strict deadline to justify their jobs, as DOGE pushes for greater accountability within the government. The email came late Saturday, explaining that all federal workers would be required to submit a brief productivity report detailing their accomplishments from the previous week. Those who do not respond will be deemed to have resigned.

Musk framed the requirement as a minimal effort, writing on X that “the bar is very low.” He assured employees that simply providing bullet points that “make any sense at all” would suffice and that the report should take less than five minutes to complete.

The policy aligns with President Trump’s push for increased efficiency in government. The Office of Personnel Management confirmed the initiative, stating that agencies would determine any further steps following the reports. Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel pushed back, advising bureau employees not to comply for the time being, stating that the FBI would handle its own review process.

The policy has drawn sharp criticism from the American Federation of Government Employees, which blasted Musk’s involvement, accusing him of disrespecting public servants. The union vowed to fight any terminations resulting from the initiative.

Musk also took aim at the White House’s Rapid Response account after it listed recent Trump administration actions, including expanding IVF access and cutting benefits for illegal immigrants. In response, Musk quipped that simply sending an email with coherent words was enough to meet the requirement, reiterating that expectations for the reports were low.

The directive comes as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seeks to eliminate waste across federal agencies, signaling a broader crackdown on bureaucratic inefficiencies under the Trump administration.