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Liberal MPs stop police commissioner from testifying about SNC-Lavalin scandal

Published

1 year ago

6 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

RCMP commissioner Michael Duheme was set to testify about whether Justin Trudeau blocked police from obtaining cabinet documents in the SNC-Lavalin affair when MPs on the ethics committee voted 7-3 to adopt a Liberal motion to abruptly adjourn the meeting

Canadian Liberal MPs on the ethics committee voted to stop the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) commissioner from testifying about a bribery scandal involving the large Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin and the federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

RCMP commissioner Michael Duheme was set to testify about the bribery scandal to speak about whether Trudeau blocked the police from obtaining certain cabinet documents, which might have implicated him regarding his obstruction of justice charges that stemmed from the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Liberal, New Democrat (NDP), and Bloc Québécois MPs on the ethics committee voted 7-3 to adopt a Liberal motion to abruptly adjourn the meeting with Duheme only minutes after it began.

Conservative MP Michael Barrett called the abrupt meeting cancellation “unacceptable.”

“Witnesses were to give testimony and now we have government members looking to shut down a hearing on a very serious matter with respect to a criminal investigation into the Prime Minister and we have the Commissioner of the RCMP at this table,” Barrett said.

Liberal MP Mona Fortier, who serves as the ethics committee vice chair, claimed the SNC-Lavalin scandal had not been “discussed whatsoever by the committee.”

“I think the committee should at least have had the opportunity to debate the motion presented in due form. I don’t think this is necessarily the best way to go forward, having committees unable to make their decisions. So based on this reasoning, I would like to adjourn the meeting,” she said.

In June, LifeSiteNews reported on how 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 charges of corruption and fraud concerning about $48 million in payments made to officials with the Libyan government between 2001 and 2011. The company had hoped to be spared both 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. Back in 2019, she contended that both Trudeau and his top Liberal officials had inappropriately applied pressure to her for four months to directly intervene in the criminal prosecution relating to corruption and bribery charges connected to SNC’s government contracts in Libya.

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 getting any government contracts for 10 years.

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

A little 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.

MPs were hoping Duheme’s testimony would clear up many questions

Conservative MPs were hoping that Duheme’s testimony would have cleared up more questions about the SNC-Lavalin scandal after the group Democracy Watch on October 16 revealed a host of records regarding it.

These records show that the RCMP was stopped by Trudeau’s top cabinet members via a restricted disclosure order. This order stated that authorization to waive solicitor-client privilege would not be allowed in regard to information concerning communications between Wilson-Raybould and the director of public prosecutions regarding SNC-Lavalin.

The records released by Democracy Watch involve about 1,815 pages of records from 19 documents that the RCMP recently disclosed after an Access to Information Act (ATIA) request.

In July 2022, the group filed an Access to Information Act (ATIA) request with the RCMP about the SNC-Lavalin affair and Trudeau.

As for SNC-Lavalin, which now goes by the name “AtkinsRéalis,” in 2019 it pleaded guilty to committing fraud in a Québec Provincial Court and was hit with a $280 million fine. Company executives also admitted that they had paid some $47.7 million in bribes to get contracts in Libya.

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Canadians should expect even more spending in federal fall economic statement

Published on November 13, 2024

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

The Trudeau government will soon release its fall economic statement. Though technically intended to be an update on the fiscal plan in this year’s budget, in recent years the fall economic statement has more closely resembled a “mini-budget” that unveils new (and often significant) spending commitments and initiatives.

Let’s look at the data.

The chart below includes projections of annual federal program spending from a series of federal budgets and updates, beginning with the 2022 budget and ending with the latest 2024 budget. Program spending equals total spending minus debt interest costs, and represents discretionary spending by the federal government.

Clearly, there’s a trend that with every consecutive budget and fiscal update the Trudeau government revises spending estimates upwards. Take the last two fiscal years, 2023/24 and 2024/25, for example. Budget 2022 projected annual program spending of $436.5 billion for the 2023/24 fiscal year. Yet the fall economic statement released just months later revised that spending estimate up to $449.8 billion, and later releases showed even higher spending.

The issue is even more stark when examining spending projections for the current fiscal year. Budget 2022 projected annual spending of $441.6 billion in 2024/25. Since then, every subsequent fiscal release has revised that estimate higher and higher, to the point that Budget 2024 estimates program spending of $483.6 billion for this year—representing a $42.0 billion increase from the projections only two years ago.

Meanwhile, as spending estimates are revised upwards, plans to reduce the federal deficit are consistently pushed off into later years.

For example, the 2022 fall economic statement projected a deficit of $25.4 billion for the 2024/25 fiscal year, and declining deficits in the years to come, before reaching an eventual surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027/28. However, subsequent budgets and fiscal updates again revised those estimates. The latest budget projects a deficit of $39.8 billion in 2024/25 that will decline to a $26.8 billion deficit by 2027/28. In other words, though budgets and fiscal updates have consistently projected declining deficits between 2024/25 and 2027/28, each subsequent document has produced larger deficits throughout the fiscal outlook and pushed the timeline for balanced budgets further into the future.

These data illustrate the Trudeau government’s lack of accountability to its own fiscal plans. Though the unpredictable nature of forecasting means the government is unlikely to exactly meet future projections, it’s still reasonable to expect it will roughly follow its own fiscal plans. However, time and time again Canadians have been sold a certain plan, only to have it change dramatically mere months later due to the government’s unwillingness to restrain spending. We shouldn’t expect the upcoming fall economic statement to be any different.

Authors:

Jake Fuss and Grady Munro
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Business

Trudeau gov’t threatens to punish tech companies that fail to censor ‘disinformation’

Published on November 13, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

A report from the House of Commons Heritage Committee claimed that ‘some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money.’

A report from a Canadian federal committee said MPs should enact laws to penalize social media and tech companies that don’t take action to quell so-called “undesirable or questionable” content on the internet.

MPs from the ruling Liberal, New Democratic Party (NDP), and separatists Bloc Québécois party on the House of Commons Heritage Committee summarized their opinions in a report.

“The Government of Canada notes some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money,” reads the report titled Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.

“Disinformation creates ‘doubt and confusion’ and can be particularly harmful when it involves health information,” it continues.

The report notes how such “disinformation” can cause “financial harms as well as political polarization and distrust in key institutions,” adding, “The prevalence of disinformation can be difficult to determine.”

As noted in Blacklock’s Reporter, the report claims that many of Canada’s “major societal harms” have come from “unregulated social media platforms relying on algorithms to amplify content, among them disinformation and conspiracy theories.”

Of note is the committee failed to define what “disinformation” or “conspiracy theories” meant.

Most of the MPs on the committee made the recommendation that Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms, which ironically have at one point or another clamped down on free speech themselves, “put mechanisms in place to detect undesirable or questionable content that may be the product of disinformation or foreign interference and that these platforms be required to promptly identify such content and report it to users.”

“Failure to do so should result in penalties,” the report stated.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Canadian legal group The Democracy Fund (TDF) warned that the Liberal government’s Bill C-63 seeks to further clamp down on online speech and will “weaponize” the nation’s courts to favor the ruling federal party and do nothing but create an atmosphere of “fear.”

Bill C-63 was introduced by Liberal Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome.

Jordan Peterson, one of Canada’s most prominent psychologists, recently accused the bill of attempting to create a pathway to allow for “Orwellian Thought Crime” to become the norm in the nation.

Conservative MPs fight back: ‘A government bureaucracy should not regulate content’

Conservative MPs fought back the Heritage Committee’s majority findings and in a Dissenting Report said the committee did not understand what the role of the internet is in society, which is that it should be free from regulation.

“The main report failed to adequately explore the state of censorship in Canada and the role played by tech giants and the current federal government,” the Conservatives wrote in their dissenting report, adding, “Canadians are increasingly being censored by the government and tech giants as to what they can see, hear and say online.”

The Conservative MPs noted that when it comes to the internet, it is “boundless,” and that “Anyone who wants to have a presence on the internet can have one.”

“A government bureaucracy should not regulate which content should be prioritized and which should be demoted,” it noted, adding, “There is space for all.”

LifeSiteNews reported how the Conservative Party has warned that Trudeau’s Bill C-63 is so flawed that it will never be able to be enforced or become known before the next election.

The law calls for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with policing internet content.

The bill’s “hate speech” section is accompanied by broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics, including levying pre-emptive judgments against people if they are feared to be likely to commit an act of “hate” in the future.

Details of the new legislation also show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.

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