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

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6 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

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 ReporterRCMP 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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Carbon Tax

The book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read

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By Franco Terrazzano

Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote a 500-page book praising carbon taxes.

Well, I just wrote a book smashing through the government’s carbon tax propaganda.

It tells the inside story of the fight against the carbon tax. And it’s THE book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read.

My book is called Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax.


 
Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax 

Every now and then, the underdog wins one.

And it looks like that’s happening in the fight against the carbon tax.

It’s not over yet, but support for the carbon tax is crumbling. Some politicians vow to scrap it. Others hide behind vague plans to repackage it. But virtually everyone recognizes support for the current carbon tax has collapsed.

It wasn’t always this way.

For about a decade now, powerful politicians, government bureaucrats, academics, media elites and even big business have been pushing carbon taxes on the people.

But most of the time, politicians never asked the people if they supported carbon taxes. In other words, carbon taxes, and the resulting higher gas prices and heating bills, were forced on us.

We were told it was good for us. We were told carbon taxes were inevitable. We were told politicians couldn’t win elections without carbon taxes, even though the politicians that imposed them didn’t openly run on them. We were told that we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to leave a healthy environment for our kids and grandkids. We were told we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to be respected in the international community.

In this decade-long fight, it would have been understandable if the people had given up and given in to these claims. It would have been easier to accept what the elites wanted and just pay the damn bill. But against all odds, ordinary Canadians didn’t give up.

Canadians knew you could care about the environment and oppose carbon taxes. Canadians saw what they were paying at the gas station and on their heating bills, and they knew they were worse off, regardless of how many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and academics tried to convince them otherwise. Canadians didn’t need advanced degrees in economics, climate science or politics to understand they were being sold a false bill of goods.

Making it more expensive for a mom in Port Hope to get to work, or grandparents in Toronto to pay their heating bill, or a student in Coquitlam to afford food won’t reduce emissions in China, Russia, India or the United States. It just leaves these Canadians, and many like them, with less money to afford everything else.

Ordinary Canadians understood carbon taxes amount to little more than a way for governments to take more money from us and dictate how we should live our lives. Ordinary Canadians also saw through the unfairness of the carbon tax.

Many of the elites pushing the carbon tax—the media, politicians, taxpayer-funded professors, laptop activists and corporate lobbyists—were well off and wouldn’t feel the brunt of carbon taxes. After all, living in a downtown condo and clamouring for higher carbon taxes doesn’t require much gas, diesel or propane.

But running a business, working in a shop, getting kids to soccer and growing food on the farm does. These are the Canadians the political class forgot about when pushing carbon taxes. These are the Canadians who never gave up. These are the Canadians who took time out of their busy lives to sign petitions, organize and attend rallies, share posts on social media, email politicians and hand out bumper stickers.

Because of these Canadians, the carbon tax could soon be swept onto the ash heap of history. I wrote this book for two reasons.

The first is because these ordinary Canadians deserve it. They worked really hard for a really long time against the odds. When all the power brokers in government told them, “Do what we say—or pay,” they didn’t give up. They deserve to know the time and effort they spent fighting the carbon tax mattered. They deserve all the credit.

Thank you for everything you did.

The second reason I wrote this book is so people know the real story of the carbon tax. The carbon tax was bad from the start and we fought it from the start. By reading this book, you will get the real story about the carbon tax, a story you won’t find anywhere else.

This book is important because if the federal Liberals’ carbon tax is killed, the carbon taxers will try to lay blame for their defeat on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They will try to say that carbon taxes are a good idea, but Trudeau bungled the policy or wasn’t a good enough salesman. They will try to revive the carbon tax and once again make you pay more for gas, groceries, and home heating.

Just like with any failed five-year plan, there is a lingering whiff among the laptop class and the taxpayer-funded desk rulers that this was all a communication problem, that the ideal carbon tax hasn’t been tried yet. I can smell it outside my office building in Ottawa, where I write these words. We can’t let those embers smoulder and start a fire again.

This book shows why the carbon tax is and always will be bad policy for ordinary Canadians.

Franco’s note: You can pre-order a copy of my new book, Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax, here: https://www.amazon.ca/Axing-Tax-Rise-Canadas-Carbon

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B.C. Credit Downgrade Signals Deepening Fiscal Trouble

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The Opposition with Dan Knight   Dan Knight

Spending is up, debt is exploding, and taxpayers are footing the bill—how David Eby’s reckless economics just pushed British Columbia one step closer to the brink.

So here’s something they’re not going to explain on CBC—British Columbia just got slapped with yet another credit downgrade. Actually, two. On April 2nd, both S&P Global and Moody’s—two of the most powerful financial watchdogs on the planet—downgraded B.C.’s credit rating. And not by accident. This wasn’t a glitch in the system or some market hiccup. This was a direct consequence of political recklessness.

Let’s talk numbers. S&P cut B.C.’s rating from ‘AA-’ to ‘A+’. Moody’s dropped it from ‘aa1’ to ‘aa2’. That’s the fourth downgrade in four years. Four. This is a province that used to hold AAA status—the financial gold standard. That means British Columbia was once considered one of the most fiscally stable jurisdictions not just in Canada, but globally. Not anymore.

Even more alarming? S&P didn’t just hit their long-term rating—they downgraded the short-term rating too, from ‘A-1+’ to ‘A-1’. Why? Because even in the short term, B.C. is starting to look like a risk. A liquidity risk. That means the money might not be there when it’s needed. That’s a red flag for anyone with a calculator and a memory longer than five minutes.

This is not some vague bureaucratic move. This is a direct indictment of the NDP’s economic policies in British Columbia. This is what happens when you treat taxpayers like an ATM machine and the economy like a social experiment. And now, international financial institutions are officially saying what a lot of people have been screaming for years: B.C. is in serious fiscal trouble.

Causes: Spending, Deficits, and Revenue Pressure

The core driver behind the downgrades is the ballooning of operating and capital deficits, coupled with aggressive government spending. According to B.C.’s 2025 budget, unveiled by Finance Minister Brenda Bailey on March 4, the provincial deficit is projected to hit $10.9 billion in 2025–26—up from $9.1 billion the previous year. Moody’s projects an even higher shortfall of $14.3 billion, raising red flags about B.C.’s ability to fund programs without unsustainable borrowing.

S&P cited the impact of reduced immigration levels and ongoing trade uncertainty as key headwinds, limiting economic growth and shrinking the province’s revenue base. Moody’s pointed to persistent budgetary gaps and limited progress on deficit reduction, highlighting the growing gap between revenue and expenditure.

Additionally, spending growth has significantly outpaced both population and inflation. Data from the Fraser Institute shows that between 2019/20 and 2024/25, program spending increased by 51.6%, whereas only 29.2% was needed to keep pace with demographic and price trends. This excess has pushed real per-capita expenditures to historic highs, without a corresponding rise in revenue.

Opposition Blames NDP Mismanagement for Downgrade

But what does that actually mean for real people—not bureaucrats, not lobbyists—but the mom on a fixed income buying groceries? So I reached out to John Rustad, leader of the Official Opposition in B.C., to ask exactly that.

“Two downgrades! Absolute disaster,” he told me. “Under David Eby, we’ve gone from a AAA status to a single A with a negative outlook. This government’s reckless spending and irresponsible management will have a devastating effect—not just today, but for generations to come.”

He’s not exaggerating. According to Rustad, by the end of this fiscal period, B.C.’s debt will have nearly tripled since the NDP took power. Let that sink in—tripled. And no, this isn’t just some abstract macroeconomic trend. This hits you. Directly.

Rustad laid it out. These downgrades mean higher borrowing costs for the province. That’s code for more taxpayer money getting funneled into interest payments instead of hospitals, schools, or—God forbid—tax relief.

“By the end of this fiscal plan, even before the downgrade and before the loss of billions in carbon tax revenue, interest payments were projected to hit $7 billion annually,” Rustad said. “That’s about 30% of personal income tax revenue—just to pay the interest.”

That’s money you send to Victoria every month—just lighting it on fire.

And with the downgrade? Expect to pay another $1 billion more in interest. That’s around $200 per person, per year. Not for roads. Not for services. Just to keep the debt monster fed.

Meanwhile, Premier David Eby—well, he’s had months to plan for replacing the carbon tax, and guess what? Still no plan. Rustad told me he expected Eby to raise industrial taxes to make up the difference, but even that hasn’t happened yet. For now, the hole is just growing—a $2 billion loss in carbon tax revenue on top of an $11 billion deficit.

So What Does This Mean for the Average Mom?

In response to a direct question about what this credit downgrade means for a mother living on a fixed income, Opposition Leader John Rustad laid out the long-term consequences in no uncertain terms:

“The average person will not notice this immediately. But what it does mean is higher borrowing costs, So with the massive deficit and debt, more money will need to be spent on interest payments. By the end of this fiscal, before loss of billions in carbon tax revenue and before the debt downgrades, interest payments would increase to about $7 billion by the end of the fiscal plan. To put that in perspective, that would be the equivalent of 30% or more of personal income taxes just to pay interest.”

He continued:

“The debt downgrades mean the province will have to pay more in interest—likely 1/4 to 1/2% more. On $220+ billion, that could mean $1 billion more in interest. That could be about $200 per man, woman and child annually in more interest by 2027.”

And with no plan to rein in spending, Rustad issued a stark warning:

“The compounding problem is: will this mean service cuts, more taxes, or yet more debt to be paid by our children?”

Final Thoughts

So here’s a question no one on CBC is going to ask: What actually happens when a progressive government can’t manage a budget? I’ll tell you. You get poorer. That’s what happens. You, the person who gets up every day and works a real job, pays the price while the people in charge keep living large off your labour.

Let’s walk through it. First, you pay provincial income tax—a tax just for working. Imagine that. You go out, earn a living, and the government takes a cut just because you dared to be productive. Then there’s the PST—you buy something, anything, and you get taxed again. Why? Because you had the audacity to participate in the economy.

And then there’s the carbon tax, the holy grail of progressive grifts. This wasn’t about saving the planet—it was about propping up the very same government that couldn’t manage a piggy bank, let alone a provincial budget. That tax was floating David Eby’s spending addiction. Now it’s gone, and surprise—there’s no plan to replace it. Just more debt, more interest, and more economic chaos.

But wait—here’s the part that really insults your intelligence. After taxing you into the ground, they turn around and say, “Don’t worry, we’ll give you a rebate.” A rebate? You mean you’re going to give me back a tiny fraction of the money you stole from me and act like you’re doing me a favour? Please. That’s not generosity—it’s gaslighting. It’s economic abuse wrapped in a government cheque.

And that’s why I keep saying it: fiscal responsibility matters. Because I’d rather have that money in my wallet, feeding my kids, paying my bills, building my future—than watching David Eby burn it on pet projects, political theatre, and bloated bureaucracy.

But here’s the thing—there is hope. It’s not all doom and despair. In the last election, something incredible happened. The BC Conservatives, a party written off by the elites and ignored by the media, pulled off a political miracle. They surged from obscurity to contention—why? Because regular people are waking up. Because the voters who pay the bills, raise the kids, and still believe in common sense are done being treated like ATMs for a government that doesn’t even pretend to respect them.

And maybe—just maybe—after a little more pain, after a little more David Eby-style financial recklessness, the voters of this province will finally realize why fiscal responsibility matters. Not because it sounds good in a press release, but because without it, your future vanishes. Your freedom shrinks. And the people in charge? They just keep spending.

So next time, when the ballots are counted and the smoke clears, maybe British Columbia will finally remember who this province belongs to—not to bureaucrats, not to activists, not to the political class in Victoria—but to you.

And that day can’t come soon enough.

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