Friday 22 February 2019

Ottawa Scandal


Ottawa Scandal.   This is the best analysis yet.   Click on links to read the two full stories at the Tyee.  These well written articles support my long-held conclusion, that Lavalin is a serial offender, and the Trudeau Administration is at fault for being weak and politically self-serving for political advantage.   They can’t do the right thing for the country.  That is, until the former AG came along who would not go along with the Liberal secret insider game.  

However, voters know what’s going on.  The Liberals are prepared to help an international cheater get by, because the loss of Liberal MPs in Quebec might result., if the law was obeyed.  In the “Liberal world”, there is one law for the politically connected and another law for everyone else.  PF


https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/02/22/SNC-Lavalin-Criminal-Record-Corruption/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=220219


Redeemable? SNC-Lavalin’s Criminal Record

And why mega-project construction so often breeds corruption.

By Andrew Nikiforuk Today | TheTyee.ca


In 2015, SNC-Lavalin’s then CEO Robert Card, an American engineer, realized the company could be banned from bidding on federal contracts if the government’s slow-moving Libya prosecution went to court.

He then mused that the company should “arrange a deferred prosecution agreement with Ottawa to avoid prosecution and developments that might jeopardize the company’s work.”

Orwellian sounding “deferred prosecution agreements” or “no prosecution agreements” are all the rage in the U.K. and the U.S. When faced with the prospect of prosecuting a large company with many employees for economic crimes, governments can grant leniency with a DPA instead. The company must admit to its wrongdoing and change its behaviour.

The moral hazard of such agreements is great. “If you do not punish crimes, there’s really no reason they won’t happen again,” Mary Ramirez, a professor at Washburn University School of Law and a former assistant United States attorney told the New York Times.

“I worry and so do a lot of economists that we have created no disincentives for committing fraud or white-collar crime.”

A bevy of SNC-Lavalin lobbyists went to work arguing for the addition of a deferred prosecution agreement in Canada’s Criminal Code in 2016. Two years later they got their wish as the Trudeau government included “the SNC-Lavalin clause” in the Criminal Code in an omnibus bill C-74.

The prime minister or his office then let it be known to then attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould they would prefer she defer prosecution. What pressure did they apply? The facts are not yet clear.

But we know she refused and the mechanism hit an unexpected roadblock that has developed into a national political scandal.

The Charbonneau Commission clearly highlighted what is at stake:

“According to the principle of the rule of law, no one is above the law: all individuals are subject to it, including those exercising political power. This principle also aims to protect individuals from the arbitrariness of public authorities, in that the state cannot coerce an individual in the absence of statutory authority to do so.”



https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/02/15/JWR-Was-Right/


Why Wilson-Raybould Was Right

By Michael Harris 15 Feb 2019 | TheTyee.ca


Her government was intensely lobbied, but the law is clear.

Mr. Prime Minister, it is one thing to move a senior cabinet minister, quite another to demote them. The question stands: why did you demote Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister?

If you won’t answer that question with something other than a flimsy process explanation, then at least waive the solicitor/client privilege in this matter so that Wilson-Raybould can tell Canadians herself what really happened.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In view of how the Liberals responded to Lavalin's enticements, Trudeau has the moral compass of the Jeopardy Wheel.

Anonymous said...

Why visitors still make use of to read news papers when in this technological world
the whole thing is accessible on web?