kelownabomberfan

However, I have been considering the events that have shaken the federal government in recent weeks and after serious reflection, I have concluded that I must resign as a member of Cabinet. In Canada, the constitutional convention of Cabinet solidarity means, among other things, that ministers are expected to defend all Cabinet decisions. A minister must always be prepared to defend other ministers publicly, and must speak in support of the government and its policies. Given this convention and the current circumstances, it is untenable for me to continue to serve as a Cabinet minister. Unfortunately, the evidence of efforts by politicians and/or officials to pressure the former Attorney General to intervene in the criminal case involving SNC-Lavalin, and the evidence as to the content of those efforts have raised serious concerns for me. Those concerns have been augmented by the views expressed by my constituents and other Canadians. The solemn principles at stake are the independence and integrity of our justice system. It is a fundamental doctrine of the rule of law that our Attorney General should not be subjected to political pressure or interference regarding the exercise of her prosecutorial discretion in criminal cases. Sadly, I have lost confidence in how the government has dealt with this matter and in how it has responded to the issues raised. http://jphilpott.liberal.ca/news-nouvelles/statement/

Could be sooner. Philpott just pulled the plug and resigned. The wheels are coming off of the bus.

Myers has been pissing me off lately with the penalties. But he's not the only one.

Justin Trudeau, imposter Paul Wells 5 hrs ago Conservatives would win 2019 federal election if it were held today: Poll Trudeau promised a new approach to politics. Now he’s mired in scandal Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft. © Used with permission of / © Rogers Media Inc. 2019. Prime Minister Trudeau in his Centre Block office in Ottawa on Dec. 8, 2016. (Adam Scotti/PMO) The story a few Liberals were telling privately, in the early hours after Jody Wilson-Raybould delivered her extraordinary testimony to the Commons justice committee about the endless procession of men who tried to make her cancel a criminal trial for SNC-Lavalin, was that she just didn’t get it. The former attorney general is a nice enough sort, the story went, but she doesn’t really understand the way the world works. The whole point of amending the Criminal Code to provide for deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) was to make that option—a sort of negotiated fine in lieu of a trial for fraud and bribery—available to SNC-Lavalin. And if the option was available, why not use it? Jobs were at stake. Elections were at stake. Elections, plural, for Pete’s sake. First an election in Quebec last autumn, then a federal election this autumn. So you could drag SNC through the mud of a court trial, long after the individual executives who actually did any frauding and bribing had fled the company, for what? To visit punishments upon everyone else in the company? To maybe scare it out of Montreal for good? To endanger the jobs of thousands of fine upstanding Quebecers and other Canadians? On the eve of elections? Plural? READ MORE: Trudeau and senior Liberals kept linking SNC-Lavalin prosecution to elections All of this was just so obvious to everyone who leaned on Wilson-Raybould, it was said privately. What the heck was she missing? Why didn’t she get it? If it’s any comfort to the former attorney general, at least she can rest assured that she’s not the only person who didn’t get that blindingly obvious fix-the-Criminal-Code-to-suit-SNC-Lavalin-and-save-jobs-and-Liberal-hides connection. Because also out of the loop were the people of Canada. And if we were out of the loop, it’s because Justin Trudeau and his apparently inexhaustible supply of yes-men worked hard to keep us uninformed. No part of the plan to save SNC-Lavalin was presented to the people of Canada, while it was being deployed, as a plan to save SNC-Lavalin. Who had called for the thing? Small businesses and NGOs, a Justice Department official said when the House Finance Committee inquired last autumn. The Quebec engineering giant was never mentioned in her testimony. When the government inserted the DPAs into the Criminal Code, how did it announce the move? With a single paragraph on page 202 of the 2018 federal budget document, under the catchy heading “Addressing corporate integrity.” You really had to go to page 202 to learn anything at all about the scheme. Finance Minister Bill Morneau made no mention of it in his nationally televised budget speech. And how was the DPA described on page 202, for insatiably curious or insomniac readers who might stumble across it? As a way to get tough on corporate wrongdoers. DPAs would be “an additional tool to hold corporate offenders to account,” the document said. They would “sanction criminal conduct appropriately and deter wrongdoing.” Now, a federal budget document is a bulky thing, drafted and reviewed by dozens of government employees. They found no room in its 367 pages to mention that SNC had been pleading for this tough accountability crackdown for months. At massive expense. As a handy rule of thumb, corporate offenders don’t usually plead for additional tools to hold them to account. RELATED: SNC-Lavalin’s allies in its push to avoid prosecution Long story short, the government of Canada was telling one story to itself and another to Canadians. To themselves, they said they were protecting jobs. To the rest of us, they said they were getting tough. A government that indulges in that much sustained double-talk clearly thinks it has something to hide. It’s being disingenuous. It’s being phony. And since the lot of them never stop calling themselves #TeamTrudeau on Twitter, I guess we can, without fear of contradiction, say the Prime Minister of Canada has been the phony-in-chief. If Trudeau is now saying his only priority was to save jobs, it’s because he got caught. If he refuses to say out loud what a majestic procession of Liberal minions kept telling Wilson-Raybould behind closed doors—that he was especially interested in saving Liberal jobs in back-to-back election years—it’s because that’s the kind of guy he is. He low-bridged a major change to criminal prosecutions while a large company was facing charges, depicting as a crackdown what was actually an escape hatch, because he didn’t dare simply say what he wanted. Didn’t think it would pass the smell test of the Canadian people. Didn’t think what he was doing was defensible. And he was right. https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/justin-trudeau-imposter/ar-BBUlkBQ?ocid=spartanntp

So no love for Par? I thought he played really well last night. Made our PK better too.

Pan bread was really phoning it in tonight. Not sure why Columbus didn't deal him at the deadline.

Helle and Lindholm looking good tonight.

that includes #26. Someone needs to throw a grenade in his underwear.

I remember interviewing Mike Vernon for a university HR project I was working on and I asked him what city was the worst to be in on the road, and he said "Winnipeg. Nothing else comes close". Good to see nothing has changed.

The moral catastrophe of Justin Trudeau Paul Wells: What Jody Wilson-Raybould described today is a sickeningly smug protection racket and it should make us all question what we’re willing to tolerate The dangerous files are never the obscure ones. Scandals don’t happen in the weird little corners of government, in amateur sport or in crop science. They happen on the issues a prime minister cares most about, because everyone gets the message that the rules matter less than the result. It’s a constant in politics. In 2016 I took one look at Bill Morneau’s first budget and wrote this: “The sponsorship scandal of the late Chrétien years was possible because it was obvious to every scoundrel with Liberal friends that spending on national unity would not receive close scrutiny from a government that was desperate to be seen doing something on the file. A government that considers the scale of its spending to be proof of its virtue is an easy mark for hucksters and worse.” It wasn’t a perfect prediction. I kind of expected the hucksters and worse to be outside government. Unless the Trudeau Liberals can produce persuasive evidence that Jody Wilson-Raybould is an utter fabulist (and frankly, I now expect several to try), her testimony before the Commons Justice Committee establishes pretty clearly that the hucksters and worse were running the show. Led by the grinning legatee who taints the Prime Ministers’ office. There will now be a period of stark partisanship. We’re in an election year. Loyal Liberals will tell themselves, and then everyone else, that the price of looking clearly at Justin Trudeau’s bully club (so many men; wonder how Katie Telford felt about that while she was signing off on every element of it) is ceding the field to Andrew Scheer. Who, they will tell themselves and then the country, is an actual Nazi. I mean, after all, that’s pretty close to what they told one another, and then Jody Wilson-Raybould, last fall, isn’t it? There was an election in Quebec in the first week of October. And Ben Chin, a former journalist who did whatever Christy Clark needed done in B.C. before moving east to do whatever Bill Morneau and the PMO needed doing, used that thin reed of an excuse to try to sway Wilson-Raybould’s chief of staff, Jessica Prince. “If they don’t get a [deferred prosecution agreement], they will leave Montreal, and it’s the Quebec election right now, so we can’t have that happen,” Wilson-Raybould told the committee, paraphrasing Chin’s conversation with Prince. I’ve never met a Liberal yet who doesn’t reliably confuse his electoral skin with the national interest. So much of what Trudeau and his minions have done in the last year stems from that instinct. Take the ludicrous half-billion-dollar bailout for people in my line of work, never explained, sprung out of nowhere in Morneau’s fall economic update—or as I now like to think of it, between Trudeau advisor Mathieu Bouchard’s meeting (yet another one) with Prince and Michael Wernick’s chat with Wilson-Raybould. You can get a lot of op-eds written with that kind of dough. Take the cool billion the Canada Infrastructure Bank coughed up to pay for a politically popular and impeccably well-connected transit project around Montreal. That money appeared, from a brand-new bank that has not funded a single other project and did not then yet have a CEO [Update, Thursday: Wrong! It had had a CEO since last May – pw], on the day before Philippe Couillard launched the Quebec election campaign. It is now impossible to believe on faith that the Canada Infrastructure Bank is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ben Chin, Mathieu Bouchard, Katie Telford and Justin Trudeau. But anyway, back to partisanship. Liberals and their many friends across the land will insist that all this behaviour must have no real-world repercussions because the other side cannot be permitted to gain the upper hand. And similarly, a lot of battle-hardened opponents of the Liberals will call for the jails to be opened up to welcome fresh Liberal meat. Fortunately, there is indeed an election coming up, and I’m content to let voters decide the partisan affiliation of the next government. I offer them no counsel. But we get to draw our own conclusions as citizens. What the former attorney general described tonight is a sickeningly smug protection racket whose participants must have been astonished when she refused to play along. If a company can rewrite the Criminal Code to get out of a trial whose start date was set before the legislation was drafted, all because a doomed Quebec government has its appointment with the voter, then which excesses are not permitted, under the same justification? If a Clerk of the Privy Council can claim with a straight face that ten calls and meetings with the attorney general, during which massive job loss, an angry PM and a lost election are threatened, don’t constitute interference, then what on earth would interference look like? Tonight I talked with two former public servants whose records rival Michael Wernick’s. Both were flat astonished that he seems not to have pushed back against this deeply disturbing, and plainly widespread, behaviour. There’ll be time to contemplate mechanisms in the days ahead. I don’t think the ethics commissioner has a broad enough mandate to investigate matters like that Canada Infrastructure Bank investment and other tendrils of this affair. But in the end, the moral collapse of Justin Trudeau’s government teaches each of us a lesson, if we will only listen: There had damned well better be a limit to what we’re willing to do or say, whatever the cause we claim to serve. The rules need to be rules—not for the people we despise, but for ourselves. For myself. For you. Or else we have no souls. https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-moral-catastrophe-of-justin-trudeau/ The op-ed comment is what still makes me cringe. Buying journalists with government money. Just yuck.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nationalpost.com/news/politics/snc-lavalin-paid-for-gadhafi-sons-debauchery-while-he-was-in-canada-report/amp

One chilling moment in JWR's testimony was when Telford told her not to worry about public perception as they could get op-eds from friendly media to support her in the press. So we essentially have a dictator with no free press. Just scary.

Rebus spelled it all out for you in his post.

This is massive news. I just watched the three and half hours of testimony and Q&A online. Bomb after bomb was going off. Heads exploding everywhere! Do I think Trudeau resigns over this? I don't think so. He'll hang in there and bank on Quebec and his brain-washed followers just not giving enough of a crap that the Liberals are completely corrupt.

we are watching history in the making folks. This is one of those "where we you when" days.

Nor was there any negativity intended! I would much rather have the perogies and kulbasa than what Vegas did for Stone!

I am almost got a Rod Black Sam Giguere vibe off of that... 😀

what they didn't tell you is that he stopped at a lake right before the border and punched a hole in the ice and then caught a fish with his bare hands...

who met Kevin Hayes at the airport in Winnipeg? A polka band and six babas in babooshkas carrying perogies and kubasas?

maybe the Jets saw something in Par that no one else sees?

that was so awkward...