SNC Lavalin’s $48M bribes to Libya (2001–2011) triggered a 2019 cabinet shakeup after Jodi Wilson-Raybould, Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister, defied Trudeau’s office to block deferred prosecution—despite 50 lobbying meetings, including 14 with his team. Her dismissal followed a 2018 criminal code amendment retroactively enabling such deals, while Trudeau’s PMO denied direct pressure, sparking skepticism over missing records in military procurement trials and foreign interference ties, like Huawei’s donations to Canada 2020. Wilson-Raybould’s refusal exposed systemic corruption, contrasting Quebec’s scandals with Alberta’s economic decline under Liberal trade failures—now worsened by Trump’s "Buy American" policies, which could force a Canadian recession within months. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Ezra Levant Show.
It's really made for TV, I should tell you.
Today, an amazing story.
It's, you know, when you see a unicorn, you have to say, all right, I found the unicorn.
They do exist.
They're extremely rare, but they do exist.
I'm referring to the front page story in the Globe and Mail about how the Liberals pressured Jodi Wilson-Raybold, the former justice minister, to let a crooked company in Quebec named SNC Lavalan off the hook for corruption crimes.
She refused, and so they fired her.
It's a hell of a story.
We're going to go through it.
Go through it.
And I say, you got to admit, it's a great story, great reportage.
And you know what?
I didn't have a lot of time for Jodi Wilson-Raybold.
I did not know she had a spine made of integrity, and she would not bend for Trudeau.
I'll go into it in depth in a minute.
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Without any further ado or to-do, let me present to you my show about Jodi Wilson-Raybold.
Here you go.
Tonight, shocking news, Justin Trudeau's office pressures the justice minister to call off a prosecution of a corrupt Quebec company.
She refused and was fired in a cabinet shuffle.
It's February 7th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government about why I publish them is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I believe Canada's media has a bias towards the Liberal Party and towards Justin Trudeau in particular, and I believe that is being made far worse by the $595 million bailout of journalists offered by Trudeau.
And so when there is a rare exception to this pattern, it behooves me to recognize it.
And today is one of those days.
The Globe and Mail has published a front-page story that is not pro-Trudeau propaganda at all.
In fact, it's the opposite, and it is huge news.
Now, there are newspapers, so it's their job to report huge news, but in this day and age of media party bias, we have to congratulate them for doing their jobs.
There were three reporters on this story, Bob Fife, Steve Chase, and Sean Fine.
So they put some work into this story, and it shows.
Let me read it to you.
I'm not going to read every word, but I'm going to read a lot of it to you.
PMO pressed Justice Minister to abandon prosecution of SNC Lavalan.
PMO, of course, stands for Prime Minister's Office.
Wilson Raybold is Jodi Wilson-Raybold, the first Aboriginal person, the first Aboriginal woman, to be the Justice Minister, a star candidate for Justin Trudeau from BC.
He was so proud of her.
And you know what?
Maybe she really was good.
If she resisted his attempt at corruption, maybe she really was excellent.
At least in that regard, too excellent.
Trudeau obviously thought she could be corrupted.
But let me tell you more of the story.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office attempted to press Jody Wilson-Raybould when she was justice minister to intervene in the corruption and fraud prosecution of Montreal engineering and construction giant SNC Lavalan Group Inc.
Sources say, but she refused to ask federal prosecutors to make a deal with the company that could prevent a costly trial.
And that's how courts are supposed to work in Canada with the rule of law, which means if you commit a crime, whether you are a prince or a pauper, you're all treated the same way.
And it's up to judges to judge cases neutrally.
And it's up to prosecutors to press the case if it's in the public interest, not the private interest of liberal fundraisers.
That's of no concern.
And that the Prime Minister's office itself would be involved is the gravest allegation possible.
I'll keep reading.
SNC Lavalan has sought to avoid a criminal trial on fraud and corruption charges stemming from an RCMP investigation into its business dealings in Libya.
Prosecutors alleged in February 2015 that SNC paid millions of dollars in bribes to public officials in Libya between 2001 and 2011 to secure government contracts.
The engineering company says executives who are responsible for the wrongdoing have left the company and it has reformed ethics and compliance rules.
So it sounds like they've more or less confessed to the whole thing if they're saying the wrongdoers have left the company.
So they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, it sounds like, and the individual criminals left the company.
So hey guys, can we just pretend we never did any of that?
Look, SNC Lavaland broke the law.
They got rich off breaking the law.
So they were caught.
And a few managers were the fall guys.
Can we all just settle this over drinks maybe?
You know, maybe at that private billionaire island in the Bahamas.
You know, that vacation retreat that Trudeau and his family go to.
I mean, why do we have to be all law and ordery about this?
I mean, that's not very liberal, is it?
Come on.
We're all friends.
Now, at this point, I have so many questions, but a huge one is, what other cases has Trudeau meddled in that we don't even know about?
Okay, I'll keep reading about this case.
After the charges, SNC Lavaland lobbied officials in Ottawa, including senior members in the office of Mr. Trudeau, to secure a deal known as a deferred prosecution agreement or remediation agreement that would set aside the prosecution.
In such deals, which are used in the United States and Britain, a company would accept responsibility for the wrongdoing and pay a financial penalty, relinquish benefits gained from the wrongdoing, and put in place compliance measures.
It is unfair that the actions of one or more rogue employees should tarnish a company's reputation as well as jeopardize its future success and employees' livelihood, SNC argued in a brief to federal officials in October 2017.
Is that really how it works in Canada?
It's been a while since I've practiced law, but as far as I can remember, if you have an excuse or an alibi or some mitigating circumstance, tell it to the judge.
In open court, under oath, on the stand, a judge can take it into consideration if that's what the law allows.
Since when do accused criminals hire lobbyists to meet secretly with politicians instead?
Look at this.
This is the website of Canada's Lobbyist Commissioner.
This is the page showing the official contacts between the president of SNC Lavaland, Neil Bruce, and senior liberal officials.
There are dozens and dozens of these meetings.
It's like it's all he did.
I mean, we know Bombardier does that.
It's pretty much all they do is lobby.
That's how they make their money.
But they're usually lobbying for free cash.
This is different.
This is lobbying the government to drop criminal charges against your criminal company.
Let me just go through some of these on November 19th, meeting Trudeau's senior advisor, Mathieu Bouchard.
And you can see on the right-hand side there, subject matters, justice and law enforcement.
Yeah, you're an engineering company, buddy.
On the same day, do you see that right underneath there?
Meeting Bill Mourneau's chief of staff, former journalist Ben Chin.
Same thing.
Justice and law enforcement.
Why on earth would the Finance Department with Bill Mourneau be making decisions about whether or not a prosecutor should prosecute a crime?
Because they're liberals, dummy.
12 days before that, they actually lobbied Trudeau's ambassador to the U.S., David McNaughton.
Same thing.
Justice and law enforcement.
Do you see that there?
David McNaughton should probably spend more time lobbying the United States on behalf of Canada to get an exemption from Trump's new Buy American executive order, and maybe less time talking to accused criminals, begging to be set free with some weird liberal get-out of jail free card.
Before that, November 5th, there's Mathieu Bouchard again from the PMO again.
And the week before that, lobbying the head of the Atomic Energy of Canada Agency about this crime.
SNC Lavaland was going around Ottawa begging every single liberal to get justice, to get Jody Wilson Rabel to call off the police.
Like we're in some sort of banana republic or something.
If you just talk to all the right people, schmooze all the right people, and your crimes will be washed away if you just buy enough people free drinks or something.
The week before that, I'm not going to read them all, but I just want to show you.
Did you see all these pages here?
The week before that, he was meeting with Jamie Innes in Christia Freeland's office.
She's the foreign minister.
Same thing.
The day before that, another meeting with David McNaughton again.
Two days before that, meeting Mathieu Beranger, director of policy for another Quebec-based minister.
And before that, Elder Marcus, senior advisor to Trudeau, and on and on dozens of times.
I'm not even going to say on and on, 63 times.
And not just meeting with senior staff, but with cabinet ministers too.
On September 18th, sitting down with Bill Mourneau directly.
I guess that later meeting was a follow-up to make sure Bill Mourneau was doing what he had to do.
The same Bill Mourneau who, whoopsies, remember that?
He hid his ownership of a luxury villa in France from his list of disclosable assets to the ethics commissioner.
I think meeting with a corrupt finance minister is about right for a corrupt company trying to get out of a prosecution for corruption.
It fits.
I miss the scandals of the Stephen Harper era, don't you?
Where a cabinet minister once resigned for expensing a $16 orange juice.
Those were the days.
I'm not going to read you the whole lobbying list.
Just take it from me.
SNC Lavaland had a private meeting with pretty much everyone they wanted to, it seems.
You get the picture.
Okay, back to the Globe Mail story.
But in October 2018, SNC Lavland hit a major obstacle.
The federal director of public prosecutions refused to negotiate a remediation agreement that would have resolved the Libyan fraud and corruption charges without prosecution.
SNC Lavland has asked for a judicial review of the decision, citing, quote, the extremely negative consequences the underlying legal proceedings have had and will continue to have even in the event of an acquittal on SNC and innocent stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, pensioners, and stakeholders, in the absence of an invitation to negotiate.
Well, yeah, buddy, that's how it's supposed to work.
If a prosecutor won't give you a plea bargain, and there's no reason why he should, and if you don't like that, well, I guess you could appeal it.
That's what a judicial review means.
You're going to a judge, not a private meeting over drinks with your favorite liberal.
You take it to a judge in open court.
You make your arguments in public, and the other side gets to challenge you, to cross-examine you, to call you out on any lies or omissions, to say, was this really some rogue employees, or was this the whole corporate plan, like Enron?
We have courts in Canada.
We don't decide who's a criminal based on private lobbying of liberals.
Oh my God.
So up until this point, we have the system working, I guess.
So far, the prosecution was immune. to this political pressure.
It shows a gross lack of judgment on the part of these public office holders to even meet with this company accused of breaking the law, begging for a special favor, and to meet with them again and again.
That is gross.
That is bad judgment.
But until the point, until this point, the line was held, keeping the gross liberal politicians away from the nonpartisan prosecutors.
Yeah, they're all dirty.
David McNaughton and Bill Mourneau, all of them meeting with this grubby guy begging they shouldn't, and shame on them.
But the prosecutors held the line.
But then this, then this.
Sources say Ms. Wilson Raybold, who was Justice Minister and Attorney General until she was shuffled to Veterans Affairs earlier this year, came under heavy pressure to persuade the Public Prosecution Service of Canada to change its mind.
Oh.
Ms. Wilson Raybold was unwilling to instruct the director of the Public Prosecution Service, Kathleen Russell, to negotiate a remediation agreement with SNC Lavalin, according to sources who were granted anonymity to speak directly about what went on behind the scenes in the matter.
Hmm.
Pressure, eh?
Heavy pressure.
Who pressured her?
That's the point, isn't it?
Did Justin Trudeau tell her that if she didn't let his Quebec friends off the hook that he'd fire her?
Because she didn't let his Quebec friends off the hook, and he did fire her.
The Prime Minister's office, let me read some more here, issued a short statement when asked to comment on efforts to persuade Ms. Wilson-Raybold to intervene.
Prime Minister's office did not direct the Attorney General to draw any conclusions on the matter, Press Secretary Chantal Gagnon said in an email to the Globe and Mail on Wednesday evening.
Sources say officials from Mr. Trudeau's office, whom they did not identify, had urged Ms. Wilson Raybold, Canada's first Indigenous justice minister, to press the Public Prosecution Office to abandon the court proceedings.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that excuse?
I don't know who Chantel Gagnon is.
She surely is just a messenger.
She didn't write that answer.
I know who Bill Mourneau is.
I know who all these very senior advisors to Justin True are.
I want to hear from them.
Frankly, under oath, I don't want some emailed non-believable line from some press assistant, but even her emailed line is weirdly written.
The PMO did not direct the Attorney General to draw any conclusion.
Okay.
Well, the question is, what did they tell her to do?
Did they tell her to drop the case, make the problem go away?
That's not, hey, can you make this problem go away?
What exactly did they say?
It's a weird lawyerly denial.
It's weirdly specific.
It's very Clintonian.
That way I think they're lying again.
Now it is possible for a justice minister that is, the political person, the liberal mp in charge of the prosecutions, the prosecutors in this Canada, in this country, to take over a case and make decisions.
It is possible in our system, but it has to be done openly and with notice and explanation.
Let me quote from the Globe story.
I thought this was a very helpful paragraph.
The Public Prosecution Service OF Canada's website says, with the exception of Canada Elections Act matters, the Attorney General can issue a directive to the Director of Public Prosecutions about a prosecution or even assume conduct of a prosecution, but must do so in writing and a notice must be published in the Canada Gazette.
Trudeau's Legal Trap00:14:30
So they have to explain themselves in public.
They can't do a secret deal over drinks.
Now, those rules there, that's all too Anglo, isn't it?
That's all too rule of law-ish, too, you know, legal.
Can't we do it how they did it back in Libya?
Maybe a nice donation to the Justin Trudeau Foundation.
Maybe the donation doesn't have to come from SNC Lavalan.
Maybe it can come from someone else, some bank in Switzerland.
I mean, the National Post did a report showing that's how it's done.
Money is pouring into the Trudeau Foundation from foreigners.
Who knows what the quid pro quo is?
I can't possibly imagine.
I mean, who would ever think that our prime minister is for sale?
Well, other than maybe the Aga Khan who let Trudeau party on his private island in the Bahamas and then let Sophie Trudeau go back there with her girlfriends again.
Did you know that?
It wasn't just Trudeau partying.
Sophie Trudeau called up and said, can I come back with my girlfriends?
And they said, yeah.
I shouldn't blame the Aga Khan.
He's not the one who invited Trudeau.
And he certainly didn't invite Sophie Trudeau.
You know, he wasn't even on Billionaire's Island when the Trudeaus went there to party.
They asked him for a free.
They didn't want to meet him.
They're multi-millionaires who inherited everything they have.
They sure are cheap and gross, the Trudeau's, aren't they?
They're really cheap and gross.
All right, back to the news today.
Ms. Wilson Raybold trusted the judgment of the public prosecutor and did not believe it was proper for the Attorney General to intervene, especially if there could be any suggestion of political interference, sources say.
The Trudeau liberals had criticized the former Harbor government for undermining independent agencies and vowed to respect the decisions.
The government has also invoked the independence of the judicial system as a reason for not intervening in the case of Huawei Technologies Company Limited, executive Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested at the Vancouver airport on an extradition request from the United States.
Well, that's a good point.
We heard Justin Trudeau's hand-picked ambassador to China weigh in the other day on a matter before the courts.
He was undermining judicial independence just weeks ago.
Sounds like a pretty common occurrence under these liberals, come to think of it.
I think she has quite good arguments on her side.
One, political involvement by comments from Donald Trump in her case.
Two, there's an extraterritorial aspect to her case.
And three, there's the issue of Iran sanctions, which are involved in her case, and Canada does not sign on to these Iran sanctions.
So I think she has some strong arguments that she can make before a judge.
Now, Trudeau later fired McCallum, but the press conference where McCallum said all that was organized by the Foreign Affairs Department, who sent government staff along.
It was not a rogue action by McCallum.
It was a liberal Trudeau thing.
That's how Trudeau works for his friends, and he loves China.
SNC Lavalon, let me read some more.
SNC Lavalon, Canada's largest engineering and construction management company, is one of Quebec's biggest corporations and has a reputation for holding political sway in Quebec City in Ottawa.
One well-connected liberal with close ties to SNC Lavaland said Ms. Wilson Raybold blew off the PMO requests.
That makes me like her more.
The company had told the government it was in dire circumstances and required a suspension of criminal charges to ensure it continued on a solid footing.
You know, I bet most criminals would say that.
Hey guys, this criminal prosecution, it's really inconvenient.
I might actually lose my job if I can get convicted for fraud.
So I really need you to make these charges go away.
Because, you know, bank robbery, I know it's not the best, but I could really lose my job if I'm convicted.
So can you help me?
I'm really embarrassed by your prosecution.
That's what they're saying.
And the fact that a liberal is saying this uppity woman, who does she think she is?
Doesn't she know that everything she has, everything she has, comes by the grace of Justin Trudeau, the precious one.
How dare she blow off Trudeau's requests like she's some independent woman.
How dare she?
The whole system was rigged in favor of SNC Lavland.
This is incredible.
This next part.
It sounds like she really did stand up to Trudeau's bullying.
I am impressed with her.
I got to say it.
Here, let me read this.
The Trudeau government in 2018 amended the criminal code.
I didn't know this.
To allow deferred prosecution agreements that let prosecutors suspend criminal charges against Canadian companies found to have committed wrongdoing.
The measure was inserted into the 2018 budget after a brief consultation in 2017.
Liberal insiders said Ms. Wilson Raybold knew this legislative change was meant to help SNC Lavland out of the legal troubles that were weighing on the price of its shares.
A conviction on the fraud and corruption charges would result in a 10-year ban from federal government contracts, a development that would lead to layoffs.
Well, we can't have that.
We can't have criminals being laid off, people.
So it sounds like this law was specifically rewritten to benefit a friend of Trudeau.
I guess Wilson Raybold went along with the rewriting of the law, but she just wouldn't or couldn't personally intervene to get Trudeau's friends off the hook.
I can imagine, I mean, she's Aboriginal.
One of her themes is helping Aboriginal people with our legal system.
It's a tough file.
It's complicated.
There are lots of shades of gray.
But imagine having some pampered, rich, privileged Quebecer, Justin Trudeau, never worked a day in his life.
Everything, silver spoon.
Imagine him telling you that you have to let another pampered, rich, privileged Quebecer off the hook from a crime, a massive crime.
Because they're friends, and you know, we just do this for each other.
And you're trying to do something about the fact that in some Canadian jails, half the prison population is Aboriginal.
You're trying to actually fix a problem.
At least that's how Trudeau sold you.
But you're being told instead to let some rich friends of the Prime Minister out of jail because they're rich friends of the Prime Minister.
And you're an Aboriginal justice minister, and you're being told to do what you're being told to do.
I wonder if there was a little part of her that said, you know what?
No, no, no.
Equal justice for all.
I mean, she's a social justice warrior herself.
Don't get me wrong.
She's meddled in the courts too.
Don't forget, she's no saint.
Last year when a Saskatchewan farmer was acquitted of murder after shooting an Aboriginal man who did a home invasion on his property and cold cocked the farmer's wife with a pistol, she criticized the jury there and said jury rules should be changed.
So she's a meddler too, but maybe doing a favor for some rich company, all fancy pantsy, was just too much for her.
Good for her.
Good for her.
An honest liberal, that's as rare as a unicorn.
Here's the Globe and Mail analysis of all those lobbying visits I was mentioning.
Since the beginning of 2017, representatives of SNC Lavaland met with the federal government officials and parliamentarians more than 50 times on the topic of justice and law enforcement.
According to the Federal Lobbyist Registry, this includes 14 visits with people in the Prime Minister's office.
Those they met included Gerald Bantz, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, and Mathieu Bouchard, Mr. Trudeau's senior advisor in Quebec, whom they met 12 times.
Mr. Trudeau's senior policy advisor, Eldor Marcus, also met with company representatives.
Sources at SNC Lavaland told the Globe the PMO was furious with the Justice Minister's intransigence on the remediation agreement and that the company was pleased to see her moved out of the portfolio.
Well, we know who the real bosses is now, don't we?
Furious.
I bet they were furious.
No one stands up to Trudeau, let alone some Aboriginal woman from BC.
I mean, unlike other members of Trudeau's cabinet, like Seamus O'Reagan or Dominic Nick LeBlanc, look at those guys.
That's the old boys' club.
She wasn't even part of his wedding bachelor party.
Who the hell does she think she is?
She wasn't one of his frat boy friends.
She's so uppity.
Who does she think she is saying no to Trudeau?
No one says no to Trudeau.
Let me read just a little bit more.
I know I'm reading a lot, but it's just so rare to see real investigative reporting like this into the Trudeau government.
And the Globe put this on the front page.
Hey, credit words do.
The closest things we get to investigative journalism from the media party is some CBC hack writing a conspiracy theory about the conservative opposition or they saw some mean tweet on Twitter that proves conservatives are racist.
Junk journalism focused on holding the opposition to account.
It's so rare to see something take on Trudeau in a serious way.
See, I can think of fewer than a handful of examples in three years.
Can you?
So let me enjoy this moment.
Here's some more.
After the cabinet shuffle, Ms. Wilson Raybold released a lengthy statement listing her legislative accomplishments during her tenure at justice.
In an unusual move for a member of cabinet, she also underlined the need for independence in the portfolio.
It is a pillar of our democracy that our system of justice be free from even the perception of political interference and uphold the highest levels of public confidence, she wrote.
As such, it has always been my view that the Attorney General of Canada must be nonpartisan, more transparent in the principles that are the basis of decisions, and in this respect, always willing to speak truth to power.
This is how I served throughout my tenure in that role.
Truth to power.
Well, you're the most powerful legal officer in the country.
So who could you possibly mean when you speak truth to power?
You are power.
Well, there's one person more powerful than you, ain't there?
That's a weird thing to emphasize.
In an exit letter, that is weird.
Unless it's a sort of coded message, a little bit like a time bomb, which it very much sounds like it was in this case.
I'm not going to read any more, but I want to note, the amount SNC Lavalan paid in bribes wasn't just $100,000, which is what Trudeau's illegal vacation on Billionaires Island was worth.
I think it was worth $200,000.
SNC Lavalan paid $48 million in bribes.
$48 million?
That's enough money to bribe a Clinton, let alone a cheap Clinton knockoff like Trudeau.
I wonder if there was any money sloshing over from Libya into Canada or into one of Trudeau's front groups like the Trudeau Foundation or Canada 2020.
I don't know.
I showed you the other day that Huawei dumped money right into Trudeau's think tank called Canada 2020, run by his close friend Tom Pitfield.
You see their logo there, almost spot in the middle there?
Huawei.
Until they deleted it last month when it became embarrassing.
I mean if SNC Lavalant was paying bribes in Libya, why do you think they weren't paying bribes elsewhere?
You think only Libya is where they paid bribes?
Same thing with Trudeau's other favorite Quebec company, Bombardier.
They are being prosecuted or have already been convicted of bribery and corruption in a great many countries in the world.
You might recall we did a whole show on it.
Why do you think they don't pay bribes here in Canada too?
You think liberals in Canada are morally superior to the other countries they were bribed?
No wonder SNC Lavalin wants to avoid a trial.
Imagine what facts would come about.
Today, Justin Trudeau indeed took a few quick questions on this and he repeated that very precise technical lawyerly denial here.
Listen to this.
The allegations in the Globe story this morning are false.
Neither the current nor the previous Attorney General was ever directed by me or by anyone in my office to take a decision in this matter.
The allegations reported in the story are false.
At no time did I or my office direct the current or previous Attorney General to make any particular decision in this matter.
But not necessarily direct, Prime Minister.
Was there any sort of influence whatsoever?
As I've said, at no time did we direct the Attorney General, current or previous, to take any decision whatsoever in this matter.
That precise phrasing.
He's not denying the thrust of the story, that she was pressured.
He's just denying that she was directed to make a decision.
Of course they weren't that clumsy in their wording.
It's like if a local mob boss comes by a store for a shakedown, he wouldn't be blunt.
He'd say, hmm, nice business you got here.
Shame if anything were to happen to it.
That crime boss could later say, well, I never directed them to take any decision.
No, I wouldn't do that.
He's lying, obviously.
Trudeau's lying.
And the problem is that the justice minister who was fired, she can't reply to his lies, obviously, because as a lawyer, as the government's former lawyer, she has a duty of confidentiality to her client.
She can't just talk about things.
So Trudeau's got her in a trap.
So Trudeau should release her from that trap.
He should tell her that he waives solicitor client privilege and that she should feel free to tell her side of the story.
Of course he won't do that.
And he knows she can't answer his lies until he does, so he won't.
It's weird.
Just two days ago, by coincidence, Blacklock's reporter, a small independent research newsletter in Ottawa, ran this story.
Firm is too big to blacklist.
Cabinet yesterday rejected any blacklisting of the country's largest engineering firm from bidding on public works.
Three former executives with SNC Lavalan Group have pled guilty to offenses in the past six months.
I'm not going to go through it, but for some reason, despite SNC Lavalan really looking like an organized crime operation, Cabinet just won't stop giving them contracts.
I wonder why.
I wonder why.
Government Notes and Corruption00:04:40
This is not new.
What's new is that the Justice Minister seems to have been fired over it.
Look at this story from a few years back.
Canada now dominates World Bank corruption list, thanks to SNC Lavalan.
And I'll read one more line.
Do you see the line right under it?
Out of the more than 250 companies year to date on the World Bank's running list of firms blacklisted from bidding on its global projects under its fraud and corruption policy, 117 are from Canada with SSC Lavalan and its affiliates representing 115 of those entries.
Yeah.
The World Bank will not touch SNC Lavalan.
It's like it's some Nigerian email scam.
The World Bank, they're so corrupt, but they won't touch SNC Lavalan.
But Trudeau insists that we do business.
See, you and I read that story and we're repulsed by all the bribes.
That's gross.
But a liberal reads the same story and thinks, uh-huh, so they're into bribes, eh?
Huh?
Maybe I can get a slice of that too.
You know, there's another criminal trial going on right now.
It's quite something.
We haven't talked about it.
We should do a show on it.
As you may know, Vice Admiral Mark Norman is being prosecuted for allegedly leaking military secrets about shipbuilding plans.
But his trial has certainly turned around.
It now looks like he was the straight arrow blowing the whistle on political corruption in huge military procurement contracts and that the wrongdoing was not his.
It looks like the trial's not done.
But the wrongdoing came from the liberal government.
I'm not going to get into the details of this case.
I don't have time to do that now.
But what should be a military matter, a police matter, a security matter, huh, under Trudeau became a political matter with Trudeau's principal secretary, Gerald Butts, right in the middle of it.
And if you can believe this, all these PMO people involved in this case, and not a single member of Trudeau's inner circle took any notes.
Let me read a little bit.
Vance, that's the chief defense staff right now, Trudeau's man, Vance testified at a pre-trial hearing last week that he didn't take any notes when senior RCMP briefed him on the matter on January 9th, 2017.
On the same day, Vance also met with Defense Minister Harjit Sajan and with Gerald Butts, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's principal secretary, and Trudeau's chief of staff, Katie Telford, to discuss the Norman situation.
He also had a brief phone call with Trudeau himself.
I'm not going to get into the details.
I'm just saying the only organizations I've ever heard of with complex operations that don't take notes about important meetings, those are organized crime.
Government take notes in quadruplicate, bilingual notes.
Police departments take notes.
It's the first thing you see when you go to court is all the police notes.
How else can they keep track of things?
Spy agencies take tons of note.
Databases full of notes.
The military probably takes more notes than anyone.
Unless you deliberately don't take notes because you're illegally interfering in things.
In this case, to push shipbuilding contracts to your liberal friends, in the case of Jody Wilson-Raybel to keep your political friends out of jail.
I mean, we know Justin Trudeau is corrupt.
He's the first sitting prime minister to be convicted under the Conflict of Interest Act.
That is not a matter of opinion.
It's a fact for convictions.
We know that his staff like to gorge at the public trial.
Gerald Butts, as you know, billed taxpayers for more than $100,000 just to move down the street from down Highway 401.
He moved from Toronto to Ottawa.
100 grand.
100 grand and Katie Telford together, 200 grand.
And he fought the release of that info so hard.
Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt.
I didn't much like Jody Wilson-Raybold as a justice minister.
Trudeau said she was a token appointee.
Trudeau said she was a gender quota.
Trudeau said she was a racial quota.
He said so.
I thought she was too much of a radical activist, but I now know that she had more integrity and more belief in the rule of law than anyone else in that cabinet, including the morally weak dozens who met with these lobbyists.
And so for that, she paid the price for her integrity.
She was sacked as Justice Minister.
But what's done in the dark will be brought to the light.
Wouldn't it be something if her quiet act of courage led to the downfall of the most corrupt Quebec prime minister since, well, since the last Quebec Prime Minister.
Immigration's Economic Impact00:09:29
Stay with us for more.
Now, Republicans and Democrats must join forces again to confront an urgent national crisis.
Congress has 10 days left to pass a bill that will fund our government, protect our homeland, and secure our very dangerous southern border.
Now is the time for Congress to show the world that America is committed to ending illegal immigration and putting the ruthless coyotes, cartels, drug dealers, and human traffickers out of business.
As we speak, large, organized caravans are on the march to the United States.
We have just heard that Mexican cities, in order to remove the illegal immigrants from their communities, are getting trucks and buses to bring them up to our country in areas where there is little border protection.
I have ordered another 3,750 troops to our southern border to prepare for this tremendous onslaught.
This is a moral issue.
The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security, and financial well-being of all America.
We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.
This includes our obligation to the millions of immigrants living here today who followed the rules and respected our laws.
That is a clip from Donald Trump's State of the Union address.
He departed from his written script and in a throwaway line suggested that he actually wants more immigration than ever.
That seems to be at odds with the whole idea of crackdown on immigration and the wall, unless there's some way of squaring the circle.
I'm slightly alarmed by this because I note that Donald Trump has not yet actually built one mile of his proposed wall between the United States and Mexico and his term is half done.
Joining us now via Skype from Bright World Headquarters is our best friend over there, Joel Pollack, the senior editor-at-large.
Joel, great to see you.
Am I overreacting to that spur of the moment impromptu deviation from the script?
It's unclear how serious a proposal it is, but it is clear that the president is selling his immigration policy by talking about how he's very much in favor of legal immigrants.
And there's no evidence to suggest that he isn't.
Even his support for more restrictive legal immigration policies has to do with the fact that our current legal immigration policies prioritize family reunification rather than skills.
So you can understand what he's saying as I want more skilled legal immigrants.
I think he's being very careful not to create the impression or to reinforce the impression that he's opposed to immigration.
And I think he hopes that by making clear in very explicit terms that he supports legal immigration, he will have an easier time selling his border wall policies to the other side.
And I think that conservatives are concerned because they are worried about the cumulative effects of legal immigration.
I shouldn't say conservatives, really.
I should say immigration hawks on both sides because the issue does cut across parties a little bit.
But I would say basically Trump supporters are a little bit alarmed, not because they don't like immigrants, but because the Trump phenomenon has partly been based on the legitimate grievance among the American working class that they are being forced to compete with labor that's being imported at a rapid rate from other countries, both legally and illegally.
So I think that's the question.
But I don't know if it's really such a big deal.
I think he was just eager to make clear that he's in favor of legal immigration on a night where he was really trying to hit a theme of unifying Americans, reaching out across partisan divides.
And I think in general, he did that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the thing is, when you bring industrial jobs back, either through changing trade deals or through tariffs, or last week Trump announced a buy American provision, which is a form of discrimination against imports, let's be candid.
When American unemployment is at some of the lowest rates in recent history, you are going to have pressure from some factories, from some employers saying, let us have more workers.
We need someone who's going to work the drive-through.
I mean, in Canada, we had something called the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
Basically, every Tim Hortons and a lot of bank tellers were foreign laborers.
They came in legally.
They were legally processed.
But it was because these employers said we need cheap labor because we don't want to pay $18 to have an indigenous, like an old stock Canadian do it.
So we need to bring in foreigners to undercut it.
The whole, in my mind, Joel, the whole promise of Donald Trump to the Midwest and to the working poor is, I'm going to give you higher wages by cracking down on foreign imports and cheap illegal workers.
So yeah, there's going to be some pain for employers, but hopefully the benefits to millions of working poor Americans will offset that.
That's to me the whole Trump rust belt promise.
Am I wrong on that?
I think that's the promise, as articulated at least by some in Trump's camp.
I'm not sure that restricting legal immigration is necessarily going to make American workers better off.
Now, it's easy for me to say that because I'm an immigrant.
So I think immigration is great.
And I also think that in general, skilled immigrants create more American jobs because skilled immigrants create more value, start more businesses, that sort of thing.
Not more than Americans, but you're bringing in people who are generally entrepreneurial if you can select those people.
The problem with illegal immigration is it's unselected.
People just come if they want to come.
And they're entering sectors of the economy where they're competing with low-skilled and semi-skilled American workers.
Very rarely do they compete in the professional fields, although we do have in California and elsewhere some illegal aliens who are registered members of the state bar and that sort of thing.
But it's really a phenomenon of competition on the low end.
My sources tell me that there's massive competition for entry-level warehouse jobs, for example.
For the most part, in our economy, there are more jobs than people right now.
That's how fast we're expanding.
But for the entry-level jobs, it's still very difficult to get those positions.
And so that's where you're seeing Americans competing with foreigners.
And especially if those foreigners are illegal, but really even if they're legal, you're going to see some pushback against liberal immigration policies.
So there's some truth to what Trump is saying economically, but I'm not sure that in general the phenomenon of legal immigration is always going to create more competition for American workers or drive down wages.
I think as long as you're prioritizing skilled immigration, you're going to create more value, create more jobs, create more tax revenues, do all these good things for the American economy, which is why Canada has an immigration policy that prioritizes skills.
There was an American critic of Trump who said that what we should do with our immigration policy is take Canada's law, stamp Made in America on it, and make it our own.
Obviously, that's an oversimplification, and not everything is hunky-dory with immigration in Canada.
I'm aware of that.
But the Canadian approach makes more sense than the one we have in the United States, which is outdated by several decades.
Yeah.
I'm not familiar enough with the American details, but I can tell you in Canada, Justin Trudeau is relaxing every requirement from language skills to the amount of time before a permanent resident can become a Canadian citizen.
And of course, his massive new immigration numbers, 340,000 per year.
And we're a country one-tenth your size.
So imagine 3.5 million migrants a year, half of whom are not economic, half of whom don't have skills.
He just had a new announcement about bringing in grandparents, which is very sweet.
But grandparents come and they go to the front of line on pensions and Medicare.
Anyway, we'll put that aside.
Shutdown Negotiations00:07:46
I want to talk about your latest article on Breitbart.com called A Wall Deal Should Be Possible.
That's what we thought during the shutdown.
The whole point of the shutdown was to put pressure on the Democrats.
There has been no wall deal.
The Democrats seem to be very resilient on this point.
I think that Trump's collapse on the shutdown from my perch up here in Canada looked like a sign of weakness.
I know you said it maybe had some negotiating judo moves there.
Do you really think there's going to be a wall deal?
I can't imagine the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Nancy Pelosi would possibly go for it.
Well, I think you're correct in that politically they may reject the deal.
The point of my article is that a deal is possible.
If you take the politics out of it and look at what both sides actually say they want, they're really not that far apart.
In fact, what Trump is proposing is new border fence, not even a wall, new border fencing along basically 100 new miles of border that are currently unfenced.
That's what the big fight is about right now.
Our border with Mexico is about 2,000 miles long.
So you're talking about 5% of the border.
And already some two-thirds of that border is unfenced, but a third of it is fenced.
Now, some of that's pedestrian fence, some of it's vehicle fence, some of the pedestrian fence is bad.
Trump wants to improve those fences.
But in terms of new fencing, he's not proposing that much, at least right now.
So theoretically, you might be able to reach a deal.
I mean, what is 100 miles of additional fence really in the long run, especially because it's in an area of Texas where the cartels are sending people across the border and making billions of dollars, presumably, doing it.
So I think that there's a zone of potential agreement that actually exists.
The problem is Democrats don't want Trump to have a win of any kind.
So you have to overcome that.
Well, this whole thing is a little bit odd for me to talk with you about because, of course, I'm a Canadian.
I have no skin in the game, neither morally, geographically.
I'm just an observer and a foreign fan.
I take this as the essential litmus test of is Trump a serious man who keeps his promises?
Because to me, it was really the promise that was larger than all other promises combined.
And during the shutdown, he tweeted how adamant he was.
He said, if I don't get this, I'll act on my own.
I might call a state of emergency.
Even he alluded to his ability to act on his own.
Well, we're well into February now and he hasn't.
Is there any chance?
And you and I talked about this before about the risks of him pushing that nuclear button using the emergency powers the president has.
Do you think he's going to do that?
Because I think he could get that wall built in months.
I mean, I've seen how fast you can build walls.
I've seen it in some Eastern European countries that built a wall in weeks when Angela Merkel went crazy there.
We've seen in Israel how quickly they can act if they have to.
Is Trump actually going to do this on his own or are we going to be having this same conversation in the year 2020?
I think that he will do it on his own.
I think he's getting a lot of pressure, in fact, from conservatives to do so.
And the argument is that he's not going outside the Constitution.
He's not going outside the law.
This is a legal emergency under the 1976 legislation that Democrats have used many times, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
So this is something that he has the legal authority to do.
And this is the only way maybe in the end to achieve what he wants.
And again, it's not so much different from what we have already in terms of the length that he's proposing.
He's not even proposing a concrete wall anymore.
So I think that he will do it.
He's going to have to do it, I think, to retain the support of his core supporters, his core voters, his base, heading into 2020.
So I don't think we're going to be looking at the issue in quite the same way in 2020.
Something is going to happen.
It may not be built by then because Democrats will sue and try to use the courts to stop him.
But with so many Trump judges now on the bench, thanks to the way the Democrats destroyed the filibuster in the previous administration, hoping that Hillary Clinton would win, I think Trump will eventually get a good hearing at the Supreme Court or somewhere else where they say the president has the right to do this and the construction will begin.
I do think there will still be unresolved questions about American asylum laws.
There are going to be areas of the fence that still need to be upgraded.
There are areas of our policy with Mexico that will need attention because right now we haven't done that much really to stop the cartels.
The cartels are the ones who really keep this flow going.
And that would require doing things that might alienate the Mexican government on economic issues.
So we have a long way to go still.
But in terms of actually building the structure, I think Trump's voter base will be satisfied, whether through legislation or emergency action, that the president is at least trying everything possible and risking everything to fulfill this promise.
Yeah.
Well, that'll be very interesting to watch.
I say again, I have no moral authority to say that I am impatient.
I am nothing but a foreign pundit.
But I believe that Trump's credibility, his authority, his moral authority, the fact that anyone would treat his word as reliable, either a friend or a foe, any respect he commands.
I mean, I think the Chinese government, I remember when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers very early in his mandate, they went on an illegal strike.
He fired them, and he replaced them with military air traffic controllers.
After the Berlin Wall fell, we learned that it was that action that made the Soviets say, whoa, we've got to take Ronald Reagan seriously.
So the wall is not just the wall.
The wall is, can you believe a word Donald Trump says?
It's Kim Jong-un.
It's the Chinese.
It's Iran.
It's Vladimir Putin.
The wall is about them too.
What do you think of that, Joel?
I agree with you.
And the ironic thing is that this time what ended the shutdown was the air traffic controllers.
And there's a story to be written.
CNN's done a little bit of work on it.
But essentially, the union that represents them, the air traffic controllers, was encouraging them to take extra leave.
So that did bring the shutdown to a halt.
But I think Trump wanted to shut it down anyway.
I'm not sure it was really a showdown between him and the air traffic controllers.
I think if it were limited to that kind of a showdown, Trump would take them on.
But I do think that he's reserved some options for himself, and he can maintain that international credibility by using the emergency declaration to build the wall.
But I agree with you.
You've got to be credible.
You've got to enforce red lines when you draw them and you've got to follow through on promises when you make them.
And that's what he understands, that his presidency will be weakened and his foreign policy will be weakened unless he can follow through on this domestic priority.
Yeah.
Well, thanks very much for your time and your insight, Joel.
I really appreciate it.
You always give us a very thoughtful point of view about this administration.
Good luck down there and keep up the fight.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it, Joel Pollock, Sr. Editor-at-Large at Breitbart.com.
It'll be interesting.
I have no cause to say I'm running out of patience.
It's not my fight, but I morally feel like it is.
How about you?
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
United States Overtakes UK00:03:25
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about an Angus Reid poll that shows Canadians in Western Canada would support a separatist party.
Cal writes, I reached voting age under Trudeau Sr.
Laheed came to power in Alberta after and said, wait.
Preston Manning said, wait, because the West wants in.
Klein said, wait, because he had a great rapport with Cred Chen.
Harper said, wait, because the West was in now.
We are now back to Junior and F waiting.
Pohl says a lot of people seem to agree with you.
And really, Stephen Harper didn't make structural changes.
He was, he didn't make any permanent changes.
And I don't even know what permanent changes could be made.
So it's just a matter of time.
Bruce writes, we Albertans should threaten to separate or become an American state.
I'm sure that would make the Laurentian bobbleheads freak out.
The problem is that we have standards of loyalty which prevent us from blackmailing the nation like Quebec politicians really regularly do.
I think that is a very key point there.
See, sorry, main story today showed in Quebec they have a bit of a different moral compass.
I'm not saying every Quebecer, but boy, the corruption sure seems to come from one province more than most.
You'd have to be blind not to notice that pattern.
Bombard JSNC Lavalan ad scam.
Just about every single mayor in Quebec was arrested for corruption in the last 10 years.
Like all of them.
Montreal on down.
So yeah.
I think Albertans are just, you know, they don't have that killer edge to them.
They're too loyal and they're too neighborly.
That's the problem.
You can't really be a separatist if you're neighborly.
Trouble is you get taken advantage of then.
Isn't that a paradox?
On my interview with Manny Montenegrino about a de facto trade war with America, Paul writes, so the Liberals botched the free trade agreement in a much bigger way than was first thought.
If we had adults running the country, we could have worked with the Trump administration and we could be looking at prosperity instead of Made in Canada recession.
Yeah, listen, our unemployment numbers are low on the face of it.
We have a big deficit and we have big taxes right now.
But as Manny points out, our labor participation rate is lower than America.
I think, though, we're getting weak.
There's signs the economy is weak.
Our growth rate is low.
And I think in the next few months, you're going to see this Buy America kick in.
And I, can I make a prediction?
I mean, look, I don't know.
Talk to me in 30, 60 days.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
I think this is going to tip us into a recession.
I think everything's pregnant for that.
We've chased $100 billion worth of investment out of the oil patch.
Taxes up, deficits up, scandals.
Now Buy American blocking us from bidding on, what, a trillions of dollars worth of stuff.
I think it's going to tip us.
I think it's going to tip us.
And you're so right, it didn't have to be that way.
You know, I read, just as an aside, I read today that the United States is now the largest exporter of oil to the United Kingdom in more than 50 years.
And I read that and I thought, that should have been us.
That should have been us.
With energies, that could have been us.
And I read that the United States is now the largest oil producer in the world by far.
They're a net oil exporter, and I thought, that could have been us, that could have been us.
Yeah, no.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.