SNC-Lavalin: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

The Ethics Commissioner released his report on the Prime Minister’s actions with respect to the SNC-Lavalin affaire while I was on the Left Coast, but you can read it all here. Or you can read all about it here, or here, for that matter, or here.

So buddy is now two for two: judged to have breached the Conflict of Interest Act on this matter and on the Aga Khan visit. Actually, that’s not true: This is his third breach.

In June of 2018, Dion fined Trudeau $100
for failing to declare designer sunglasses
he was gifted by Prince Edward Island Premier Wade MacLauchlan
during a visit to the province the year before.
The Post Millennial

Having the Ethics Commissioner involved in such penny ante stuff blunts his force on the big ones, in my mind. Maybe that’s the point.

Anyway, not everyone agrees with the Ethics Commissioner’s most-recent ruling. (Heck, there are probably some folks upset about the sunny-day glasses fine.) Andrew Roman gives his usual incisive evaluation of that criticism — and, for what it’s worth, comes down squarely in the Ethics Commissioner’s court. (That’s a tennis allusion, not a court-of-law reference. Go, Bianca!)

And the Prime Minister’s first response extended the incoherence of everything he has said in public about the mess: how can he “accept” the report while “disagreeing” with it, claiming to acknowledge that he “didn’t do it the right way” while dismissing every specific criticism from Dion? – Macleans

And if you, too, wondered how the PM could say that he accepted the report but disagreed with its conclusion, Mr. Roman has an answer for that, too.

The PM’s response to the EC’s report is the only possible response that would not have required his immediate resignation. He had to say he accepted responsibility for his actions. Who else is responsible for his actions if not he himself? In our society anyone who says he is not responsible for his own actions would probably be confined in a mental institution.

He also had to disagree with the report because if he admitted he had a conflict of interest he would have had to resign. To argue that what he did was ethical requires a public interest justification. He had previously insisted he tried to encourage JWR to overrule the prosecutors to save the 9,000 jobs. That’s his only story, so he has to stick to it. To change his story now would require a new story, triggering the accusation that he keeps changing his story. – Andrew’s Views

As Paul Wells says,

You vote how you like.

 

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2 Responses to SNC-Lavalin: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

  1. Wade says:

    Isabel, thank you for reminding the audience about Andrew Roman, for some reason I had forgotten to put him on my regular blog visit list. Now if I could only remember why I picked up this IPad.

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