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Trudeau lying about SNC


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44 minutes ago, Rue said:

I actually agree with you until the last sentence myself. However I know many people who challenge how Trudeau has acted over Lavalin as one issue and their opinions over the pipeline issue as another and they want pipelines

I also believe many Liberals don't agree with Trudeau did at all but will not say so out loud.

Look the pipeline issue let's be honest, no matter who is in power over that issue, either BC or Alberta will hate you depending on your decision. You can't please them both. .

The closest analogies we have to politicians trying to interfere with on-going  legal processes are Nixon and Trump and in Canada Marcel Duplessis and Jean Charest..

 

I’ve said all along that the game changer for building pipelines in Canada, including the idyllic Energy East, is to illustrate to Quebecers the tremendous value of oil and gas independence.  If we can get crude to refineries in Eastern Canada to provide petrol to markets in Ontario and Quebec, as well as ports for shipping from the Atlantic coast, the potential royalties to provincial and federal treasuries are immense.  Pipelines are cleaner than shipping by rail or truck.  BC has to see the virtue in pipelines as well, but at least there we know that part of the reason pipelines can’t get approved is because of a left wing provincial government that could be ousted, whereas Quebec’s government is relatively centre-right.  

The voices of over regulation and consult until you drop are part of a politically correct Puritanism that exclaims that laws must be followed to the letter and not changed or reinterpreted, even when their enforcement doesn’t serve the public interest.  Really, have we become such a model of temperance and virtue that not a tree can be felled, not one Hereditary Chief can be upset, not one court decision can be overturned by a higher court or bureaucrat, even though doing so would create or protect thousands of jobs.  Who runs this country, oversensitive wimps?   It’s the centre at the mercy of the fringe.

I don’t like that some SNC personnel have committed crimes, but I also don’t support throwing our biggest employers under the bus.  We can still have rule of law, regulations, and consultations, but don’t create a business climate that makes it impossible to grow or operate.

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19 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

I don’t disagree with much of what you said, but you’re referencing a period of history when there were few limitations on the amounts or nature of donations to political parties, so all parties took donations and countless companies made them.  Times have changed and there’s higher standards and more accountability in campaign financing.  In the US both major parties are essentially corporate sponsored entities.  Hillary took massive payouts from private health insurance companies.  SNC is a massive international company.  That doesn’t excuse past bad behaviour, but you need to bring context.  Many international companies simply don’t have the kinds of accountability and reporting standards that we have in Canada.  I certainly don’t think SNC should get away with any bad behaviour, but make sure the punishment fits the crime and impacts the perpetrators.  There was an excellent article in the Toronto Star today by Clayton Ruby.  His message to JWR is that the reason the Liberals brought in DPA’s is because judges hated having to apply mandatory minimum sentences such as ten year bans on applying for government contracts.  It undermines judicial discretion and hurts innocent workers.  That’s the real issue. JWR didn’t seem to value the new process.  She didn’t seem to consider valid evidence and decided to make AG independence, hers in particular, the hill she would fight and die on.  It seems at least a bit like an underhanded political move, enough that I’m willing to see the greyness of this affair.  

What I have established is that SNC-Lavalin has been acting like a mafia for decades with government complicity by sanctioning SNC-Lavalin llegal activities.

 

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17 hours ago, Owly said:

I don't think your memory failed you. I am awaiting wcm to show us a cite which proves his comments about snc having influenced the adoption of the dpa law in Canada.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/snc-lavalin-lawyers-rushed-prosecutors-1.5027319

Quote

SNC-Lavalin worked hard to avoid criminal proceedings by proposing a remediation agreement, but in September the prosecutor's office declined to invite the company to negotiate. A guilty verdict on bribery and corruption charges has been characterized as an existential threat for SNC-Lavalin and its employees because the company would be barred from bidding on government contracts in Canada for 10 years. Much of its work is in designing, building and operating public infrastructure.

The company lobbied federal officials, including in the Prime Minister's Office, to put remediation agreements into the law in the first place. The tools, known as deferred prosecution agreements in other jurisdictions, had already been enacted in the United States and the United Kingdom.

http://theconversation.com/snc-lavalin-canadas-anti-foreign-bribery-laws-did-their-job-112758

Quote

The remediation agreements that the Prime Minister’s Office allegedly pressured Wilson-Raybould to consider were introduced into law in June 2018. A remediation agreement allows a corporation accused of certain criminal offences, including foreign bribery, to obtain a stay of proceedings if the corporation agrees to specific penalties.

SNC-Lavalin was one of many businesses that supported remediation agreements, as did Transparency International Canada.

 

https://globalnews.ca/news/5057722/bribery-law-snc-lavalin-canada/

Quote

That places Canada at the lower end of enforcement among the 44 signatories of the 1999 Anti-Bribery Convention of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Canada passed the domestic law after it signed the convention, which is aimed at recruiting richer countries to combat corruption their own citizens and businesses perpetrate in poorer ones.

The OECD raised concerns about lax enforcement efforts in Canada eight years ago and Canada responded with some amendments to the law, but the number of charges and convictions since is small.

 

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/trudeau-is-making-canada-safe-for-corruption-again-with-the-snc-lavalin-case

Quote

What’s old is new again. Before corruption of foreign officials became illegal in Canada in the late 1990s, Liberal governments blessed bribes that facilitated exports. After the Harper Conservatives came to power in 2006, the tide turned against corruption, with companies such as SNC-Lavalin being prosecuted, much to the chagrin of Liberals. Now the Liberals are back in power, and thanks to their recent introduction of Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs), corruption has made a comeback.

In the 1970s, when Jean Chrétien was the Liberal trade minister, he urged Canadians not to put their “head in the sand” and pass up overseas sales by being fussed over bribes. The late Bernard Lamarre, former head of Lavalin Inc. (now SNC-Lavalin), boasted to Maclean’s in 1991 that whenever he did business in the Third World, he never handed out bribes without first demanding a receipt. “I make sure we get a signed invoice,” he explained. “And payment is always in the form of a cheque, not cash, so we can claim it on our income tax!”

Canada passed the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act in 1998 because it was forced to — thanks to an OECD convention that had deemed bribery illegal, and Canada had no choice but to comply … on paper. Federal governments spent the next decade largely ignoring its legislation.

 

DECADES of government complicity in large scale corporate corruption that's crossing all party lines.  And SCN-Lavalin has been influencing that for decades. So yes SNC has clearly shown their involvement of influence in getting the DPA law passed. 

Mic Drop.

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15 hours ago, Owly said:

Scheer and co will do their best to keep it in the news as long as they can, but it will fade over the summer. Just watch.

CTV and CBC will do everything they can to make it fade away. CTV was already championing the cause of government regulation of social media to block "fake news" and they specifically mentioned SNC Lavalin in the fake news category.

If Trudeau and the MSM got their way then Scheer & co. could talk about SNC in the HP all day and we would never hear a word of it. 

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3 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

First off, I don’t see politicians of any political stripe as especially noble or honest or decent.  Trudeau is one of many snake oil salesmen.  I see JWR as a self-righteous and privileged manipulator not unlike Trudeau.  She dresses up her ambitious machinations in the cloak of “speaking truth to power” as an underrepresented Indigenous woman, but of course she doesn’t share the plights of most Indigenous people.  I do want to see more jobs in the oil sands.  I see the anti-DPA forces and the eco warrior forces preventing pipelines as almost one and the same.  

How do you see the anti-DPA forces preventing pipelines? I don't follow.

 

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2 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

I’ve said all along that the game changer for building pipelines in Canada, including the idyllic Energy East, is to illustrate to Quebecers the tremendous value of oil and gas independence.  If we can get crude to refineries in Eastern Canada to provide petrol to markets in Ontario and Quebec, as well as ports for shipping from the Atlantic coast, the potential royalties to provincial and federal treasuries are immense.  Pipelines are cleaner than shipping by rail or truck.  BC has to see the virtue in pipelines as well, but at least there we know that part of the reason pipelines can’t get approved is because of a left wing provincial government that could be ousted, whereas Quebec’s government is relatively centre-right.  

The voices of over regulation and consult until you drop are part of a politically correct Puritanism that exclaims that laws must be followed to the letter and not changed or reinterpreted, even when their enforcement doesn’t serve the public interest.  Really, have we become such a model of temperance and virtue that not a tree can be felled, not one Hereditary Chief can be upset, not one court decision can be overturned by a higher court or bureaucrat, even though doing so would create or protect thousands of jobs.  Who runs this country, oversensitive wimps?   It’s the centre at the mercy of the fringe.

I don’t like that some SNC personnel have committed crimes, but I also don’t support throwing our biggest employers under the bus.  We can still have rule of law, regulations, and consultations, but don’t create a business climate that makes it impossible to grow or operate.

I agree with basically every single thing that you said here.

Part of the reason that I think Trudeau is against pipelines is that he helped create a system where there are a whole host of individuals or small, independent groups with the ability to unilaterally shut down an entire 2,000 mile long pipeline.

Sure he talks casually about getting pipelines built, but at the same time he's telling the world that the oil sands will be phased out - and investors are fleeing like it's a house on fire.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/pipeline-controversy-pitting-hereditary-leaders-against-elected-band-councils-reveals-intricacies-of-b-c-indigenous-governance

Just a few hereditary chiefs oppose a pipeline and that's that. Done like dinner. Can Queen Elizabeth shut down pipelines too? Can she block the government on any issue that she sees fit? It's no less ridiculous imo. 

Saudis can give one hereditary chief $100k and our oil is landlocked. Makes perfect sense.

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2 hours ago, GostHacked said:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/snc-lavalin-lawyers-rushed-prosecutors-1.5027319

http://theconversation.com/snc-lavalin-canadas-anti-foreign-bribery-laws-did-their-job-112758

 

https://globalnews.ca/news/5057722/bribery-law-snc-lavalin-canada/

 

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/trudeau-is-making-canada-safe-for-corruption-again-with-the-snc-lavalin-case

 

DECADES of government complicity in large scale corporate corruption that's crossing all party lines.  And SCN-Lavalin has been influencing that for decades. So yes SNC has clearly shown their involvement of influence in getting the DPA law passed. 

Mic Drop.

Pick up the mic that you dropped.  If you worked for SNC you’d do the same thing.  

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On 4/9/2019 at 9:26 PM, eyeball said:

Glad to hear it and I'll have you and your homies backs if it comes down to a coup d'etat to put a stop to it.  I'm pretty sure its precisely this sort of back-room horseshit that sinks us into hopeless military quagmires and that leave you out to dry afterwards.

It's a good gesture, one that millions of Canadians have said they would do, how ever they soon fold when it comes down to doing anything about it....and no we are not bitter, just facing reality....

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On 4/13/2019 at 10:21 AM, Zeitgeist said:

The PM and his coterie applied pressure on the AG to consider a policy that they valued, but they didn’t break any laws.  So what?

 

Your right so what, no laws were broken.........and yet Justins main man quits, the senior civil servant retires early, the treasure dept MP retires early, 2 MPs were fired, and Justin is in up to his neck in shit....how does that happen if no laws were broken, there has to be something to this whole issue.....or is this all normal behavior for federal government MP's or maybe ….and I say maybe there is a major rule or policy that states something has gone wrong.....something that would demand the forced retirement of all these people.... 

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4 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

Pick up the mic that you dropped.  If you worked for SNC you’d do the same thing.  

So it's ok to spend millions buying hookers and blow to bribe who ever you want, not counting million dollar boats....to get contracts....where do you draw the line, would it be alright to bribe government employees, elected officials , or anyone else for that matter in this country....or does it have to be in a foreign country for you to feel all good about this act ? 

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1 hour ago, Army Guy said:

So it's ok to spend millions buying hookers and blow to bribe who ever you want, not counting million dollar boats....to get contracts....where do you draw the line, would it be alright to bribe government employees, elected officials , or anyone else for that matter in this country....or does it have to be in a foreign country for you to feel all good about this act ? 

How big was the boat?  Sorry, kidding.  I’m just a lot more cynical than most people on here I guess about how politicians conduct themselves.  None of those things are right and none of those things surprise me. 

1 hour ago, Army Guy said:

 

Your right so what, no laws were broken.........and yet Justins main man quits, the senior civil servant retires early, the treasure dept MP retires early, 2 MPs were fired, and Justin is in up to his neck in shit....how does that happen if no laws were broken, there has to be something to this whole issue.....or is this all normal behavior for federal government MP's or maybe ….and I say maybe there is a major rule or policy that states something has gone wrong.....something that would demand the forced retirement of all these people.... 

Yes fairly normal.  Almost every government faces a scandal if they’re in power long enough.  This is small potatoes.  

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9 hours ago, Rue said:

I actually agree with you until the last sentence myself. However I know many people who challenge how Trudeau has acted over Lavalin as one issue and their opinions over the pipeline issue as another and they want pipelines

I also believe many Liberals don't agree with Trudeau did at all but will not say so out loud.

Look the pipeline issue let's be honest, no matter who is in power over that issue, either BC or Alberta will hate you depending on your decision. You can't please them both. .

The closest analogies we have to politicians trying to interfere with on-going  legal processes are Nixon and Trump and in Canada Marcel Duplessis and Jean Charest..

 

Do you know what LNG project is? do you think all BC-ers are tree huggers?  Most of BC-ers don't care the pipeline at all. In fact, few surveys show more than half of "BC-ers" want the pipeline to be build. It is green party and uncle sam "mandate", and JT is the free rider.

 

 

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17 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

Pick up the mic that you dropped.  If you worked for SNC you’d do the same thing.  

No Problem, I'll pick it up to add this....

I'd would not want to work for a company that acts like a mafia. I also do not want nor support a government sanctioning corporate criminal activity.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snc-lavalin-trial-board-1.5096153

Quote

Ben Aïssa has a very different story to tell. He is back in Canada after having spent more than two years in prison in Switzerland.

He has turned on his former executives and board of directors and has been co-operating with police and prosecutors.

If called to testify at an SNC-Lavalin trial, he could expose who else in the senior ranks may have known about $47.7 million in bribes and $130 million in fraud tied to projects in Libya — crimes the RCMP alleges were committed by the company between 2001 and 2011.

SNC-Lavalin has been lobbying hard behind the scenes to secure what's called a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) to avoid going to trial. The company, as well as its supporters in government, argue thousands of jobs are at risk if it is convicted and barred from bidding on federal contracts.

Mic Drop, again.

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20 hours ago, Zeitgeist said:

How big was the boat?  Sorry, kidding.  I’m just a lot more cynical than most people on here I guess about how politicians conduct themselves.  None of those things are right and none of those things surprise me. 

Yes fairly normal.  Almost every government faces a scandal if they’re in power long enough.  This is small potatoes.  

I would agree that this stuff does not surprise Canadians very much.....that in itself is very telling, and politicians ask us why we don't trust the government ….and yet these scandals are common.

small potatoes or not, Justin liberals are free falling at a rapid rate....I can't remember when a scandal claimed so many people in such a short time, and lets not forget their positions …. I give it a med size scandal at the very least.

 

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20 minutes ago, Army Guy said:

I would agree that this stuff does not surprise Canadians very much.....that in itself is very telling, and politicians ask us why we don't trust the government ….and yet these scandals are common.

small potatoes or not, Justin liberals are free falling at a rapid rate....I can't remember when a scandal claimed so many people in such a short time, and lets not forget their positions …. I give it a med size scandal at the very least.

 

No this is a large scandal , crossing decades and party lines, provincial borders and international borders.

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  • 2 weeks later...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/snc-lavalin-liberal-donors-list-canada-elections-1.5114537

Just a few bad apples??  Time to take this company down for good.

Quote

A confidential document sent to the Liberal Party of Canada in 2016, and obtained by CBC/Radio-Canada, reveals how top officials at the embattled engineering firm SNC-Lavalin were named in a scheme to illegally influence Canadian elections.

The list of names, compiled in 2016 by federal investigators probing political party donations and leaked to CBC's The Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada's Enquête, raises new questions about an agreement by the Commissioner of Canada Elections not to prosecute the company.

The federal Liberals were sent the list in a letter marked "confidential" from the Commissioner of Canada Elections — the investigative branch of Elections Canada — on Aug. 5, 2016. But for nearly three years, neither Elections Canada nor the Liberal Party shared that information publicly.

But this ...

Quote

Only 1 SNC executive charged

SNC-Lavalin avoided charges by signing what is known as a "compliance agreement" in 2016 with the Commissioner of Canada Elections after promising not to break the law in the future.

They can make all the promises they want, but their actions have remained the same.

If I promise not to steal from someone else, can I avoid jail time? 

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-snc-lavalin-results/snc-lavalin-to-speed-up-cost-cuts-after-profit-plunges-idUSKCN1S8116

Quote

(Reuters) - SNC-Lavalin Group Inc is exiting operations in 15 countries, the Canadian company said on Thursday, after posting a surprise quarterly loss in its engineering and construction unit that pushed its shares to a decade low.

----

“We believe that there’s at least C$5 to C$6 billion worth of contracts to date that we are privy to that we lost out on because of our competitors using (corruption charges) as a negative,” Chief Executive Officer Neil Bruce said at a generally quiet meeting of shareholders.

I believe that this company needs to stop existing. And competitors have every right to call them out on corruption charges in other nations that affect contracts. Not saying that these competitors are any different, but I am not hearing about any other corporation like this at the moment.

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“We believe that there’s at least C$5 to C$6 billion worth of contracts to date that we are privy to that we lost out on because of our competitors using (corruption charges) as a negative,” Chief Executive Officer Neil Bruce said at a generally quiet meeting of shareholders."

This suggests a possible market based solution to corruption but how does one demonstrate to future shareholders you're not corrupt?  Simply not having been caught in the past doesn't cut it on it's own, nor should it, so decreasing your company's opacity is really the only way forward.  Political parties could do the same thing.

Unless of course there's an argument to be made that without a certain amount of corruption our economy would collapse.  I know I've certainly gotten the sense some people think that's the case when listening to the arguments defending the Liberals - like its a case of realpolitik or some economic variant thereof.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The last post in this thread was 16 days ago.

Would you say:

1) it's remarkable how quickly the CBC and CTV have managed to make the SNC scandal go away, or

2) it's remarkable how quickly an even bigger, more unseemly scandal could totally draw all the attention away?

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Just now, WestCanMan said:

The last post in this thread was 16 days ago.

Would you say:

1) it's remarkable how quickly the CBC and CTV have managed to make the SNC scandal go away, or

2) it's remarkable how quickly an even bigger, more unseemly scandal could totally draw all the attention away?

Every day the LRT is not running in Ottawa I blame the city OCTranspo and SNC-Lavalin. Every f'n day.

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1 hour ago, WestCanMan said:

The last post in this thread was 16 days ago.

Would you say:

1) it's remarkable how quickly the CBC and CTV have managed to make the SNC scandal go away, or

2) it's remarkable how quickly an even bigger, more unseemly scandal could totally draw all the attention away?

I'd say what's most remarkable is that no one seems to disagree with the conclusion of the 16 day old post.

Corruption, like greed, is good for the economy.

As always, I'm left wondering what it is that conservatives really have against Liberals and why everyone else isn't applauding them for simply doing their jobs...whatever it takes to keep the economy pointing up. 

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3 hours ago, eyeball said:

I'd say what's most remarkable is that no one seems to disagree with the conclusion of the 16 day old post.

Corruption, like greed, is good for the economy.

As always, I'm left wondering what it is that conservatives really have against Liberals and why everyone else isn't applauding them for simply doing their jobs...whatever it takes to keep the economy pointing up. 

The problem is that SNC was caught paying off a politician ($2M) to help get themselves a bridge contract. Why is Trudeau trying so hard to get them back in the loop? Does he have a finacial stake in it?

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3 hours ago, WestCanMan said:

The problem is that SNC was caught paying off a politician ($2M) to help get themselves a bridge contract.

Grease for the wheels.  You agree that corruption is not necessary?  Good to know.

 

Quote

Why is Trudeau trying so hard to get them back in the loop? Does he have a finacial stake in it?

I have no idea and could care less, the man's probably just a moron who doesn't know any better.

 

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On 5/18/2019 at 3:26 PM, WestCanMan said:

The last post in this thread was 16 days ago.

Would you say:

1) it's remarkable how quickly the CBC and CTV have managed to make the SNC scandal go away, or

2) it's remarkable how quickly an even bigger, more unseemly scandal could totally draw all the attention away?

The average attention span is very short conditioned by the cell phone. I also think our media controls the message to an extent. Let us hope voters remember.

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