Yes,they may change the laws,but as a good Canadian sheeple I trust they will administer the penalties under the law to the max!
SNC, for instance, a million looney fine,which goes over big with us rubes,”gol-leee a millions bucks”! (in the voice of Gomer Pyle). This combined with a suspension on bidding on government contracts for, oh………30 days, would get the point across to all who are tempted that CANADER IS A COUNTRY OF LAWS! By Gum!
And anyone who says differently must be deranged.
My f***ing oath! I guess we HAVE become this corrupt.
Exactly. We have laws for corrupt Liberals and then we have laws for despicable deplorables.
Double standard, twice as good.
Both of you somewhat miss the point here. The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts. This was precisely the problem that SNC Lavalin ran into. In some countries, bribery and corruption is the only way to do business.
The second issue is public service availability. There are some public service contracts which require large companies with extensive engineering capabilities. SNC is one of the few such companies in Canada. Disqualifying it means forcing a) a project to be done only by offshore competitors; or b) that a project not be undertaken at all.
Such as ?
Such as what?
Such as the specific example of a project that needs to be done in Canada you are referring to.
what projects we couldn’t do and Lav could?
Loads of such examples: large power plants of any kind; large transportation infrastructure such as bridges, roads, harbour construction or expansion, pipelines, subway systems, highways. No government or large company such as Imperial Oil or TransCanada gives out any of these kinds of projects and hundreds of others to any company unless it has the financial strength to carry it out, and the mass of engineering expertise to actually build it. Canada has less than half a dozen large engineering companies having both the financial strength and the engineering expertise to build a large project such as, for example, another bridge over the St.Lawrence. Kill off the domestic competitors with stupid laws, as Joe Clark and Trudeau Sr. were too prone to do, and you can only undertake such a project by a foreign large engineering company bringing foreign supply chains (which will NOT include Canadian suppliers).
The above is only a very short, incomplete summary of just some of the enormous complexity of what’s involved in large project contracting. What Trudeau and Clark did in the ’70s was that any Canadian company had to observe all Canadian laws wherever they operated. Hence, bribery was and is illegal in Canada. So, bribe any two-bit Third World Dictator anywhere in the world and you were automatically disqualified from bidding on any Canadian government project. No government outside Canada cripples its domestic industry this way. In short, this means that only corrupt foreign companies can compete for Canadian large engineering projects because they are not so handicapped by their domestic governments.
Call this the “Don’t Buy Canadian” policy brought to you by Pierre and Joe. The stupidity of Shiny Pony and Butts is that they’re trying to keep Canada’s Boy Scout image by retaining stupid foreign trade laws while not crippling Canadian companies trying to do business in Canada. They’re doing it badly. The only sane policy was always never try to export Canadian law outside Canada.
https://www.on-sitemag.com/features/top-40-contractors-by-revenue/
Another thing people don’t realize are things like bonding. You just can’t bid on big projects because you want to. The Parliament Hill Center Block rehab starting up is a Joint Venture between PCL & Ellis Don because its such a large project.
Well I guess Lav people would be drawn elsewhere.. The bribers would lose out.. Sounds like a divorce , get rid of the abusive partners..Breakup would be a good result… Perhaps.. Nothing is forever.. When the libs lose it would be better if the incoming rulers would be better off with these crooks gone.
SNC-Lavelin and/or it’s officers were not above using bribes and kickbacks in Canada to get the jobs either.
b.
Canada’s not alone in the world against corporate corruption, Canada lags behind the US and others. Need another Nuclear plant?
Next we’ll be importing the corruption by the millions………oh.
Canada is completely corrupt from governments, law and business that’s why the LibCon parties have to go.
Wake the f up Canadians…
All you get is less purchasing power to feed and house your loved ones and always increased taxes and debts none of the politicians and their teams who allowed the debt lined their pockets full.
Stupid Canadians
Let’s have de corruption, cause it is de way we do da business in Quebec. Da corruption is just not for da foreign project, it is for project in Canada
reference McGill Health Center, Champlain Bridge
It’s time to clean up business in Quebec, starting with the corruption in SNC.
True. Greasing palms in third world shit holes is normal business. Why does the government of Canada impose our laws on companies doing work overseas? I do however enjoy the scandal and the resignation of PM Butts. It also points out to Canadians how the federal government gets pretty excited in protecting a few thousand Quebec jobs while essentially cheering on the demise of over a hundred thousand jobs in Alberta. I’m also looking forward to seeing the FN consultation, gender balance, and downstream carbon impacts of any future infrastructure project that SNC could get involved with. Sarc/off
Excellent questions. Why does the government impose our laws on domestic companies doing overseas work? Ask Trudeau Sr. and Joe Clark. Most of it was their doing. They believed that Canadian companies should be Boy Scouts even as said companies were getting mugged in the alleys by overseas competition with no such restraints from their home governments. No, obviously it’s not about a few thousand jobs in Quebec. It’s also about the hundreds of thousands of jobs that come with their Canadian supply chains. Don’t have a big company like SNC fronting your small supply bid against the big internationals? Then you ain’t getting through the front door.
cgh –
joelark was around for 9 months. I don’t recall what laws his minority government passed that hindered Canadian corporations doing business abroad?
What were they?
“…There are some public service contracts which require large companies with extensive engineering capabilities. SNC is one of the few such companies in Canada. …”
That’s why SNC Lavalin’s strategy has been to grow by buying so many engineering firms (remove competition) with profits from lucrative public service contracts that it wins with bribes which it funds with profits from lucrative public service contracts…
On a completely unrelated subject, I wonder what a civil servant who has reached the top in his/her field, e.g. Clerk of the Privy Council, can do with him/herself after that. How could their skills, experience, contacts be best employed? Who would pay them for advice?
You don’t really understand how large international project contracting is done, do you? Size = financial weight and viability to be able to carry a project to completion. If you don’t have it, you ain’t getting the bid or even the right to submit a bid. It’s not really about monopolies and eliminating competition. It’s about being big enough just to qualify.
The CPC? No CPC will ever be out of a job no matter how egregious his or her career may have been.
I do understand how large international project contracting is done. And as I explained in my post above, I understand how SNC Lavalin is doing large domestic project contracting. Governing Canadian companies’ activities outside of Canada according to Canadian law is certainly handicapping them in international competition. Allowing them to use the same corrupt practises in our domestic market will certainly result in bigger rip-offs of the taxpayer in public infrastructure projects and in the long term, entrench corruption in Canadian business.
If we must let them play pirate outside Canada, we should ensure they (and their international competitors) fear a real risk of prison time if they are caught at inside our borders.
Agreed, Tooner. If it’s the Law of the Jungle out there it’s insane to handicap our own companies by tying their hands. The issue in this whole thing is not about what SNC did in Canada. It’s a string of charges from bribing Libyan officials to get work from Libya in Libya, the act of which disqualified it from doing any government work in Canada. The whole thing is a testament to how ineffective Pony and Butts are that they couldn’t deal with this issue except by a clumsy attempt to compromise the criminal justice system. Their stupidity is that they ran into a Justice Minister (of their own creation) who had big enough cojones to kick them where it hurts.
To answer you question about the Clerk of the Privy Council : cleaning privies is all he should be doing.
“The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts. This was precisely the problem that SNC Lavalin ran into. In some countries, bribery and corruption is the only way to do business.”
Hear what you’re saying, but the issue is principles. You have ’em. or you don’t.
Britain, USA, and Australia (and probably other democracies) have legislation similar to Canada’s – if they choose not to use it, that’s a different story…or as we will soon see in this sordid affair, maybe the same story.
A good, moral perspective, but most other countries including your named examples do not apply extra-territoriality to their laws. The US does but only to companies getting Ex-im Bank financing (I believe). Generally, when it comes to competition in foreign “shitholes” as someone here described them, there are few rules in place except those which the export credit agencies enforce among themselves. Most of the rules that exist are caught up within the WTO.
I don’t actually disagree with you, Jamie, but we live in the real world, dirty and grubby as it is, not in the hippy-dippy feel-good crap of Pierre and Joe Who.
What’s ironic is all the bribery it takes to get We Were Here First Nations projects up and running. Even projects not even tied to the feds, done by charities and philanthropy, require palms to be greased – usually ‘warrior’ types (yeah ok) who need their cut so they don’t torch your machinery or blockade the road in.
“…but most other countries including your named examples do not apply extra-territoriality to their laws. ”
If that is the case, it is not for lack of capability, but rather, because they choose not to investigate or prosecute.
There are provisions for extraterritorial prosecutions in America’s Corrupt Foreign Practices Act, Britain’s Bribery Act, and Australia has, like Canada, those tools built right into its Criminal Code.
From any ethical perspective It is quite clear how dealings “should” be done. The acceptance that bribes should be offered to obtain profit sits no higher on a moral scale than the expectation to receive the offering. Both sides are debased. And in the case of a firm from a country such as Canada, which preens on the world stage as an example of all that is decent and proper, the debasement is greater, because not only has it lowered itself, but it has contributed to, and reinforced, the corruption in the shithole.
“The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts.”
Not really. The issue is first and foremost how can this be used as an albatross around Librano necks. We can be bothered to write sensible laws after we go Alinsky on thier a$$es.
geezus cgh, a libtard could not have said it better. How much dose McTurd pay you????
You really are an effing idiot, aren’t you NME? Did you have even the slightest understanding of what I wrote? Do you have the slightest understanding that SNC Lavalin is NOT the same thing as the Liberal Party of Canada? Do you have the slightest notion of how many tens of thousands of jobs all across Canada threatened by this legal impediment the federal Liberals have created for SNC? Do you have the slightest idea of how much of Canada’s advanced research and applied research infrastructure is threatened by how the Liberals have botched this? And how many more tens of thousands of jobs waiting to be adversely impacted by the blundering of Spawn and Butts?
And after posting for so many years at SDA, you imagine that I’m being paid by McTurd? As stated at the outset, you really are an effing idiot.
Everything will be put in place to clear the company and the liberals involved. Meanwhile the Libranos will stonewall and give non-answers to questions. I’m not excited about Raybould testifying, she’s still a Liberal, however, I reserve the right to be surprised.
IMO anyone who engages in coverup on this file should be punished to whatever extent the law dictates otherwise we are looking at corruption.
Also why can’t Butts be called to testify, or, is that why he quit?
Of course he can be called to testify. The Liberal majority on the committee refuses to call him.
You are so right Liz. She is a committed Liberal. Folks are putting too many of their eggs into the one basket if they expect too many incriminating statements from her against her collegues. ‘If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit’.
Isn’t that what the Canadian Standards Association has done to PSKnight?
A company that routinely bribes governments inside and outside of Canada is getting the laws rewritten for them.
Thank the idiots in the Canadian media and the idiot voters who believed them for getting rid of PM Harper.
That $16.00 orange juice is looking pretty cheap right now.
That’s a Liberal finger on the scales of Justin’s Justice. Wonder why Quebec has a Mad Max?
Wow, they lost me with the headline.
Integrity…how can you review something when you have zero of it and don’t even know what the word means?
Under the present circumstances … and being Kanada, perhaps a healing circle would suffice in order to take all parties “hurt” into consideration.
The implied inclusivity would be/could be staggering.
The implied diversity would be sublime.
Jr got his peepee in a wringer over trying to obstruct justice so he is just going to eliminate the penalty for being caught. I wonder if he will try do the same for himself when he is charged by the RCMP.
“He said the former justice minister and attorney-general was warned several times about the economic consequences of a criminal conviction of SNC-Lavalin. He denied, however, that she was subjected to “inappropriate pressure” to shelve the prosecution.”
She was warned, but that wasn’t inappropriate pressure?
It is Time to get the lady to testify under oath.
Why even bother with this pretense? Why don’t the Liberals just do what every dictatorship has done and pass whichever law they like whenever they like?
How many Canadians would notice?
Time was, they could do just that. The power of Parliament was absolute, restrained only by the requirements and prohibitions of the British North America Act and Britain’s unwritten constitution. Now we have in addition only whatever restraints are in the Constitution Act of 1982. What no government could do was violate the criminal code regardless of the power of Parliament. Osumashi, I get a sense that you like many other commenters in this thread don’t really understand how Canada’s constitution works. We are a Westminster Parliamentary system, not a republic. Sovereignty does NOT lie with the People but with the Crown.
On the contrary, cgh, I am quite familiar with how things actually work. Power lies in a handful of people who can violate and make whatever law they wish. We are all witness to that.
Anything else is a delusion.
We are the facade of a Westminster Parliamentary system… just ask the unaccountable unelected “Judges” of the Trudopian Parliamentary system.
This bit is a real gut buster.
“Public Services and Procurement Canada is proposing granting itself more flexibility in deciding how long a company is banned from bidding when convicted.”
I can understand that the world can be a dirty place to do business and all the concerns about a large company losing out on significant contracts.
I mean think about the optics.
The government is about to set a precedent that allows a company to obtain contracts after they broke the law.
So what about all those laws that killed two pipelines and stalled another one indefinitely?
Sarc off
Time is not on their side.
The Director already made the ruling in effect the liberals now wear this one.
So they upset both the anti-pipeline and the pro-pipeline voters in BC. But they can’t change the rules.
Got the folks in Oshawa riled cause they can’t get GM to reconsider closing the plant there. But they can’t change the rules to make it favourable for GM to keep the plant open.
And now they want to change the rules to save their seats in and around Montreal.
Diversity is his strength?
Corruption is his strength!
May the FARCE be with you…
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
“The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts. ”
Is that why there are currently suspended from WTO contracts?
“Disqualifying it means forcing a) a project to be done only by offshore competitors; or b) that a project not be undertaken at all.”
Gee whiz, so who is the contractor building the dam extension in B.C. There are lots of comanies who can handle these contracts (without corruption.
In Vancouver a number of years ago there were building Skytrain and putting a section of it underground. After the contract was issued SNC decided that, rather than boring a tunnel ( and not disrupting businesses at grade) they would do cut and cover. Most busnesses operated at a loss and some even went out of business. SNC Lavalin has a culture of corruption and deception.They just can’t help themselves from operating either illegally or deceptively.
“Is that why there are currently suspended from WTO contracts?”
Yes. This was our requirement inserted as a condition of joining WTO.
Skytrain?
SNC was required to do it that way by the contract. Tunneling is hugely expensive (and may fail catastrophically as Ottawa is discovering right now). This was the City of Vancouver doing it on the cheap by cut and fill. If a government project was crippling local business then it’s up to government (meaning YOU the voter) to compensate local business for their losses.
Funny you mention Site C, as the ‘old man’ was supposed to be tapped as project manager way back in 1971; whilst he was on the Mica Dam!
Here we are some 48 years later and the project is finally getting off the ground.
I’ll be sure to mention it to my dad at his 90th birthday party in a few weeks; now that he is safely retired; he won’t be bribed!
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Site C should have been built decades ago. You can thank a series of Dipper administrations in BC for that. At least in Ontario it has Ford to finally restore some sense after 15 years of madness under McGuinty/Wynne.
HT, SNC-Lavatory is one of the main bidders on the new Pattulo bridge, about $1.4 billion or so, of course to come in at twice that, but I’d bet you a pint of good beer SNC wins this government contract as they so often do.
This is terrific news. The voters who keep the Liberals in power, get to see the sick, corporatist political culture that they have created, up close and in detail.
Perhaps they’ll find a way to be smug about this too, because the first two requirements to vote Liberal are to be blind, and deaf.
This is terrific news. Canadian companies will learn the skills of bribery, fraud, corruption in the world’s shitholes and then bring that skill set home to do more of the same here. We certainly want to be competitive! Multi-culturalism at its best.
It is like sports, of course you have to use drugs to compete at the Olympics and Canadians are okay it both abroad and bringing it back home.
sarc/off
Contrary to the assertion that “Canada alone on the world” has laws that prohibit companies proven guilty of bribery from competing for contracts, even India has such a law which has prevented the Italian aircraft manufacturers Leonardo from bidding on Indian contracts after being convicted of bribery in a helicopter sale.
Oh, by the way, that company was just awarded a contract by the Liberals to upgrade Canada’s Search and Rescue helicopter fleet. So, here is Canada – slightly less ethical than India.
That is truly gullible of you. India uses that law to prevent outside competition from beating their domestic suppliers. Call it India’s version of Buy America. It’s just pure protectionism dressed up in a fancy name.
And a few ducks land in an Alberta pond against the wishes of Syncrude and they are fined $3 million. Freedom from justice only seems to happen in Quebec.
Yep, that is now the meme.
The rules only count if its a company not from Quebec.
When were you under the illusion that life was fair? Laws and regulations are written according to what party has the confidence of the House. That means Ontario and Quebec, mostly. Harper was right; the West wanted in and only got it with lots of Tory voter support in Ontario.
I don’t care about SNC Lavalin I just want Lieberals to eat shit force fed them by the Canadian voting public. But that ain’t happening. If we’re lucky PM Hypocrite will only get a minority government.
What about Stantec? It’s not as if SNC is the only game in town.
Sing along with me now …
A law is a law until it comes
to apply to a Lib-er-al,
you can if you like just break a law
if Trudeau is your pal;
For the likes of us the law is firm,
there is no room to fight or squirm,
but if you’ve got a party member card,
you can get away with lots of fraud, so
hire a lawyer if you want, or join the party,
choice is yours, the lawyer costs a lot of dough,
the party card is cheap and so,
if you do the math and I know you will,
avoid prosecution on Parliament Hill
(or its environnnnnssssssss)
The Mafia always does business with other Mafia outfits so its no surprise that the Libranos are doing backflips to help out their Quebec Mafia buddies at SNC… did anyone really expect anything different… corrupt shithole gonna corrupt shithole.
How flexible should a deferred prosecution agreement be? Clearly it will be a political decision to accept a negotiated ‘appropriate’ fine with some bureaucrat or politico who might be willing to accept a brown paper bag themselves.
The concept is absurd and open to the very corruption it purports to address. Shame on those who propose a lowering of standards to those of the 3rd world. If SNC-L wants to do business like that they should go and live in Pakistan and the hell holes that exist because of their ethics
Yes,they may change the laws,but as a good Canadian sheeple I trust they will administer the penalties under the law to the max!
SNC, for instance, a million looney fine,which goes over big with us rubes,”gol-leee a millions bucks”! (in the voice of Gomer Pyle). This combined with a suspension on bidding on government contracts for, oh………30 days, would get the point across to all who are tempted that CANADER IS A COUNTRY OF LAWS! By Gum!
And anyone who says differently must be deranged.
My f***ing oath! I guess we HAVE become this corrupt.
Exactly. We have laws for corrupt Liberals and then we have laws for despicable deplorables.
Double standard, twice as good.
Both of you somewhat miss the point here. The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts. This was precisely the problem that SNC Lavalin ran into. In some countries, bribery and corruption is the only way to do business.
The second issue is public service availability. There are some public service contracts which require large companies with extensive engineering capabilities. SNC is one of the few such companies in Canada. Disqualifying it means forcing a) a project to be done only by offshore competitors; or b) that a project not be undertaken at all.
Such as ?
Such as what?
Such as the specific example of a project that needs to be done in Canada you are referring to.
what projects we couldn’t do and Lav could?
Loads of such examples: large power plants of any kind; large transportation infrastructure such as bridges, roads, harbour construction or expansion, pipelines, subway systems, highways. No government or large company such as Imperial Oil or TransCanada gives out any of these kinds of projects and hundreds of others to any company unless it has the financial strength to carry it out, and the mass of engineering expertise to actually build it. Canada has less than half a dozen large engineering companies having both the financial strength and the engineering expertise to build a large project such as, for example, another bridge over the St.Lawrence. Kill off the domestic competitors with stupid laws, as Joe Clark and Trudeau Sr. were too prone to do, and you can only undertake such a project by a foreign large engineering company bringing foreign supply chains (which will NOT include Canadian suppliers).
The above is only a very short, incomplete summary of just some of the enormous complexity of what’s involved in large project contracting. What Trudeau and Clark did in the ’70s was that any Canadian company had to observe all Canadian laws wherever they operated. Hence, bribery was and is illegal in Canada. So, bribe any two-bit Third World Dictator anywhere in the world and you were automatically disqualified from bidding on any Canadian government project. No government outside Canada cripples its domestic industry this way. In short, this means that only corrupt foreign companies can compete for Canadian large engineering projects because they are not so handicapped by their domestic governments.
Call this the “Don’t Buy Canadian” policy brought to you by Pierre and Joe. The stupidity of Shiny Pony and Butts is that they’re trying to keep Canada’s Boy Scout image by retaining stupid foreign trade laws while not crippling Canadian companies trying to do business in Canada. They’re doing it badly. The only sane policy was always never try to export Canadian law outside Canada.
https://www.on-sitemag.com/features/top-40-contractors-by-revenue/
Another thing people don’t realize are things like bonding. You just can’t bid on big projects because you want to. The Parliament Hill Center Block rehab starting up is a Joint Venture between PCL & Ellis Don because its such a large project.
Well I guess Lav people would be drawn elsewhere.. The bribers would lose out.. Sounds like a divorce , get rid of the abusive partners..Breakup would be a good result… Perhaps.. Nothing is forever.. When the libs lose it would be better if the incoming rulers would be better off with these crooks gone.
SNC-Lavelin and/or it’s officers were not above using bribes and kickbacks in Canada to get the jobs either.
b.
Canada’s not alone in the world against corporate corruption, Canada lags behind the US and others. Need another Nuclear plant?
Next we’ll be importing the corruption by the millions………oh.
Canada is completely corrupt from governments, law and business that’s why the LibCon parties have to go.
Wake the f up Canadians…
All you get is less purchasing power to feed and house your loved ones and always increased taxes and debts none of the politicians and their teams who allowed the debt lined their pockets full.
Stupid Canadians
Let’s have de corruption, cause it is de way we do da business in Quebec. Da corruption is just not for da foreign project, it is for project in Canada
reference McGill Health Center, Champlain Bridge
It’s time to clean up business in Quebec, starting with the corruption in SNC.
True. Greasing palms in third world shit holes is normal business. Why does the government of Canada impose our laws on companies doing work overseas? I do however enjoy the scandal and the resignation of PM Butts. It also points out to Canadians how the federal government gets pretty excited in protecting a few thousand Quebec jobs while essentially cheering on the demise of over a hundred thousand jobs in Alberta. I’m also looking forward to seeing the FN consultation, gender balance, and downstream carbon impacts of any future infrastructure project that SNC could get involved with. Sarc/off
Excellent questions. Why does the government impose our laws on domestic companies doing overseas work? Ask Trudeau Sr. and Joe Clark. Most of it was their doing. They believed that Canadian companies should be Boy Scouts even as said companies were getting mugged in the alleys by overseas competition with no such restraints from their home governments. No, obviously it’s not about a few thousand jobs in Quebec. It’s also about the hundreds of thousands of jobs that come with their Canadian supply chains. Don’t have a big company like SNC fronting your small supply bid against the big internationals? Then you ain’t getting through the front door.
cgh –
joelark was around for 9 months. I don’t recall what laws his minority government passed that hindered Canadian corporations doing business abroad?
What were they?
“…There are some public service contracts which require large companies with extensive engineering capabilities. SNC is one of the few such companies in Canada. …”
That’s why SNC Lavalin’s strategy has been to grow by buying so many engineering firms (remove competition) with profits from lucrative public service contracts that it wins with bribes which it funds with profits from lucrative public service contracts…
On a completely unrelated subject, I wonder what a civil servant who has reached the top in his/her field, e.g. Clerk of the Privy Council, can do with him/herself after that. How could their skills, experience, contacts be best employed? Who would pay them for advice?
You don’t really understand how large international project contracting is done, do you? Size = financial weight and viability to be able to carry a project to completion. If you don’t have it, you ain’t getting the bid or even the right to submit a bid. It’s not really about monopolies and eliminating competition. It’s about being big enough just to qualify.
The CPC? No CPC will ever be out of a job no matter how egregious his or her career may have been.
I do understand how large international project contracting is done. And as I explained in my post above, I understand how SNC Lavalin is doing large domestic project contracting. Governing Canadian companies’ activities outside of Canada according to Canadian law is certainly handicapping them in international competition. Allowing them to use the same corrupt practises in our domestic market will certainly result in bigger rip-offs of the taxpayer in public infrastructure projects and in the long term, entrench corruption in Canadian business.
If we must let them play pirate outside Canada, we should ensure they (and their international competitors) fear a real risk of prison time if they are caught at inside our borders.
Agreed, Tooner. If it’s the Law of the Jungle out there it’s insane to handicap our own companies by tying their hands. The issue in this whole thing is not about what SNC did in Canada. It’s a string of charges from bribing Libyan officials to get work from Libya in Libya, the act of which disqualified it from doing any government work in Canada. The whole thing is a testament to how ineffective Pony and Butts are that they couldn’t deal with this issue except by a clumsy attempt to compromise the criminal justice system. Their stupidity is that they ran into a Justice Minister (of their own creation) who had big enough cojones to kick them where it hurts.
To answer you question about the Clerk of the Privy Council : cleaning privies is all he should be doing.
“The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts. This was precisely the problem that SNC Lavalin ran into. In some countries, bribery and corruption is the only way to do business.”
Hear what you’re saying, but the issue is principles. You have ’em. or you don’t.
Britain, USA, and Australia (and probably other democracies) have legislation similar to Canada’s – if they choose not to use it, that’s a different story…or as we will soon see in this sordid affair, maybe the same story.
A good, moral perspective, but most other countries including your named examples do not apply extra-territoriality to their laws. The US does but only to companies getting Ex-im Bank financing (I believe). Generally, when it comes to competition in foreign “shitholes” as someone here described them, there are few rules in place except those which the export credit agencies enforce among themselves. Most of the rules that exist are caught up within the WTO.
I don’t actually disagree with you, Jamie, but we live in the real world, dirty and grubby as it is, not in the hippy-dippy feel-good crap of Pierre and Joe Who.
What’s ironic is all the bribery it takes to get We Were Here First Nations projects up and running. Even projects not even tied to the feds, done by charities and philanthropy, require palms to be greased – usually ‘warrior’ types (yeah ok) who need their cut so they don’t torch your machinery or blockade the road in.
“…but most other countries including your named examples do not apply extra-territoriality to their laws. ”
If that is the case, it is not for lack of capability, but rather, because they choose not to investigate or prosecute.
There are provisions for extraterritorial prosecutions in America’s Corrupt Foreign Practices Act, Britain’s Bribery Act, and Australia has, like Canada, those tools built right into its Criminal Code.
From any ethical perspective It is quite clear how dealings “should” be done. The acceptance that bribes should be offered to obtain profit sits no higher on a moral scale than the expectation to receive the offering. Both sides are debased. And in the case of a firm from a country such as Canada, which preens on the world stage as an example of all that is decent and proper, the debasement is greater, because not only has it lowered itself, but it has contributed to, and reinforced, the corruption in the shithole.
“The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts.”
Not really. The issue is first and foremost how can this be used as an albatross around Librano necks. We can be bothered to write sensible laws after we go Alinsky on thier a$$es.
geezus cgh, a libtard could not have said it better. How much dose McTurd pay you????
You really are an effing idiot, aren’t you NME? Did you have even the slightest understanding of what I wrote? Do you have the slightest understanding that SNC Lavalin is NOT the same thing as the Liberal Party of Canada? Do you have the slightest notion of how many tens of thousands of jobs all across Canada threatened by this legal impediment the federal Liberals have created for SNC? Do you have the slightest idea of how much of Canada’s advanced research and applied research infrastructure is threatened by how the Liberals have botched this? And how many more tens of thousands of jobs waiting to be adversely impacted by the blundering of Spawn and Butts?
And after posting for so many years at SDA, you imagine that I’m being paid by McTurd? As stated at the outset, you really are an effing idiot.
Everything will be put in place to clear the company and the liberals involved. Meanwhile the Libranos will stonewall and give non-answers to questions. I’m not excited about Raybould testifying, she’s still a Liberal, however, I reserve the right to be surprised.
IMO anyone who engages in coverup on this file should be punished to whatever extent the law dictates otherwise we are looking at corruption.
Also why can’t Butts be called to testify, or, is that why he quit?
Of course he can be called to testify. The Liberal majority on the committee refuses to call him.
You are so right Liz. She is a committed Liberal. Folks are putting too many of their eggs into the one basket if they expect too many incriminating statements from her against her collegues. ‘If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit’.
Isn’t that what the Canadian Standards Association has done to PSKnight?
A company that routinely bribes governments inside and outside of Canada is getting the laws rewritten for them.
Thank the idiots in the Canadian media and the idiot voters who believed them for getting rid of PM Harper.
That $16.00 orange juice is looking pretty cheap right now.
That’s a Liberal finger on the scales of Justin’s Justice. Wonder why Quebec has a Mad Max?
Wow, they lost me with the headline.
Integrity…how can you review something when you have zero of it and don’t even know what the word means?
Under the present circumstances … and being Kanada, perhaps a healing circle would suffice in order to take all parties “hurt” into consideration.
The implied inclusivity would be/could be staggering.
The implied diversity would be sublime.
Jr got his peepee in a wringer over trying to obstruct justice so he is just going to eliminate the penalty for being caught. I wonder if he will try do the same for himself when he is charged by the RCMP.
“He said the former justice minister and attorney-general was warned several times about the economic consequences of a criminal conviction of SNC-Lavalin. He denied, however, that she was subjected to “inappropriate pressure” to shelve the prosecution.”
She was warned, but that wasn’t inappropriate pressure?
It is Time to get the lady to testify under oath.
Why even bother with this pretense? Why don’t the Liberals just do what every dictatorship has done and pass whichever law they like whenever they like?
How many Canadians would notice?
Time was, they could do just that. The power of Parliament was absolute, restrained only by the requirements and prohibitions of the British North America Act and Britain’s unwritten constitution. Now we have in addition only whatever restraints are in the Constitution Act of 1982. What no government could do was violate the criminal code regardless of the power of Parliament. Osumashi, I get a sense that you like many other commenters in this thread don’t really understand how Canada’s constitution works. We are a Westminster Parliamentary system, not a republic. Sovereignty does NOT lie with the People but with the Crown.
On the contrary, cgh, I am quite familiar with how things actually work. Power lies in a handful of people who can violate and make whatever law they wish. We are all witness to that.
Anything else is a delusion.
We are the facade of a Westminster Parliamentary system… just ask the unaccountable unelected “Judges” of the Trudopian Parliamentary system.
This bit is a real gut buster.
“Public Services and Procurement Canada is proposing granting itself more flexibility in deciding how long a company is banned from bidding when convicted.”
I can understand that the world can be a dirty place to do business and all the concerns about a large company losing out on significant contracts.
I mean think about the optics.
The government is about to set a precedent that allows a company to obtain contracts after they broke the law.
So what about all those laws that killed two pipelines and stalled another one indefinitely?
Sarc off
Time is not on their side.
The Director already made the ruling in effect the liberals now wear this one.
So they upset both the anti-pipeline and the pro-pipeline voters in BC. But they can’t change the rules.
Got the folks in Oshawa riled cause they can’t get GM to reconsider closing the plant there. But they can’t change the rules to make it favourable for GM to keep the plant open.
And now they want to change the rules to save their seats in and around Montreal.
Diversity is his strength?
Corruption is his strength!
May the FARCE be with you…
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
“The issue is first and foremost whether Canada alone in the world should penalize its companies for committing bribery and corruption to secure foreign contracts. ”
Is that why there are currently suspended from WTO contracts?
“Disqualifying it means forcing a) a project to be done only by offshore competitors; or b) that a project not be undertaken at all.”
Gee whiz, so who is the contractor building the dam extension in B.C. There are lots of comanies who can handle these contracts (without corruption.
In Vancouver a number of years ago there were building Skytrain and putting a section of it underground. After the contract was issued SNC decided that, rather than boring a tunnel ( and not disrupting businesses at grade) they would do cut and cover. Most busnesses operated at a loss and some even went out of business. SNC Lavalin has a culture of corruption and deception.They just can’t help themselves from operating either illegally or deceptively.
“Is that why there are currently suspended from WTO contracts?”
Yes. This was our requirement inserted as a condition of joining WTO.
Skytrain?
SNC was required to do it that way by the contract. Tunneling is hugely expensive (and may fail catastrophically as Ottawa is discovering right now). This was the City of Vancouver doing it on the cheap by cut and fill. If a government project was crippling local business then it’s up to government (meaning YOU the voter) to compensate local business for their losses.
Site C is being done by BC Hydro with a number of large subcontractors for certain parts of the project. I don’t know who they all are but most of them are in the AFDE Partnership which includes Aecon.
https://www.sitecproject.com/bc-hydro-awards-three-site-c-project-contracts
Funny you mention Site C, as the ‘old man’ was supposed to be tapped as project manager way back in 1971; whilst he was on the Mica Dam!
Here we are some 48 years later and the project is finally getting off the ground.
I’ll be sure to mention it to my dad at his 90th birthday party in a few weeks; now that he is safely retired; he won’t be bribed!
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Site C should have been built decades ago. You can thank a series of Dipper administrations in BC for that. At least in Ontario it has Ford to finally restore some sense after 15 years of madness under McGuinty/Wynne.
HT, SNC-Lavatory is one of the main bidders on the new Pattulo bridge, about $1.4 billion or so, of course to come in at twice that, but I’d bet you a pint of good beer SNC wins this government contract as they so often do.
This is terrific news. The voters who keep the Liberals in power, get to see the sick, corporatist political culture that they have created, up close and in detail.
Perhaps they’ll find a way to be smug about this too, because the first two requirements to vote Liberal are to be blind, and deaf.
This is terrific news. Canadian companies will learn the skills of bribery, fraud, corruption in the world’s shitholes and then bring that skill set home to do more of the same here. We certainly want to be competitive! Multi-culturalism at its best.
It is like sports, of course you have to use drugs to compete at the Olympics and Canadians are okay it both abroad and bringing it back home.
sarc/off
Contrary to the assertion that “Canada alone on the world” has laws that prohibit companies proven guilty of bribery from competing for contracts, even India has such a law which has prevented the Italian aircraft manufacturers Leonardo from bidding on Indian contracts after being convicted of bribery in a helicopter sale.
Oh, by the way, that company was just awarded a contract by the Liberals to upgrade Canada’s Search and Rescue helicopter fleet. So, here is Canada – slightly less ethical than India.
That is truly gullible of you. India uses that law to prevent outside competition from beating their domestic suppliers. Call it India’s version of Buy America. It’s just pure protectionism dressed up in a fancy name.
And a few ducks land in an Alberta pond against the wishes of Syncrude and they are fined $3 million. Freedom from justice only seems to happen in Quebec.
Yep, that is now the meme.
The rules only count if its a company not from Quebec.
When were you under the illusion that life was fair? Laws and regulations are written according to what party has the confidence of the House. That means Ontario and Quebec, mostly. Harper was right; the West wanted in and only got it with lots of Tory voter support in Ontario.
I don’t care about SNC Lavalin I just want Lieberals to eat shit force fed them by the Canadian voting public. But that ain’t happening. If we’re lucky PM Hypocrite will only get a minority government.
What about Stantec? It’s not as if SNC is the only game in town.
Sing along with me now …
A law is a law until it comes
to apply to a Lib-er-al,
you can if you like just break a law
if Trudeau is your pal;
For the likes of us the law is firm,
there is no room to fight or squirm,
but if you’ve got a party member card,
you can get away with lots of fraud, so
hire a lawyer if you want, or join the party,
choice is yours, the lawyer costs a lot of dough,
the party card is cheap and so,
if you do the math and I know you will,
avoid prosecution on Parliament Hill
(or its environnnnnssssssss)
The Mafia always does business with other Mafia outfits so its no surprise that the Libranos are doing backflips to help out their Quebec Mafia buddies at SNC… did anyone really expect anything different… corrupt shithole gonna corrupt shithole.
https://youtu.be/3azK1jdyQ84
■ Breaking news…
Fed’s will ‘let’ JWR speak.
How flexible should a deferred prosecution agreement be? Clearly it will be a political decision to accept a negotiated ‘appropriate’ fine with some bureaucrat or politico who might be willing to accept a brown paper bag themselves.
The concept is absurd and open to the very corruption it purports to address. Shame on those who propose a lowering of standards to those of the 3rd world. If SNC-L wants to do business like that they should go and live in Pakistan and the hell holes that exist because of their ethics