Category: SNC Lavalin

How Do You Like My Socks?

Prime Minister’s remarks updating Canadians on Canada’s Plan to Mobilize Industry to fight COVID-19 — June 9, 2020

Over the past few months, our government has helped companies re-tool their manufacturing facilities and massively scale-up production to meet the demands of this crisis.
 
And I want to thank every entrepreneur and every worker who stepped up to contribute to this fight.
 
As we start to reopen and some people head back to work, the need for personal protective equipment and other essential supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant will continue to grow.
 
And we’re making sure we’re ready for that.
 
On Saturday, a ship carrying 160,000 litres of hand sanitizer arrived in Vancouver and we’re expecting seven more ships with hand sanitizer in the coming days.
 
We also have almost 1 million face shields and more than 7 million pairs of gloves on their way to the provinces and territories.

According to Blacklocks (paywalled) there were no ships, and the actual number of gloves was 600. Shiny just … made it all up.

More: “SNC-Lavalin always lands butter side up, don’t they? … I’m sorry, are you getting upset now?” @steeletalk and Blacklock’s Reporter on $150M in pandemic supplies nobody asked for.

Update @brianlilleyBig news requires big answers. The doses of the AZ vaccine we will get this week expire on April 2 according to multiple sources. Future doses will expire in June. Meaning provinces need to rush this vaccine out even as federal advisory group says limit use to under 65.

SNC-Lavalin…Again!

“Urgency” you keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. was awarded a $150 million federal contract for pandemic field hospitals nobody asked for, according to records. The Department of Public Works five months after signing the sole-sourced contract had not bothered to fix any delivery dates for the mobile health units: “A public call for tenders was not issued due to the urgency.”

The Libranos: Chinada

Terry Glavin;

[R]easonable people will understand fraud as a vice involving dishonesty, trickery, sleight-of-hand, swindling and related varieties of self-dealing monkey business, and each of these have in their way contaminated the public debates about Meng’s case. Those debates are inextricably bound up in the matter of Beijing’s barbaric retaliatory kidnapping and imprisonment of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor, along with a variety of costly trade reprisals and threats of more punishments to come.
 
The culpability of quite a few yesteryear Liberal party big shots in giving Beijing every impression that these sorts of strong-arm tactics would work in Canada is at issue as well, or at least it should be. We are expected to believe, for instance, that Jean Chrétien, John Manley and Eddie Goldenberg, in relaying Beijing’s ransom demands — the crudest being a “prisoner exchange,” Meng for Kovrig and Spavor — are sage and wizened statesmen whose advice is offered in a public-spirited way, in the national interest. After all, we’re talking about a former prime minister, a former deputy prime minister, and Chrétien’s former chief of staff.
 
The charade here is that Jean Chrétien has been a senior skid-greaser in the China trade racket ever since he resigned in 2003, and he currently serves as a trusted counsel with Dentons LLP, which serves as the public face of the Chinese corporate law conglomerate otherwise known as Beijing Dacheng. Manley is a senior adviser with Bennett Jones LLP and a director of Telus Corp., which is up to its eyeballs in Huawei gear and is quaking at the thought of Huawei being properly barred from Canada’s 5G internet roll-out on national security grounds. Bennett Jones’ clients roster includes several of Beijing’s ministries, agencies and state-owned enterprises, and the firm’s “co-head of government affairs and public policy practice” is none other than Eddie Goldenberg.
 
The prisoner-exchange remedy they’ve proposed relies on some heretofore undisclosed assurance from Beijing that indeed the two Mikes would be surrendered if only Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would hornswoggle from Justice Minister David Lametti an unseemly intervention on Meng’s behalf of the sordid kind he failed to procure from Jody Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin affair.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

Let’s not forget them.

After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s failed efforts to see SNC-Lavalin avoid prosecution led to him losing two key ministers, his edge in the polls and (almost) his party’s hold on government, the Quebec engineering firm at the centre of the controversy walked away today with a plea deal that looks a lot like what it asked the government for in the first place.
 
A judge on Thursday accepted the plea deal that a division of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. struck with the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Under the agreement, the company pleaded guilty to one charge of fraud over $5,000 in relation to the company’s activities in Libya.
 
All other charges have been dropped.

Main take away: “So we’re very happy that it’s now over. We are free to bid as normal. This guilty plea does not prevent construction, or any other entity of the group, to bid on public contracts.”

@globeandmail SNC shares surge…

Christie Blatchford’s Take on the Debate

Ms. Blatchford wasn’t impressed:

Scheer pointed out that he’d broken ethics rules twice, interfered with an ongoing criminal investigation (SNC-Lavalin and the full-court press Trudeau, a few of his key henchmen and staffers in the PCO and PMO, put on former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould) and asked, “When did you decide the rules don’t apply to you?”

Trudeau first had the gall to repeat his mantra from the height of the SNC imbroglio: “The role of the PM is to stand up for Canadian jobs.”
Scheer snapped, reminded him “you said the allegations in the Globe and Mail were false,” and Trudeau seriously responded, “They were false.”

No, sir, they weren’t.

SNC Lavalin’s mentor

“I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in,’ I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. [Laughter.] He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

h/t: Ed @ Instapundit

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

ProTip: Next time the RCMP come calling with questions, cite ‘cabinet confidentiality’.

The RCMP has been looking into potential obstruction of justice in the handling of the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., but its examination has been stymied by the federal government’s refusal to lift cabinet confidentiality for all witnesses, The Globe and Mail has learned.
 
This means individuals involved in the matter cannot discuss events or share documents with police that have not been exempted from the rule of cabinet confidentiality, according to sources, who The Globe agreed not to identify so they could discuss the RCMP inquiries.
 
In Canada, the principle of cabinet confidentiality is intended to allow ministers to debate decisions freely in private. As a result, discussions involving cabinet matters must be kept secret unless a waiver is granted. In the SNC matter, the Liberals say that the Clerk of the Privy Council, who heads the bureaucratic agency that serves the Prime Minister’s Office, made the decision not to offer a broad waiver to either the RCMP or to the Ethics Commissioner, and that the PMO played no role.
 
A source who was recently interviewed by the RCMP told The Globe that investigators indicated they are looking into possible obstruction of justice. The Criminal Code says obstruction of justice occurs when an effort is made to “obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice in a judicial proceeding.”
 
The national police force will pause the operation because of the coming election campaign. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is scheduled to go to Rideau Hall Wednesday to ask the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament and call the vote for Oct. 21, and the RCMP has a policy to suspend politically sensitive operations during campaigns.

And on the eve of an election call. (They’ll question the timing)

If You Can’t Make History, Make Mischief.

Via email;

Good Morning, Norman Traversy here. I have successfully charged Trudeau with obstruction of justice in the SNC-Lavalin affair.
 
My Pre-Enquete hearing is tomorrow at the Ottawa courthouse. I have a lawyer accompanying me – he’s pro bono tomorrow, but after that, he has to be paid.
 
I have set up a GoFundMe page – https://www.gofundme.com/f/uphold-the-law .
 
We have raised $5000 so far – not much, as far as legal costs are concerned. But that is just in two days!
 
Could you please post the link to this on your blog? You could make history.
 
All the best, from a Canadian patriot.

Heh.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

Payback time.

“Sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity…”

Glen Assoun’s lawyer says the wrongfully convicted Halifax man suffered “every single day” as he waited to be exonerated for a murder he didn’t commit — a wait that was prolonged for months as his case sat on former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s desk.
 
David Lametti issued an order for a new trial on Feb. 28, just seven weeks after taking over as justice minister. The following day — after a five-minute new trial in which the prosecution presented no evidence — Assoun was a free man. […]
 

The Halifax Examiner first reported earlier this month that Wilson-Raybould sat for 18 months on the findings of the Justice Department’s criminal conviction review group, which recommended that a new trial be ordered for Assoun. Sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the Assoun case, which may yet be the subject of a public inquiry, have confirmed that report to The Canadian Press.

I see they called up their dependable smear artist, Joan Bryden for this one.

The Libranos: SNC Lavalin

Uh oh.

There is enough evidence against SNC-Lavalin for the engineering corporation to be tried on fraud and bribery charges, a Quebec court judge has ruled.
 
SNC-Lavalin spent months lobbying the federal government to avoid finding itself in this position. It hoped to use a new legal mechanism — a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) — to pay a fine rather than risk conviction.
 
But its efforts ignited a major political scandal in Ottawa when the former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, accused the Prime Minister’s Office of pressuring her to arrange a deal for SNC-Lavalin.
 
The court’s decision was handed down in Montreal on Wednesday. It followed an extended preliminary inquiry into accusations from federal prosecutors in 2015.

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