I agree. I realize it is the other side of the coin of Laurentian Canadians voting for Trudeau because of his name, but I can’t vote for Trudeau because of his family - all my Western Canadian ancestors would be rolling in their graves. Chrystia Freeland continues to impress me, though.
It might ease your ancestors’ pains if we acknowledge the fact that Justin Trudeau has a maternal line too; and not only is that half not PET, but they are deep rooted Western Canadians. JT, like the rest of the Canadian elites, tend to have ties to all areas of Canada.
JT lived, studied, worked, and partied in BC, it is his mother’s home province and the province where his brother died and rests (body was never recovered).
Well, they don’t teach conflict of interest law in drama teacher school, nor can you learn it while being a snowboarding instructor.
This of course is one reason why ex-drama teacher/snowboard instructors might not be the best candidates for the highest office in the land.
Also, Trudeau appears to have at best an average IQ. At best.
Trudeau’s excuse now is that it wasn’t a conflict of interest, “just the appearance of one.” I’m not making that up.
The difference between a conflict of interest and something that looks like a conflict of interest is… uhhh, pretty slim, and in many circumstances those are the same thing.
Did they teach it in law-talking school when Mulroney was PM? How about Paul Martin? Turner? Diefenbaker?
They all had shady dealings, enough with the Drama Teacher.
Everyone knows you’re supposed get your kickback in a plain envelope AFTER your term ends. Duh!
Single sourced contract for PPE granted to Quebec firm with no manufacturing plant in Canada
Notice that SNC Lavalin is involved.
There are rules for a reason, on procurement, on ethics, on many other things. It is obvious JT thinks they are for other people, not him.
The moderately anti-Liberal Saskatchewan government has built a couple of field hospitals (utilizing rinks, space for 130ish beds per ice surface) using single-source, cost-plus contracts that I know for a fact have been extremely lucrative for the companies involved. I know because I’ve done some work at one of them. As a taxpayer I wince, but competitive procurement processes take a lot of time.
I’d be very surprised if similar things weren’t happening in Alberta and Ontario as well. Nobody is following procurement rules at the moment, and for mostly good reasons.
The Sun article reads more like the issue is related to poor choices - though I’d be curious to know what companies in March would have provided masks in addition to this one. Maybe a better question would be did Medicom do it well?
As for SNC-Lavalin, the $4Million loan is from the Quebec government so I’m missing the link back to the federal Liberal party when the loan came from a Coalition Avenir Québec government with an ex-PQ Premier @Uzi.
Medicom received an initial $19,922,868 contract to ship masks from its factories in Augusta, Georgia as well as China, Taiwan and France.
On April 26 it was given a $93,564,000 contract to make masks in Quebec but it closed its last Canadian plant in 2019, in Granby, Que., in 2019.
…
Medicom has since received a $4 million loan from the Government of Québec to build a new factory in Montréal and the contractor hired was SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.
Ah, did find the SNC-Lavalin media announcement from May 2020
Medicom did release an announcement around the Government of Quebec supplying a $4M loan back on May 12
The CBC suggest Liberals have lost a little support but would currently form a government given an election today. They are ahead in BC, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. They are sufficiently unpopular in Alberta and the Prairies that I don’t see a lot of change in their support as a result of this debacle.
It’s up to the Conservatives to put forward better policies and more inspiring candidates. They have had limited success in this regard.
Getting multiple quotes is not an onerous process. That the government makes it so is not a good enough reason to not follow a cut down version of that process. I’m sure the government works with many pre-approved companies that could meet the requirements without signing long term contracts (which appear to be unusual given the comments in the article).
@Grey
A 30 second search finds a link from the local government in Surrey https://www.surrey.ca/city-government/31504.aspx stating that local ‘manufacturers’ have been producing face masks and shields. Small quantities, but could they produce larger ones in existing facilities rather than have to build a new factory?
Re. SNC. I just find it odd that SNC is again involved in a dodgily sourced contract.
@Uzi, I’m just trying to point out while LIberal and SNC are two words everyone should raise an eyebrow at, in this case any linkage does not appear to be valid. We need to remember as well SNC-Lavalin is the largest construction company in Canada, followed by PLC Construction and EllisDon. I’m not sure how a company picks their construction contractor but a Quebec based one being picked to build a factory in Montreal with little lead time does not seem crazy to me.
As for Medicom, they came into play back in March 2020 as part of a group of 3 suppliers of PPE
The Government of Canada has signed new procurement agreements with Canadian companies Thornhill Medical, Medicom, and Spartan Bioscience to purchase and boost capacity to manufacture equipment and supplies including portable ventilators, surgical masks, and rapid testing kits. The government has ordered millions of supplies to ease the pressure on health care facilities. It has also signed letters of intent with five companies – Precision Biomonitoring, Fluid Energy Group Ltd., Irving Oil, Calko Group, and Stanfield’s – to produce additional test kits, hand sanitizer, and protective apparel including masks and gowns.
It would be quite nice for supporters of the CPoC to realized that every time they say things like that they drive away voters like me. When I see that stuff what I see if the tribal venom of politics in the USA, and I don’t like.
Somebody else posted that it is up to the CPoC to provide good policy. And I agree 100% with this. The CPoC is increasingly becoming a regional party made up and for angry Western Canadians. I don’t think this is a good national strategy for them. They’ll get 99% of the vote in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but this doesn’t translate into more seats. If they put somebody like Derek Sloan into the leadership role, then they’ve lost my vote… again. There’s almost nothing the Liberals could do that would be worse than having somebody like Sloan as PM. So, overall, if the CPoC wants to be a national party then they need to start acting like one. I know that deep down they would like everybody to forget that their origins are as a regional party (Reform), but they don’t seem to have grown past this stage. I would love to see a return of a party like the PC. Until then, I’ll continue to examine every leader and their platforms carefully, and vote accordingly, and that means probably Liberal even in the face of corruption scandals (it isn’t like the CPoC if in charge wouldn’t have their share of scandals, although I have to say for some Liberal scandals historically, not just with Trudeau, have seemed dumber).
The CPC is a merger of both Reform and PC parties, and was the government as recently as 2015, when they held ridings in nine out of ten provinces, so saying they never grew part being a regional party is not consistent with fact.
What might be true is that they are reverting to regionalism, but at the risk of pointing out the obvious, the Liberal Party is regional, too. The Liberals in 2019 had no less a regional spread of votes and seats than the Conservatives did, and their messaging is just as targeted. You cannot cast the “regional” aspersion at the CPC and leave it off the Liberals.
Everyone seems to think that it’s only regionalism when it’s not about their region.
I get what you’re saying, but I think the CPoC rose to national leadership by not being the Liberal party and in part fooling people into forgetting that they were the Reform party (Harper did a very good job of not feeling Reform, heck I voted for him twice). My brother-in-law, for example, got in a huge argument with me about the CPoC origins being from the Reform party, until I showed him the wiki and he honestly said “Oh, I didn’t know that.” That’s why they downplay their origins really hard. How common are people like my brother-in-law? I’m not really sure, but he certainly isn’t unique.
While yes, I know they were a merger of Reform and PC, the reality is that merger was more Reform than PC, and the politics from the party have reflected that. Here’s an article talking about how embedded the Reform Party is in the CPoC.
I suppose the Liberal party could be considered regional if you consider every other province except AB, SK, (and to a lesser extent) MB a “region”. And isn’t even like they don’t try to deliver some message to Western Canada, which Western Canada doesn’t agree with (and that’s ok). I’m not strictly speaking talking about election results, but more the underlying principles of the party. My impression is the CPoC feels a lot more like the Bloq Quebecois than the Liberal, NDP or Green parties. And that has a lot to do with things like in the article I posted, and probably also their supporters. Perhaps there’s a bit of self-fulling prophecy at work (most of their supporters are Western Canadians, and so that’s who I hear from the most), but it ends up coming across that way to me.
P.s. - I’m also a Western Canadian so the notion that everybody thinks it is regionalism when it isn’t about their region probably doesn’t apply.
They weren’t the Reform Party. They were the CPC, which earned them votes in Eastern provinces, which is why they won. They won the 2006 election because they ran a better campaign than the Liberals did.
Maybe I’m the only person who remembers that campaign, but a huge part of the Liberal campaign was trying to scare people with messages about the CPC that turned out to be false. I don’t recall much the CPC actually did while in power that was much of a conservative surprise; if anything, they did not govern with any particular ideological concept at all, though admittedly it was a minority government for years.
I’m not saying they are; YOU are saying they are. You cannot rationally dismiss the CPC as a regional party and not say the same thing about the Liberal Party, which has MPs, and gets votes, just as geographically concentrated in particular areas.
To what are you referring to? I hope that Liberal supporters would realize that lack of ethics is worth calling out no matter who does it. He has been found to have broken ethics rules by two different Ethics Commissioners and is now being investigated a third time. No ones making him out to be more of an idiot than he plainly is.
So listening to the radio yesterday (sorry no cite) and they said that it’s now come out that in spite of Trudeau’s claims to justify the sole sourcing that WE was the only group capable of doing the contact, in fact WE was outsourcing parts.
The example they mentioned was the Quebec portion was outsourced to a Quebec PR agency which (hopefully purely coincidentally) apparently also has ties to the Trudeau family.
So much for the justification of the sole-sourced contract.
You would think the Liberals would push Trudeau out, get Freeland in and then call an election “for legitimacy”. Though if I’m the conservative party, that’s likely the last thing I’d want - no opposition party is in any shape to run a decent campaign. Weak NDP & Green parties mean more Liberal votes and who leads the Conservatives? A hamstrung leader about to be pushed out. ick