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banana republic

Thursday February 28, 2019

February 28, 2019 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay – Thursday February 28, 2019

The moral catastrophe of Justin Trudeau

The dangerous files are never the obscure ones. Scandals don’t happen in the weird little corners of government, in amateur sport or in crop science. They happen on the issues a prime minister cares most about, because everyone gets the message that the rules matter less than the result.

February 9, 2005

It’s a constant in politics. In 2016 I took one look at Bill Morneau’s first budget and wrote this, “The sponsorship scandal of the late Chrétien years was possible because it was obvious to every scoundrel with Liberal friends that spending on national unity would not receive close scrutiny from a government that was desperate to be seen doing something on the file. A government that considers the scale of its spending to be proof of its virtue is an easy mark for hucksters and worse.”

It wasn’t a perfect prediction. I kind of expected the hucksters and worse to be outsidegovernment. Unless the Trudeau Liberals can produce persuasive evidence that Jody Wilson-Raybould is an utter fabulist (and frankly, I now expect several to try), her testimony before the Commons Justice Committee establishes pretty clearly that the hucksters and worse were running the show. Led by the grinning legatee who taints the Prime Ministers’ office.

There will now be a period of stark partisanship. We’re in an election year. Loyal Liberals will tell themselves, and then everyone else, that the price of looking clearly at Justin Trudeau’s bully club (so many men; wonder how Katie Telford felt about that while she was signing off on every element of it) is ceding the field to Andrew Scheer. Who, they will tell themselves and then the country, is an actual Nazi.

September 22, 2017

I mean, after all, that’s pretty close to what they told one another, and then Jody Wilson-Raybould, last fall, isn’t it? There was an election in Quebec in the first week of October. And Ben Chin, a former journalist who did whatever Christy Clark needed done in B.C. before moving east to do whatever Bill Morneau and the PMO needed doing, used that thin reed of an excuse to try to sway Wilson-Raybould’s chief of staff, Jessica Prince. “If they don’t get a [deferred prosecution agreement], they will leave Montreal, and it’s the Quebec election right now, so we can’t have that happen,” Wilson-Raybould told the committee, paraphrasing Chin’s conversation with Prince.

I’ve never met a Liberal yet who doesn’t reliably confuse his electoral skin with the national interest. So much of what Trudeau and his minions have done in the last year stems from that instinct. Take the ludicrous half-billion-dollar bailout for people in my line of work, never explained, sprung out of nowhere in Morneau’s fall economic update—or as I now like to think of it, between Trudeau advisor Mathieu Bouchard’s meeting (yet another one) with Prince and Michael Wernick’s chat with Wilson-Raybould. You can get a lot of op-eds written with that kind of dough. Take the cool billion the Canada Infrastructure Bank coughed up  to pay for a politically popular and impeccably well-connected transit project around Montreal… (Continued: Paul Wells, MacLean’s) 

 

Posted in: Canada Tagged: banana republic, Canada, corruption, dictators, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Justin Trudeau, Michael Wernick, partisanship, Rule of Law

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

February 5, 2014 by Graeme MacKay

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Patrick Brazeau, Mac Harb charged by RCMP

Suspended Senator Patrick Brazeau and retired senator Mac Harb have been formally charged by the RCMP with one count each of fraud and breach of trust related to inappropriate Senate expense claims.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner Gilles Michaud announced the charges at a news conference at about 11:10 am ET Tuesday.

“The RCMP has proceeded to charge Mr. Brazeau and Mr. Harb with one count each of breach of trust and fraud under sections 122 and 380 of the Criminal Code, ” Michaud said. “Both  Mr. Brazeau and Mr. Harb will be appearing in court at a later date.”

The Mounties allege Brazeau and Harb defrauded taxpayers by claiming travel and living expenses to which they were not entitled.

Brazeau was suspended from the Senate in October along with onetime fellow Conservative Senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin. The three former Conservatives were suspended without pay following an outside audit of their expenses.

Harb, who was a Liberal senator until his spending came under scrutiny through an external audit, retired in August after paying back $231,000.

Both Brazeau and Harb, along with Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, were subject to a lengthy Senate investigation of their expenses claims and living allowances.

A Senate committee determined each of the four had claimed tens of thousands of dollars in expenses that they were not entitled to.
The Senate then passed its files to the RCMP.

The charges expected Tuesday against Brazeau and Harb are the first to flow from the RCMP’s own lengthy investigation of the spending scandal, underway since May 2013. (Source: CBC News)

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Posted in: Canada Tagged: banana republic, bananas, Canada, corruption, Editorial Cartoon, Mac Harb, Patrick Brazeau, scandal, Senate Expenses Scandal

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This website contains satirical commentaries of current events going back several decades. Some readers may not share this sense of humour nor the opinions expressed by the artist. To understand editorial cartoons it is important to understand their effectiveness as a counterweight to power. It is presumed readers approach satire with a broad minded foundation and healthy knowledge of objective facts of the subjects depicted.

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