For The Liberals, Corruption Is Now Part Of The Official Brand

The most recent Liberal scandal shows just how far we are from the “sunny ways” promise of Justin Trudeau, and much closer to the “basic Dictatorship” he admired. Recently Minister of Small Business Export Petroleum and International trade, Mary Ng, was found guilty of an ethics violation for awarding single source contracts to her friends.

The problems with this type of behaviour are obvious. A functioning country has to be built on competence, not sycophancy. The government can not be handing out our money to the people it is friends with, as this doesn’t incentivize companies to make better products and lower costs, but instead to invest in bribery which in turn breeds most corruption. 

The real story is not that another high-ranking Liberal has been found guilty of a serious ethical, borderline criminal, violation. It is that Mary Ng feels no need to resign and Justin Trudeau does not feel like he needs to save the Liberal brand by removing her. Even the Toronto Star’s editorial board has called for the minister to resign.

The ethics commissioner found that Minister Ng had a personal hand in awarding two different contracts to her personal friend  Amanda Alvaro for “media training”. This is nowhere near the worst scandal of the Trudeau years, but it does fit a pattern.

It will be hard to find a scandal that will ever be worse than the SNC-Lavalin. To recap the major scandal that kicked off the Trudeau era, SNC Lavalin was an attempt to fully centralize all of the power of the Canadian government into the hands of the Prime Minister’s office. 

SNC-Lavalin had a long relationship of funding both the Liberal party and the Trudeau foundation, and when they were about to be convicted of a felony for their corrupt dealing in Libya they went into hyper-lobbying mode. A felony conviction would disqualify them from getting any more government contracts so Justin Trudeau created a new law called a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA). The DPA would allow SNC Lavalin to continue to get government money.

However, there was a problem. There is still some separation of powers as the Harper government had installed an independent prosecutor to put a bulwark between the government and the judiciary. The independent prosecutor found that SNC-Lavalin did not qualify for a DPA so Trudeau, Butts, Telford, and the rest of the PMO tried to force Jstice Minister Jody Wilson Raybould to overrule the independent prosecutor. When she refused to defy everything that her office should stand for she, along with Jane Philpot, was forced out of the Liberal Party and replaced with a Trudeau sycophant David Lametti. 

Mary Ng’s corruption can’t possibly hold a candle to Trudeau’s corruption. It should be noted that SNC-Lavalin as we speak can still get government money. This was the signal that corruption in favour of the Liberal party will be the new normal in Canada. That message was reinforced by the WE scandal and the Ng scandal is nothing in comparison to those two.

Corruption is now the brand of the Liberal party for two reasons. First, it is highly profitable for those that allow it. There are tons of money and little consequences for laundering money through the Liberal party. Secondly, is any reversal of this trend and a system that would punish corruption would ultimately lead right to the top of the power structure, and why would Trudeau be incentivized to do that?