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Entitled to their entitlements – Prime Minister Dress-up fined for violating violating conflict of interest rules AGAIN!

July 2018

Re: “Entitled to entitlements,” (Mark Bonokoski, Toronto Sun, 24 June): besides Bev Oda’s $16 glass of orange juice, remember when Harper’s Chief of Staff Nigel Wright wrote a personal cheque to the federal treasury to cover Senator Mike Duffy’s $90, 000 worth of disallowed expenses and was forced to resign as a result? Yeah, those were the good ol’ days, weren’t they?

For those who don’t know the story, our virtue-signaling Prime Minister Dress-up was recently fined $100 for violating conflict of interest rules for not disclosing a gift of a pair of $300 aviator sunglasses from P.E.I. Premier Wade MacLauchlan.

This marks the second time in his tenure that Prime Minster Justin Trudeau has been censured by the Ethics Commissioner for conflict of interest violations.

The first time was when Trudeau accepted two all-expenses paid family vacations to the private Bahamian island owned by the Aga Khan, a registered lobbyist in Canada.  For that one Trudeau received a $250 fine, something this millionaire trust-fund kid probably paid with the spare change in his pocket.

This is in contrast to former Minister of Canadian Heritage and the Status of Women Bev Oda’s spending scandals that ultimately cost Oda her cabinet position; scandals that included staying in a $665 per night hotel instead of a cheaper hotel while attending a conference in London, England, ordering a glass of orange juice that cost $16 and hiring a limousine to transport her from the hotel to the conference, along with $5500 in limousine rides to the 2006 Juno Awards in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

It’s too bad that Prime Minister Dress-up doesn’t do the honourable thing and resign amid such disregard of Parliamentary rules and ethics.

Sources:  https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pm-s-chief-of-staff-paid-off-mike-duffy-s-senate-expenses-1.1300717, http://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/bonokoski-compared-to-trudeau-bev-odas-16-orange-juice-was-skinflint.

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Below is the original article written by Mark Bonokoski

Compared to Trudeau, Bev Oda’s $16 orange juice was skinflint

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the guy with the nice hair and the comfort of his dear old dad’s trust fund, still doesn’t get it when it comes to understanding the struggles of the middle class.

As prime ministers go, he’d make a good drama teacher-cum-drama queen but waiting for him to become a prime minister is like waiting for Godot.

How many times has he cried publicly, for example? There was when he talked of the death from cancer of Tragically Hip front-man Gord Downie and when he apologized for Canada’s discrimination of the LGBTQ community.

But tears are not enough.

Once summer ends, our federal political parties will be up to their arse plotting the 2019 election campaign, begging for political donations, coming up with the kind of slogans where bullshit baffles brains, and digging through social media and dusty archives looking for new dirt in which to play the old game.

Surely Canadians have grown weary by now of Trudeau the Younger who, like no prime minister before him, loves to buff-shine his own image.

In Friday’s column, I referred to pushback poor old Bev Oda got back in 2012 when she dared order a $16 orange juice at the posh Savoy Hotel in London, Eng., while doing some international grunt work for the former Conservative government of the much-maligned Stephen Harper, a true policy wonk with true economic cred.

Compared to Trudeau, Oda was skinflint, yet she was drummed out of Harper’s cabinet and into resignation by taxpayer outrage.

She must envy Trudeau’s Teflon.

Now, Bev Oda could have purchased more than 1,000 of those high-priced orange juices with the amount of taxpayers’ money Trudeau spent because he could find no one among the 1.4 billion citizens of India who could make a decent butter chicken—importing, instead, Indo-Canadian celebrity chef Vikram Vij from Vancouver to New Delhi at a cost of $17,000 in order to sweat over the cookstove at the Canadian Embassy.

Yet where is the outrage and the call for Trudeau’s head on a pike?

Is it simply quietly simmering towards a boil?

Justin Trudeau contends his mission as PM is to better the lives of the middle class, to make their lives better, and to create the kind of jobs that will still be around for generations.

But, if Justin Trudeau had any real idea of middle-class struggles, he would have hung in on the Northern Gateway pipeline that would get Alberta’s bitumen to tidewater and open the taps to financial billions. Energy East would have been a go, and the Trans Mountain not reliant on public money.

But he needs what eunuchs don’t have.

Conservative MP Candace Bergen wasn’t wrong when she slammed Trudeau during the House of Commons last sitting for using his nine-day Mr. Dressup trip to India to “pay for his celebrity lifestyle.”

“The prime minister thinks he is entitled to his entitlement,” said Bergen, stirring the ghost of former Liberal trougher David Dingwall. “He spares no expense when he wants to be pampered and showered with luxury.”

Trudeau’s blunderland trip in February to India cost taxpayers $1.5 million. But it is the fine print of the expense documents recently tabled that should have the blood pressure of middle-class Canadians pushing the red line.

It was pretty cool, for example, that there was a ball hockey game at the Canadian Embassy that pitted those in Trudeau’s entourage against members of India’s national women’s ice hockey team.

Cool, that is, until figures released showed we paid $3,500 to buy and leave behind 21 Team Canada women’s hockey jerseys.

That’s almost 220 of Bev Oda $16 orange juices.

But who’s counting?

About the author

Bruce Forsyth

Bruce Forsyth served in the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve for 13 years (1987-2000). He served with units in Toronto, Hamilton & Windsor and worked or trained at CFB Esquimalt, CFB Halifax, CFB Petawawa, CFB Kingston, CFB Toronto, Camp Borden, The Burwash Training Area and LFCA Training Centre Meaford.

Permanent link to this article: https://militarybruce.com/entitled-to-their-entitlements-prime-minister-dress-up-fined-for-violating-violating-conflict-of-interest-rules-again/

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