Tough On Crime Unless They're Tories: The Shameful Hypocrisy of Pierre Poilievre and the CPC on Criminal Justice

Conservatives love to posture about being tough on crime, as long as it's someone else committing it. When it's one of their own, well, they can be Premier or advisor to the Prime Minister.

One of these things is not like the others.

Canada’s National Post is reporting that Canada’s Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre is returning to the well-trodden path of promising draconian punitive measures for certain types of violent crime.

I say “certain types” because, quite notably, crimes like sexual assault or assaulting your partner are never considered to be “violent crimes”

“Under the proposed 'three-strikes' law, anyone convicted of three serious offenses would be sentenced to a minimum of 10-years' incarceration, with no chance at bail, probation, parole or house arrest… Poilievre has already said that, if he becomes prime minister, he'll bring in life sentences for aggravated human, gun and fentanyl trafficking.”

It’s notable, but not at all surprising, that Poilievre would point to a horrifying incident in Saskatchewan where a First Nations man with a string of previous convictions killed 11 people on a horrific spree.

I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, which has often been the “murder capital” of Canada. I’ve met many, many victims of crime face to face, including many people whose family and loved ones were murdered, as well as women who have been assaulted and sexually assaulted who could not get justice. Just witnessing their suffering is painful, and I can’t imagine the further levels of anguish they have gone through.

The people who suffered these losses, as well as ongoing injustices are mostly Indigenous. Some of them are miseries and tragedies are related to the policies of the last Harper Conservative Government, in which Pierre Poilievre was a cabinet minister. That government cancelled the Kelowna Accord, which was going to increase funding to First Nations, with funds dedicated to clean water and better care for children, and froze funding instead, even as the population grew.

They brought in new draconian legislation that led to more Indigenous children being thrown in jail, while cancelling education and training programs in prisons that successfully reduced the chance of people re-offending.

At the same time, I have seen a complete indifference to crimes committed by powerful conservatives.

For that reason, I find Poilievre’s announcement completely insincere and exploitive, and frankly disgusting. These are profoundly unjust policies that if they came to pass would make current injustices worse.

Jails in Manitoba and Saskatchewan are overcrowded with First Nations and Indigenous prisoners. Manitoba has twice the national incarceration rate, and the vast majority of prisoners are Indigenous. There are no provincial half-way houses, which means that inmates are discharged straight to the street, and immediately get arrested again.

Peter Nygard, Canada’s Billionaire Serial Rapist

At the same time, Manitoba is a province where a billionaire, Peter Nygard was never charged criminally for decades, despite dozens of allegations that he was sexually assaulting women in Manitoba.

In 2019, Nygard was arrested and faced extradition to the U.S. in a class action suit involving over 50 women - several of them having occurred in Manitoba. The complaints span decades and are shocking, to say the least. On the eve of his extradition, police in Toronto and in Montreal charged him with multiple criminal charges for offenses against women and girls.

In Manitoba, 20 women came forward, and the Winnipeg Police Service recommended that 8 charges be laid, but Manitoba Justice declined all of them.

In November 2022, I was a Member of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly, and I was approached by a representative of over 40 women who had complaints against Nygard. One of Nygard’s lawyers was facing professional sanctions of professional misconduct for publicly trashing the reputations of Nygard’s Manitoba accusers, essentially calling them paid actors and gold-diggers.

I asked the then- Progressive Conservative Government whether they would have an independent third party review the charges. Together with my colleague Cindy Lamoureux, we got the government to agree to hand over the investigation to a Crown Prosecutor from Saskatchewan, who eventually found that one of the charges should proceed to trial.

There has never been any explanation for why Manitoba Justice did not lay charges.

Nygard was eventually convicted and sentenced in Toronto and is still awaiting trial in Winnipeg, Montreal and the U.S. Comparisons have been made of Nygard to Jeffrey Epstein, except that the crimes Nygard is accused of are much worse and more extensive.

A search through about 30 years of the Manitoba Legislature’s Hansard showed that I was, apparently the first and only party leader or MLA to ever ask a question about why Nygard wasn’t charged. The second was my colleague, and current Interim Leader, Cindy Lamoureux.

Nygard has already been convicted of multiple crimes, and faces many more charges, but there is no explanation whatsoever of how he was able to escape being charged for decades. The one charge he is now facing in Manitoba dates back to the 1990s.

I raise the issue of Nygard because the crimes he committed against women are almost never included in the list of “violent crime” that conservatives tend to talk about. They talk about drugs, violence, and human trafficking, but not sexual assault.

Nygard used a wide range of tactics to silence people. He used non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to ensure that employees could not speak about anything they had witnessed.

In the 1990s, the publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press - Manitoba’s “paper of record” spiked a story where one of Nygard’s employees reported she had been raped by him. The publisher of the other newspaper, the Winnipeg Sun, went to work for Nygard in the Bahamas.

When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran investigative pieces on Nygard, he filed a private prosection against them for something called “criminal libel” which still exists in Canada, where reporters faced jail time for their reporting. Private prosecutions have to be signed off on by the government as being in the public interest, which is one of the reasons the judge allowed the case to go forward.

The criminal libel case was hanging over the heads of the journalists and only fell apart when the U.S. charges against Nygard demanded his extradition from Canada.

Turning a Blind Eye to the Many Crimes of the Freedom Convoy

I’ve written at length about Conservatives turning a blind eye to the lawlessness of the “Freedom Convoy," which was a mid-pandemic protest that blocked highways and border crossings, blockaded legislatures and had leaders like Pat King who regularly made veiled threats of violence towards elected officials, and the demands of organizers in Ottawa included that democratically elected government be toppled and that they be appointed to run it instead.

Here’s King saying talking about Liberals “catching a bullet”

The reporting was that the “Conservatives hitch their wagons to the convoy protest without knowing where it's going”

The conservatives always stuck to messaging that the protests were “peaceful” without acknowledging that there were many ways in which it was blatantly illegal. It is a crime in the Federal Criminal Code to block a highway. It’s an offense to disobey court orders. Jamming 911 phone lines with phony calls may be “peaceful” but it can absolutely result in someone’s death.

In fact, Conservatives were involved in organizing the Convoy, which had some of the same organizers as a 2019 “United We Roll” convoy (rebranded from Yellow Vests) where a Conservative Senator, David Tkachuk, encouraged truckers to “roll over every Liberal” in the country

Former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer met with Freedom convoy in Saskatchewan as they rolled through, and former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall was texting advice to them, even after they had occupied Ottawa.

This was fuelled by fraudulent claims about the law promoted by the Alberta-based lawfare outfit, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, whose legal arguments have consistently been found in court to be groundless.

• Two lawyers who run the JCCF had to stop practising law after they hired a private investigator to tail the Manitoba judge hearing their case, as well as the Premier of Manitoba.

• In Alberta, the Coutts Border blockade who had body armor and weapons, where evidence showed they were willing to shoot police officers. They were charged and convicted.

One federal court judge did find that some protestors’ Charter Rights were violated when the Federal Government suspended access to their bank accounts as part of the declaration of the Emergencies Act, though he agreed that had he been in charge, he probably would have declared it, too.

However, this sidesteps the rather serious issue of the fact that the Freedom Convoy participants was quite literally a paid protest funded by foreign donors.

Above: From Politico

“Analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found multiple U.S. right-wing groups, including those associated with the Tea Party Movement and others opposing U.S. vaccine mandates, had donated to the now-defunct GoFundMe page, as well as similar groups from Europe and Australia.

That international backing, in part, was driven by several U.S.-focused white supremacist channels on Telegram, which had repeatedly shared a link to the GoFundMe page. On 4Chan, an online message board favored by extremists groups, the same link had been posted at least 25 times between Jan. 28 and Feb. 5, based on research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue."

In fact, there was an overlap between Trump donors and the Freedom Convoy:

Out of 200 of the top American donors to the convoy protest that paralyzed downtown Ottawa and blocked parts of the Canada-U.S. border, half have names matching those of donors to Republican candidates, the Republican Party or former U.S. President Donald Trump, according to analysis by CBC News.

Mike Roman, who worked in the Trump White house and who was charged in multiple states with playing a key role in the Trump’s 2020 Election fraud, was an advisor to the Conservatives and was in Ottawa at the time of the Convoy.

Tom Quiggin, yet another tiresome and paranoid troll, tweeted this - that one of the donors was none other than the incredible shrinking billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk has somehow managed to give white South Africans an even worse name.

To any Americans, please consider what would happen if Canada helped organize and fund January 6th? If this happened anywhere else it would be recognized as a failed coup supported by foreign agitators. Many of them living in the U.S., and quite a few with direct ties to Donald Trump, like Elon Musk.

Bruce Carson, the Convicted Criminal Who was Stephen Harper’s Right Hand Man

While the Conservatives have routinely attacked other parties for corruption, Stephen Harper had a fraudster with multiple convictions working for him as a senior adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Wikipedia pithily calls Carson a “Canadian Fraudster”. As a lawyer, he had been convicted of multiple frauds and even spent time in jail before being hired by Harper.

However, Carson’s is also one of the shocking reason why the issue of clean water in First Nations communities was further delayed for years.

The Harper Conservatives had brought in a law banning former staffers from lobbying for five years. Not only was Carson lobbying, but as APTN investigates discovered, he was trying to get a $400-million contract for water filtration systems for a company that was owned by his partner, who was a former Ottawa-area escort.

Canadian Politicians with Criminal Records and Criminal Charges

There is Canadian TikTok user named “Jaw Knee” (Johnny) who compiled a list of Canadian politicians who have been charged and convicted of crimes.

You can access the file here »

While this image is hard to read, the one thing that stands out is the colour that is associated with party affiliation.

Bearing in mind the offenses date back more than a century, they also include people who were charged or convicted after being elected. That includes Louis Riel, the founder of the province of Manitoba and a father of Canadian confederation, whose trial by the Canadian government on highly questionable grounds, not least because the alleged offenses occurred in territory that was not under Canada’s jurisdiction.

The chart at the top of this article shows that 57% of the convicted politicians are conservative, and what’s more, that Saskatchewan conservatives are massively overrepresented.

While there are often accusations of corruption in Quebec, it has to be said that it is also a province there the political dynamic has actually resulted in inquiries into corruption and convictions. Anglos in Canada generally love to complain about corruption in Quebec. There’s no denying there has been, because we know it for a fact - but it’s also the case that Quebec actually has far stricter standards for corruption than many other provinces, especially when it comes to campaign finance corruption.

For example, Quebec there have been a couple of scandals and inquiries, where people ended up going to jail where there were illegal corporate donations to political parties. The Charbonneau inquiry discovered that an engineering firm was giving fake bonuses to employees who then used the funds to make a personal donation to a particular political party or politician.

The donations from one firm in one year was $110,000.

By contrast in Alberta and Saskatchewan, election financing laws can be extremely loose. Even after the Alberta NDP tightened up election finance laws, individual donations were $15,000, and corporations and unions could both second people to work on campaigns. Saskatchewan allows out-of-province corporate donations, and as a consequence, the Saskatchewan Party has received millions of dollars in donations from the oil industry in Alberta.

CBC reported in 2016 that “Alberta-based companies have donated more than $2 million to the Saskatchewan Party over the past decade”

In Alberta, during the spring election of 2012, the PC party led by Alison Redford was struggling at the polls, but a last minute surge in fundraising helped them spend their way to victory.

As the Globe and Mail reported:

Billionaire entrepreneur and Edmonton Oilers owner Daryl Katz gave Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives nearly half a million dollars – almost one-third of the party’s total fundraising in a single donation – as Premier Alison Redford’s cash-strapped campaign was staring down defeat at the ballot box in the spring election.

Documents made public by Elections Alberta on Wednesday record $300,000 in donations from Mr. Katz, his company, his family and business associates.

But a source close to the campaign told The Globe and Mail that Mr. Katz provided a cheque for $430,000 to the PCs, a donation that was broken up into smaller pieces.

The maximum allowable donation to a political party in Alberta from an individual person or company during an election campaign is $30,000. Elections Alberta said splitting donations is allowed in some circumstances.

However, Elections Alberta cleared Katz, and said there was nothing wrong with the donation.

Danielle Smith and her UCP government are currently in the midst of a corruption scandal involving major private health contracts going to a donor:

The Globe and Mail says it has obtained documents showing Danielle Smith and Adriana LaGrange knew more about the alleged AHS scandal – and some supposedly questionable procurement decisions – than they’re letting on.

The Globe claims the AHS board was fired the day it was supposed to get a report on whether some of its business deals were subject to “improper activity.”

Brian Mulroney

When Brian Mulroney died, he received a hero’s sendoff, with nary a mention of the public inquiry that found he had received $300,000 in cash from a notorious German-Canadian businessman and lobbyist named Karlheinz Schreiber. Mulroney accepted the first $75,000 while he was still a Member of Parliament, in the form of seventy-five $1,000 Canadian bills.

The inquiry is fascinating and occasionally hilarous reading, in part because Mulroney claimed that he was being paid by Schreiber for promoting what Wikipedia will tell you was a “fresh pasta business” but which the inquiry specifies is the much weirder and funnier: “anti-obesity pasta.”

For years, Schreiber had been pestering Mulroney to have a German company, Thyssen, build military vehicles in Canada for sale to places like Saudi Arabia. Most people around Mulroney hated the plan and opposed it, for a lot of very fundamental reasons. At the time, it was illegal under German law for Thyssen to be making military equipment for that purpose, and it could have caused a diplomatic furore because Israel would not look kindly on Canada arming their enemies.

The project had the slightly Spy-Novel name of “Boar’s Head,” and despite the urgings of Cabinet Ministers and senior civil servants, Mulroney wouldn’t rid himself of Schreiber.

When the Federal branch of Canada’s RCMP alleged that Mulroney had recived kickbacks, he sued the Federal Government for $50-million, and won a multi-million dollar settlement. Somehow, not one government lawyer ever thought to ask Mulroney, even once, whether he Schreiber had given him the money.

The inquiry reads:

William Kaplan, a lawyer and legal historian, wrote his first book, Presumed Guilty: Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair and the Government of Canada, to defend Mr. Mulroney’s reputation after the Canadian government sent a letter of request to the Swiss government, which contained allegations of criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Mulroney. In the course of several interviews for this book, Mr. Mulroney told Mr. Kaplan that his relationship with Mr. Schreiber was merely “peripheral,” and he never mentioned his commercial relationship with Mr. Schreiber.

According to Mr. Kaplan, when he subsequently found out about these business dealings and the payments Mr. Mulroney had received from Mr. Schreiber, this “changed everything” for him.

Indeed, Justice Oliphant wrote

This Inquiry provided Mr. Mulroney with the opportunity to clear the air and put forward cogent, credible evidence to support his assertions that there was nothing untoward about his dealings with Mr. Schreiber.

I regret that he has not done so.

… Mr. Mulroney, an intelligent, sophisticated businessperson, had to recognize that Mr. Schreiber was attempting to manipulate him to use his power and influence as prime minister to move the Bear Head Project forward despite all the advice to the contrary he was receiving from trusted advisers such as Paul Tellier, the clerk of the privy council and secretary to the cabinet from 1985 to 1992.

Even after he says he “killed” the Bear Head Project in 1991, Mr. Mulroney permitted Mr. Schreiber to have continued access to him. In my opinion, that is the principal reason why the Bear Head Project, albeit proposed for locations other than the Bear Head Peninsula, refused to die and, like Phoenix, kept rising from the ashes.

So, not only did Mulroney do exactly what he was accused of doing - taking money from Karlheinz Schreiber, he lied and said he didn’t, and successfully sued the Canadian Government, which had to shell out public money to compensate him for his lies.

When William Kaplan learned that Mulroney had received money, he decided he would write about it. Notably, the inquiry reports that the National Post refused to print it.

Sometime before October 5, 2003, Mr. Kaplan disclosed to Mr. Mulroney that he planned to write an article on Mr. Mulroney’s transactions with Mr. Schreiber.

Mr. Mulroney thereupon attempted to convince Mr. Kaplan that the information he had concerning these payments was false. Mr. Kaplan had received the story from Philip Mathias, the first journalist to write an article about the payments. Mr. Mathias’s employer, the National Post, apparently refused to publish his article.

According to Mr. Kaplan, on October 24, 2003, leading up to the publication of the article he proposed to write about Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Schreiber, Mr. Mulroney said to Mr. Kaplan that, if he (Mr. Kaplan) wanted his “cooperation and friendship,” then he could not be both “a friend and an opponent.” The evidence I heard convinces me that Mr. Mulroney went to great lengths to try to persuade Mr. Kaplan not to write the article about his (Mr. Mulroney’s) dealings with Mr. Schreiber or the payments he had received from Mr. Schreiber.

In his book A Secret Trial, Mr. Kaplan referred to Mr. Mulroney’s “unrelenting campaign,” which he described as “brutal, heavy-handed, and extremely wearing,” to persuade him not to publish the story. Mr. Kaplan believes, quite rightly in my opinion, that Mr. Mulroney had a singular purpose in mind in attempting to block the publishing of the article – namely, to protect his reputation. When asked about this episode by Mr. Wolson, Mr. Mulroney did not deny what Mr. Kaplan had said. The evidence I accept persuades me that Mr. Mulroney did not want the article about his dealings with Mr. Schreiber or the payments he received from him to be published.

Notably, it’s not just the Conservative politicians, it’s also such figures as convicted (and pardoned) criminal Conrad Black, who despite being a named associate of Jeffrey Epstein, continues to hector people for their moral failings. Two Postmedia board members, David J Pecker and Daniel Rotstein, actually handled the hush-money arrangements that led to Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions.

In all of this, I will say that of course there are honest, hard-working, law-and-order conservatives, and there always have been, but the “movement” is now largely being driven by people whose chief strategic inspiration is Roy Cohn, who advised Joseph McCarthy then became a mob lawyer and mentor to Donald Trump. His career consisted in accusing others of crimes they didn’t commit, while making a living working for actual criminals.

This is all monumentally destructive and corrosive to the single most important requirement for freedom and a free society, which is the rule of law. It is also monumentally corrupting, because it requires people to continually defend the indefensible. More than anything, Canada and the world need effective and fair enforcement of the law against corruption and criminality, and the Conservatives have put themselves on the wrong side.

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