Opposition parties resume battle for WE

Two House of Commons committee meetings dragged on for hours Thursday as Liberal MPs continued to filibuster opposition efforts to reopen their investigations into the WE Charity affair.

The finance committee was still droning on after eight hours of debating amendments to a Conservative motion denouncing redactions to some 5,000 pages of documents released by the government in August — just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament, shutting down four separate committee investigations into the affair.

The ethics committee was similarly stalled, going on five hours by early evening, over a Conservative motion calling on Speakers’ Spotlight, the agency that arranged speaking engagements for Trudeau’s wife, mother and brother at WE events, to hand over 12 years of receipts for the trio’s paid appearances.

WE Charity, which was to have been paid $43.5 million to manage a now-defunct federal student volunteering program, has already disclosed that it paid Margaret and Alexandre Trudeau more than $350,000 over the years.

Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, was paid a one-time fee of $1,400 for an event in 2012, before her husband became prime minister.

Liberal members of the ethics committee complained that the motion is too broad, a “fishing expedition” aimed at delving into the financial affairs of the prime minister’s relatives beyond their involvement with WE.

They also argued that it is wrong for MPs to investigate members of another MP’s family and that the matter should be left with the federal ethics commissioner, who is already investigating Trudeau and former finance minister Bill Morneau.