National Post (National Edition)
PM’s vacation location proves details matter
Aga Khan group competes for Canadian funds
Last week, I argued the Prime Minister’s Office’s initial refusal to divulge the location of Justin Trudeau’s vacation, in even the most general terms, was cause for concern — even more so once it turned out the answer was so apparently anodyne: Trudeau and family had flown to the Bahamas, the PMO explained, and were holidaying somewhere in the area. In my view, that was all that needed to be said at the time. That the PMO would be so hesitant to release such harmless information augured poorly, I argued, for how it would deal with things it really didn’t want Canadians to know.
A steady torrent of objections began filling my inbox. Are politicians not entitled to private lives? “Get a life!” I was admonished at least twice. “If we continue to belittle government and treat them with suspicion they will likely return the compliment,” one very polite correspondent suggested. Even some people clearly unenamoured of the PM — including one who referred to him as “Turdo” — suggested I was being quite ridiculous. “Your write up is use less!” he complained.
A year earlier, the PMO had refused to divulge that the Trudeaus were in St. Kitts, until TMZ tracked them down. I suspected the same thing was happening again: they were enjoying a fairly conventional vacation, by the standards of people with significant means, and for some reason the PMO just didn’t want anyone to know about it. But then a little birdie alighted on my shoulder with some solid intel: the Trudeaus had been guests of the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismailis, on his lavish private island, Bells Cay.
The PMO initially refused to confirm this to my colleague David Akin, but eventually came clean. “As you are aware, his Highness and the Prime Minister have been close family friends for many years,” Kate Purchase wrote in a statement. “As is the usual course, the Prime Minister will be reimbursing the costs of his (and his family’s) flights to and from Nassau.”
Why, I was repeatedly asked, would journalists bother demanding to know where the PM is on vacation? This. This is why. If journalists hadn’t asked, we might never have known something that is — at the very least — unambiguously in the public interest. Since 2004, as Akin reported, federal taxpayers have handed the Aga Khan Foundation $310 million in foreign aid, including the current government’s recent commitment of $55 million over five years for aid work in Afghanistan.
By all accounts the Aga Khan is a fine fellow and his foundation does wonderful work. And he is, as Purchase said, a close friend of the Trudeau family. But there is a reason his foundation is formally registered as an organization that lobbies the federal government: it’s competing for Canadian taxpayers’ money with which to do those good works, and that competition is supposed to be reasonably transparent. And it seems the Aga Khan just gave the Prime Minister of Canada and some of his friends and family a free vacation in paradise — one even the Trudeaus might struggle to afford on their own. Many will quite understandably perceive that as a conflict of interest. And there is no indication Canadians ever would have known about it had Trudeau and his office been left to determine the appropriate level of disclosure.
Indeed, had the PMO just said right off the bat that the family was in the Bahamas, media inquiries might have been rather less intense. Instead it defaulted to secrecy, piquing journalists’ interest all the more, and now we know they were concealing something that mattered. “Demanding to know what the government is doing, like demanding to know what it’s spending, can never be a piecemeal undertaking,” I argued in my original column. You can’t let it off the hook when things seem to “not matter.”
Again, people asked: Why? Again: This. This is why.