Trudeau slams opposition for continuing to bring up WE Charity affair
Prime minister says his government focused on second wave of COVID-19
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his government is focused on COVID-19 and criticized the Conservatives for trying to bring back committee investigations into the WE Charity affair — investigations that were interrupted two months ago by Trudeau’s own choice to prorogue Parliament.
“We are entirely focused on the second wave of COVID19,” Trudeau said at a news conference Tuesday. “We will continue to stay focused on what we need to do to support Canadians facing a very difficult time right now. The Conservatives continue to want to focus on WE Charity, so be it.”
Trudeau noted that he had testified on WE Charity at committee in July, and said his government had already handed over thousands of pages of documents related to the controversy. “We’ve been open and transparent on these questions,” he said.
But the Conservatives, NDP and Bloc Québécois have all said they have concerns with redactions on the documents that were disclosed. The nonpartisan House of Commons law clerk told the committee in August that the government appeared to have redacted more information than was necessary.
Opposition MPs also want to see more details on the speaking fees paid to Trudeau’s family. Trudeau did not recuse himself from the decision to have WE Charity administer the $900-million Canada Student Service Grant program, even though it later emerged that his mother and brother had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees and expenses by WE over the previous four years.
Parliamentary committees were in the middle of examining both issues when Trudeau prorogued Parliament on Aug. 18, and then waited more than a month until bringing it back on Sept. 23.
“Conservatives will continue to fight for answers that Canadians deserve,” said Michael Barrett, the party’s ethics critic. He said Trudeau “shut down Parliament during a pandemic in order to try to kill investigations into the WE scandal,” and said the Liberals are “more focused on covering up Justin Trudeau’s unethical behaviour than helping Canadians.”
Prorogation starts a new session of Parliament, wiping the legislative slate clean and restarting all committees with fresh agendas. Although Trudeau said the prorogation would allow for a new throne speech to address the radically new environment created by the pandemic, he did not explain why a month-long shutdown of Parliament was necessary to do this.
The committees had to be reconstituted after the return of Parliament and are only now getting back to the work they had been doing in August, when the pandemic was at a lull in Canada.
The minority parliament means the Liberals do not hold a majority of votes on committees, and the opposition parties can control committee agendas if they all vote together.
Liberal MPs have been filibustering some attempts to get WE Charity back on committee agendas. On Friday, the ethics committee was convened to vote on a motion to have the Speakers’ Spotlight bureau provide details of speaking fees paid since 2008 for Trudeau, his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, his mother Margaret Trudeau and his brother Alexandre Trudeau.
However, Liberal MPs on the committee delayed the vote by four and a half hours through lengthy speeches and repeated attempts to adjourn. The meeting finally concluded late Friday afternoon without a vote, when the Bloc MPs joined the Liberals in voting to adjourn.
The finance committee, meanwhile, has remained in limbo after its chair, Liberal MP Wayne Easter, suspended the meeting on Thursday to determine whether a motion on WE Charity was in order. The Conservatives protested that Easter should have held a vote to adjourn the meeting but didn’t because the opposition would have outvoted him.
Both the NDP and the Conservatives have asked for a special Parliamentary committee to be created to examine the WE Charity affair in full, and not take up the time of the standing committees that have other parliamentary work to do, such as reviewing legislation.