Voting mistake upends unearthing of WE contracts

OTTAWA — After enduring nearly three weeks of Liberal filibustering, opposition MPs trying to acquire WE Charity speaking contracts involving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife were shut down Monday when a Bloc Québécois MP voted against the initiative — by mistake.

It was supposed to be a straightforward vote at the federal ethics committee to force the release of all invoices for the speeches Trudeau and his wife delivered to WE Charity in the past decade.

Opposition MPs want to verify how much money WE Charity and its affiliates have paid the Trudeau family in the years leading up to the now-defunct $543.5 million deal to have WE administer a student volunteer grant program for the government.

For weeks, the Liberal members of the committee tried to thwart the vote by filibustering, filling the time with lengthy and often irrelevant speeches, calling countless points of order and asking for more amendments on amendments than anyone would care to count.

The issue came to a head last week when the minority Liberals declared a Conservative proposal to create an “anticorruption” committee to delve into the WE scandal a matter of confidence. Had the Liberals lost the vote, Canadians would be going to the polls.

The NDP ultimately voted with the Liberals, but promised to continue studying the WE Charity scandal in committees such as ethics.

So, Monday, after a bit more filibustering and a few more amendments, the Conservative motion at the ethics committee was set to pass with the support from all opposition members, who outnumbered the Liberals.

All was going as expected until the committee clerk called on Bloc Québécois MP Julie Vignola, who had replaced her colleague Marie-Hélène Gaudreau just a few minutes earlier.

After a few seconds of silence, Vignola unexpectedly said: “I am against the motion.” A visibly stunned NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus laughed incredulously as he cast the final vote for the motion. But it didn’t matter anymore, the nays (five) defeated the yays (four).

In a scrum minutes after the vote, Bloc Québécois House Leader Alain Therrien admitted it had all been a mistake. Their vote had literally been lost in translation, and the party was scrambling to see if there was a way to change it.

“There were many amendments that were proposed consecutively, and there were issues with translation, so there was a mistake in the vote we made. And now we are looking to see if there is a way to correct the mistake we made,” Therrien said.

In an interview, Angus said the Bloc’s vote felt like being “stabbed in the back.”

He didn’t buy Therrien’s explanation that the error was the result of translation and technical issues, particularly because the party had “unusually” swapped out Gaudreau for Vignola just before the vote.

“I can’t see that they would be that amateurish that on such an important vote, which held up the ethics committee since we returned in September., that they would send someone in and not tell her what the upcoming vote was. You know, you can’t run a ship like that. Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet knows what he’s doing,” Angus said.

The Bloc vehemently denied his allegations and said it was actively looking for ways to bring the motion back to the table.

Angus said he is planning to bring a motion to the ethics committee next week to continue studying the WE Charity scandal.

But because the committee just voted against requesting the speaking invoices, he said it’s unlikely those documents will ever make it to the committee.

“Three weeks of work that kept us up into the wee hours of the morning went out the window. And so now we are not going to get those Trudeau documents,” Angus lamented.