Trudeau misses deadline for disclosing private interests to ethics commissioner

OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has run afoul of federal ethics rules yet again -- this time missing the deadline for filing a financial disclosure statement with the ethics commissioner.

Every MP is required to file a disclosure statement within 60 days of his or her election being published in the Canada Gazette; in Trudeau’s case, the deadline was Jan. 13. Of the 338 MPs elected last October, only 13, including Trudeau, had failed to file their statements as of Feb. 5, the last time commissioner Mario Dion’s office updated a status report on members’ compliance with the disclosure requirement.

The Prime Minister’s Office says the failure to file was an administrative oversight that is being corrected.

The compliance status report, available on the ethics commissioner’s website, is to be updated again Wednesday.

There is no penalty for missing the deadline for filing the statements, in which MPs are supposed to detail their own and family members’ private interests, as a hedge against winding up in a conflict of interest. Trudeau has twice been found to have violated the Conflict of Interest Act: by accepting a 2016 family vacation on the private Bahamian island owned by the Aga Khan, billionaire spiritual leader of the world’s Ismaili Muslims; and by improperly pressuring his former attorney general, Jody WilsonRaybould, to intervene to stop the criminal prosecution of Montreal engineering giant SNC-Lavalin.

Others who had not filed their disclosure statements as of Feb. 5 included Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet, Liberal MPs Wayne Easter and Hedy Fry, and Conservative MPs John Barlow and Arnold Viersen.