Ruling reminds elites ethics rules for them, too

For the longest time, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his office stuck to the same talking points about his 2016 holiday vacation to the Aga Khan’s Bahamas island: It was a family vacation. A private affair. The Aga Khan, the leader of the Ismaili Muslim religion, was a longtime friend. Nothing to see here, folks.

Except now the ethics commissioner has ruled that’s not quite the case. On Wednesday, Mary Dawson defied her critics and concluded her long-running investigation into Trudeau’s trip that happened almost a year ago to the day.

She found him guilty of violating four sections of the Conflict of Interest Act (5, 11, 12 and 21) involving his accepting of the trip, his flying on the Aga Khan’s private helicopter and how he didn’t recuse himself from two meetings concerning public funds being given to an institute directly connected to the Aga Khan and his foundation.

(It remains unclear to me why such a wealthy individual needs taxpayer money to support his projects, but that’s an issue for another day.)

Seeing as the act, while quite lengthy, only contains 19 actual rules, being found in violation of four of them is quite the tally.

Dawson is defying her critics by issuing the report in the first place. She’d been labelled a lapdog by groups such as Democracy Watch. That all changes now. Her findings mean Trudeau is the first prime minister in Canadian history to violate a federal statue while in office.

You’ve also got to wonder about why she did this now, just weeks before her term expires on Jan. 8. Maybe she was working on this timeline all along. But it could have something to do with what her successor said when questioned at a committee hearing.

Last week Mario Dion would not commit to keeping open Dawson’s investigations into both Trudeau and Bill Morneau. It was alarming to hear the Liberals’ last-minute, handpicked candidate who was rushed through the appointment process suggest there’s a chance he’d drop probes into the very people who appointed him. Perhaps Dawson shared this assessment.

Back to those Trudeau talking points though.

The odd thing isn’t so much how his response to Dawson’s announcement has changed, but how much it’s stayed the same. Here’s a snippet from what he told media Wednesday afternoon: “The Aga Khan is someone who has been a longtime friend of my family’s, a friend of mine, a friend to Canada as well. And for me to look for a place to have a quiet vacation, where I can have quality family time, is something we all look for with our families.”

Yup, just good ol’ middle-class Joe Trudeau out for a little vacay with the fam — on a billionaire’s private island.

Spare us.

It’s like he’s learned nothing. The only mea culpa is his pledge that “in the future, including on family friends and personal family trips, we will be proactively working with (the ethics commissioner) to ensure there is no conflict of interest, no appearance of conflict of interest.”

In other words, now that the horse has gone, he’s going to close the barn doors.

The problem in these responses has always been tone, which reeks of moral superiority. It’s as if because they’re buddies and everyone on the cocktail circuit will vouch for them as men of good character, then we should give them a free pass when they violate some pesky little rules.

This is the same tone that’s prevailed in the Morneau saga. And it doesn’t cut it.

It’s an incredibly elitist attitude. And Dawson’s report sets it straight.