What the PM doesn’t get
Late last month, the CBC asked WE Charity — the organization at the heart of the recent scandal over almost a billion dollars in proposed, but then cancelled, federal work — if the charity had ever paid a member of the Trudeau family for speeches. The Trudeau family have many links to WE Charity: until 2017 the prime minister himself regularly attended the group’s annual Canadian youth rally called WE Day; his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, is a WE ambassador and hosts a WE podcast.
The speeches had happened. Those were a matter of record. The question was whether WE had paid for them — whether the prime minister’s close relatives had personally benefited from their affiliation with a charity being handed a huge solesourced federal contract. And the answer, WE said, was no. It had “never paid an honorarium to these individuals for their involvement,” WE told the CBC.
This wasn’t true. But the PMO doesn’t think you should worry about that.
On Thursday, CBC and Canadaland, the online news site that covers media and politics, reported that, in fact, the prime minister’s mother, Margaret Trudeau, and his brother, Alexandre Trudeau, were paid a combined $352,000 for speaking engagements from WE or a We-affiliated organization. (A speakers’ bureau took a 20 per cent cut.)
The charity insists the distinction about which specific organization signed the cheques matters, and has acknowledged that some direct payments to the Trudeaus were made through WE Charity — an accounting error, it insists, that was corrected, with funds being reimbursed by WE’S for-profit arm.
WE’S lawyers and accountants are welcome to knock themselves out spinning that narrative, for all the good it’ll do either WE or the prime minister. The point isn’t the precise corporate structure of whatever specific slice of the organizational flowchart was tasked with cutting the cheques. It’s that the broader WE organization, with all its various parts and entities, was sending big money to the PM’S close relations while the PM was in office (the payments covered 2016 through 2020, says Canadaland), and then received a huge contract for federal work. That’s the point.
Actually, no, it’s not the point at all, insists the PMO. In a delightfully tone-deaf statement, the PMO said, in part, “The prime minister’s relatives engage with a variety of organization (sic) and support many personal causes of their own accord. What is important to remember here is that this is about a charity supporting students.”
Well, there you have it, Canadians. The important part isn’t the sole-source contract from the federal government, awarded by a cabinet vote the PM admits he did not recuse himself from, to an organization that has belatedly fessed up, after previously denying it, to paying his mom and brother hundreds of thousands of dollars. The important thing for Canadians to remember, the PMO insists, is that the charity was supporting students.
Sure. Just like the important thing to remember is that the Aga Khan has a really nice island.
No one would argue that the prime minister and his nearest and dearest can’t support “a variety of organization(s) ... and many personal causes.” They should! It’s lovely that they do. The problem is when money flows from one of those organizations/causes as huge sums of public money flow to the organization (or its affiliates). It’s a gigantic conflict of interest, and good motives don’t absolve the PM of basic accountability and transparency obligations. Much as this might surprise him.
That the PMO is pretending not to understand what the voters will instantly get tells you a lot about how confident they feel going into this latest self-made ethics crisis for Trudeau — a man with something of a habit of finding himself in jams a lot like this one.