Marathon committee meetings as Liberals continue filibusters over WE documents
Two House of Commons committee meetings dragged on for hours Thursday as Liberal MPs continued to filibuster opposition efforts to reopen their investigations into the WE Charity affair.
The finance committee was still droning on after eight hours of debating amendments to a Conservative motion denouncing redactions to some 5,000 pages of documents released by the government in August — just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament, shutting down four separate committee investigations into the affair.
The ethics committee was similarly stalled, going on five hours by early evening, over a Conservative motion calling on Speakers’ Spotlight, the agency that arranged speaking engagements for Trudeau’s wife, mother and brother at WE events, to hand over 12 years of receipts for the trio’s paid appearances.
WE Charity, which was to have been paid $43.5 million to manage a now-defunct federal student volunteering program, has already disclosed that it paid Margaret and Alexandre Trudeau more than $350,000 over the years.
Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, was paid a one-time fee of $1,400 for an event in 2012, before her husband became prime minister.
Liberal members of the ethics committee complained that the motion is too broad, a “fishing expedition” aimed at delving into the financial affairs of the prime minister’s relatives beyond their involvement with WE.
They also argued that it is wrong for MPs to investigate members of another MP’s family and that the matter should be left with the federal ethics commissioner, who is already investigating Trudeau and former finance minister Bill Morneau, who also had close family ties to WE.
In the process, they read portions of the Conflict of Interest Act into the record, recounted the history of the ethics committee and embarked on lengthy digressions on entirely unrelated matters.
Liberal MP Han Dong went on at length about the government’s anti-racism strategy, recounting anecdotes of Asian-Canadians who’ve been subjected to racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. He argued the committee - which also deals with access to information and privacy issues - should be dealing with the impact of facial-recognition technology on people of colour rather than pursuing the WE affair, on which
Trudeau, his chief of staff, Morneau, the clerk of the Privy Council and multiple other public servants have already testified.
After several opposition MPs interrupted to question the relevance of Dong’s digression to the motion before the committee, Liberal MP Greg Fergus, chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, intervened to suggest that the interruptions themselves were evidence of unconscious bias.
“The constant interruption ... I know it’s not the intent of my honourable colleagues, but it just reminds me of the micro-aggressions that a lot of Canadians of colour face. I don’t hear other members being interrupted,” he said, urging them to allow Dong to continue speaking.
New Democrat MP Charlie Angus countered that if Liberals want to get on with a study of facial-recognition technology or anything else, they need only let the WE documents motion come to a vote and the committee could move on.
“I’m asking him not to play games, not to throw these heavily loaded insinuations down at my colleagues,” Angus said. “If he wants to talk about something, just bring this to a vote so we can get this thing done.”