WE contract may be sign of corruption, Scheer says

OTTAWA— The Opposition Conservatives accused the Liberal government of either corruption or ignorance Monday as they pressed for more answers around a decision to hand control over a major student grant program to an organization with longtime ties to the Trudeau family. The House of Commons was sitting to pass a new bill to extend the wage subsidy program, send a special COVID-19 topup to some people with disabilities and to extend legal deadlines for court cases.

While those measures were expected to pass with the support of all opposition parties, the same collegial spirit did not extend to question period.

There, the dominant line of inquiry was around the Liberal government’s decision to award WE Charity the responsibility for a $900-million student job program.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mother, in particular, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for participating in WE events, and Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s daughter works for an arm of the WE organization.

The organization has handed the program back to the government and both Trudeau and Morneau have said they should have recused themselves from the decision. But the international development and youth empowerment group is now under scrutiny for its internal practices, adding further fuel to the opposition’s charges that the decision to grant the contract to WE was suspect.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer pointed Monday to a report by Canadaland that red flags had been raised in 2018 by auditors reviewing WE’s financials, as well as the fact that their board had undergone a major shakeup earlier in the year as evidence the Liberals had not done their due diligence in deciding to sign off on the contract.

“Either the Liberals were aware of these issues and still approved the decision or they were incompetent,” he said. “It’s either corruption or incompetence, which is it?”

It is neither, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland replied repeatedly, nearly reading verbatim from a sheet of paper with the Liberals’ current topline talking point on the issue: that the idea of having WE run the Canada Student Services Grant was brought forward by the non-partisan public service. Trudeau did not show on Monday, his itinerary listing him as taking a personal day. Scheer suggested Trudeau was ducking any questions on the ongoing controversy. “(Trudeau) picked today to come back to debate this bill and also to participate in question period, then he decided to take a personal day,” Scheer said.