O’Regan may face inquiry over vacation
O T TAWA • The federal ethics commissioner may investigate Liberal cabinet minister Seamus O’Regan for failing to disclose a vacation to the Aga Khan’s private island.
In December, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was found to have violated federal conflict-of-interest and ethics rules by accepting an all-expenses-paid vacation to a Bell Cay, a private island in the Bahamas owned by the Aga Khan, two winters ago.
O’Regan and his husband were guests of the Trudeau family during the December 2016 trip, first revealed by the National Post, which was organized by Trudeau’s wife Sophie and the Aga Khan’s daughter. But the now-Veterans Affairs Minister didn’t disclose the gift to the ethics commissioner and was never scrutinized by the commissioner’s office for potential conflicts-of-interest.
“I have received a request for information from the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner regarding a preliminary review and I will continue to co-operate fully with any requests from his office,” O’Regan said in a statement to the Post on Wednesday.
“As I have stated previously, the trip in question was a personal vacation and when I returned from that vacation, I reported it to the Commissioner’s office.”
Finding Trudeau guilty of rule-breaking was previous commissioner Mary Dawson’s last act. With new ethics commissioner Mario Dion looking to set the stage for his mandate, NDP MP Charlie Angus said he saw an opportunity to request an investigation that he had been “thinking about for some time.”
“Seamus never registered his trip to the Aga Khan’s island and I thought that was really odd,” he told the Post on Tuesday. “It just doesn’t square, how the prime minister could be held guilty of breaching, breaking the code of ethics, and the person who travelled with them hasn’t even bothered to register. It’s obviously an inappropriate gift.”
Dion has responded saying that he will consider a formal inquiry, Angus said.
That means giving O’Regan up to 30 days to respond to the complaint, then making a decision within 15 more business days about whether or not an investigation is warranted.
Angus brought the matter to Dion with a letter March 27, in which he implored the ethics commissioner to call attention to issues “which I feel were not resolved during your predecessor’s tenure and highlight a significant weakness in the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons.”