Can we trust Trudeau's foreign affairs minister？
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Summary
Is Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, Francois-Philippe Champagne, personally compromised by the Chinese government? Is there any truth behind the $1.2 million in mortgages he took out from the Bank of China?
Transcript
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Is Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne personally
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compromised by the Chinese government and the fact that he took out 1.2
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million dollars worth of mortgages from them, from the Bank of China, which is
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wholly owned, wholly directed by the Chinese government? I hope the answer is
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no. I hope these are just files buried somewhere at the bottom of the desk that
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have not been flagged by anyone, but you just don't know, and that is part of the
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problem. That is the challenge. You just don't want to put yourself in that
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situation to begin with. Now, the Liberal government say this is much ado about
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nothing. There's nothing to see here, folks, and when he was living in the
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United Kingdom back in 2009 and 2013 is when these mortgages were taken out. He
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had some difficulties because he wasn't a UK citizen and some other technicalities
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so he had to go with a non-traditional lender. Okay, you can kind of appreciate
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that, but there's also a lot of non-traditional lenders out there in the
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real estate finance world. Did you really have to go with the government of
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China? I mean, this is not a good idea for really anybody, let alone someone who's
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maybe thinking of a career in politics a couple years further down the road. Not a
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good scene at all, but I've got to ask another question here. As I was reading
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through this story, I kind of thought, how many years was Minister Champagne abroad? He
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first gets elected in 2015. The second mortgage was taken out in 2013. One would
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assume he didn't leave the UK the day after he got that mortgage, that he stayed
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a little further into, I don't know, 2014 or early 2015 when he would have run for the
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nomination in the writing that he is in. And we're told that in his 20-year career
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in these prominent positions with big corporations, it was spent largely around
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the world. I just find it curious that our foreign affairs minister has spent most of his
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professional career perhaps not actually living in Canada and just comes back around
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the time of his nomination. Former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, he arguably lost
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the election in 2011 because of that very issue there. You will remember those
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conservative attack ads that said, Michael Ignatieff, he didn't come back for you.
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And you kind of got to look at this and go, this has not been discussed at all
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previously in Canadian media that our foreign affairs minister spent so much time
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abroad, not getting to know Canada, but elsewhere. Kind of interesting. How do you
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feel about that? Let me know. I know how I feel about these mortgages. I think he
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should probably find an exit strategy from them at the very least, particularly
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now while the Canada-China relationship is so fraught, probably not going to be
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getting any better anytime soon. And it will be up to people like Champagne to
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actually make the decisions that need to be made for Canada to responsibly
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decoupled from China. Can he do that in the position he's in right now? I don't
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know. Maybe he can, but it's still probably best to not have those mortgages