Juno News - Can we trust Trudeau's foreign affairs minister？

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?

00:00:00.000 Is Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne personally

00:00:09.560 compromised by the Chinese government and the fact that he took out 1.2

00:00:14.720 million dollars worth of mortgages from them, from the Bank of China, which is

00:00:18.840 wholly owned, wholly directed by the Chinese government? I hope the answer is 1.00

00:00:23.440 no. I hope these are just files buried somewhere at the bottom of the desk that

00:00:26.840 have not been flagged by anyone, but you just don't know, and that is part of the

00:00:31.320 problem. That is the challenge. You just don't want to put yourself in that

00:00:34.780 situation to begin with. Now, the Liberal government say this is much ado about

00:00:39.420 nothing. There's nothing to see here, folks, and when he was living in the

00:00:42.180 United Kingdom back in 2009 and 2013 is when these mortgages were taken out. He

00:00:47.940 had some difficulties because he wasn't a UK citizen and some other technicalities

00:00:52.080 so he had to go with a non-traditional lender. Okay, you can kind of appreciate

00:00:55.820 that, but there's also a lot of non-traditional lenders out there in the

00:00:59.460 real estate finance world. Did you really have to go with the government of

00:01:03.100 China? I mean, this is not a good idea for really anybody, let alone someone who's 1.00

00:01:08.760 maybe thinking of a career in politics a couple years further down the road. Not a

00:01:13.740 good scene at all, but I've got to ask another question here. As I was reading

00:01:17.380 through this story, I kind of thought, how many years was Minister Champagne abroad? He

00:01:22.060 first gets elected in 2015. The second mortgage was taken out in 2013. One would

00:01:28.280 assume he didn't leave the UK the day after he got that mortgage, that he stayed

00:01:32.380 a little further into, I don't know, 2014 or early 2015 when he would have run for the

00:01:37.400 nomination in the writing that he is in. And we're told that in his 20-year career

00:01:42.680 in these prominent positions with big corporations, it was spent largely around

00:01:46.560 the world. I just find it curious that our foreign affairs minister has spent most of his

00:01:50.740 professional career perhaps not actually living in Canada and just comes back around

00:01:55.780 the time of his nomination. Former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, he arguably lost

00:02:00.040 the election in 2011 because of that very issue there. You will remember those

00:02:04.200 conservative attack ads that said, Michael Ignatieff, he didn't come back for you.

00:02:08.480 And you kind of got to look at this and go, this has not been discussed at all

00:02:11.900 previously in Canadian media that our foreign affairs minister spent so much time

00:02:16.460 abroad, not getting to know Canada, but elsewhere. Kind of interesting. How do you

00:02:22.700 feel about that? Let me know. I know how I feel about these mortgages. I think he

00:02:26.780 should probably find an exit strategy from them at the very least, particularly

00:02:30.760 now while the Canada-China relationship is so fraught, probably not going to be

00:02:35.780 getting any better anytime soon. And it will be up to people like Champagne to

00:02:39.460 actually make the decisions that need to be made for Canada to responsibly

00:02:44.040 decoupled from China. Can he do that in the position he's in right now? I don't

00:02:48.400 know. Maybe he can, but it's still probably best to not have those mortgages

00:02:53.160 on the books.

Juno News - June 18, 2020

Can we trust Trudeau's foreign affairs minister？

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