Will Trudeau testify at committee over the WE scandal？
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Summary
The scandal surrounding the Trudeau Foundation continues to grow, and on Wednesday, the Prime Minister finally apologized for his part in it. He said he made a mistake and should have recused himself from the discussions, but there are still questions about why he chose not to recuse himself. And a new report suggests that the PMO may have been involved in the fundraising for the We Day event.
Transcript
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Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of The Andrew Lawton Show.
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It is Wednesday and we are going to put the we in Wednesday.
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I've been waiting since Monday to use that joke and I finally get to now.
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You know, Justin Trudeau put out his daily itinerary for Wednesday and it was private meetings.
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So no public itinerary, no public announcements, no press conferences, no media avail.
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And all I could think of is, you know, how it looked like the we, the W and the E were
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I'm going like full QAnon conspiracy theory on this.
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In any case, the scandal is continuing to balloon and this is a big problem right now.
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We know that Justin Trudeau was giving a multi-million dollar contract, almost worth a billion dollars
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of government money under the control of a charity that has been paying his buddies and
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Now this comes after being rather unrepentant last week.
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He should have recused himself from the discussions.
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This morning, I know people want to hear more about the Canada Student Service Grant Program
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in particular, I know there are many questions and problems with the way this program has
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run out, run about, and I know people have concerns about it.
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I made a mistake in not recusing myself immediately from the discussions given our family's history.
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And I'm sincerely sorry about not having done that.
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It's either better late than never or too little too late.
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And I'm going to probably side with too little too late because of how Justin Trudeau and
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the Prime Minister's office were talking about this last week by saying, listen, it's only
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They had an option to clean it up last week and they didn't.
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So I don't think we can really give them too much credit for doing the right thing if
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it's coming after attempting to deflect and muddle and muddy the discussion for several
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And now we have another development of this in the National Post that it was the Trudeau
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government itself that organized and contributed over $1 million to a We Day event in 2017,
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during which the Post says, we likely gave some of that money to Margaret Trudeau to speak.
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Now, I don't think this is that, you know, this was orchestrated by the PMO.
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I don't think it's that, you know, they said, all right, we're going to invite you guys to
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We're going to pay you, but you have to invite my mom to speak.
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No, but I think it shows the deep and intricately linked ties that exist between we and the
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government, the longstanding ties, financial and familial.
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And it really reinforces the question of why on earth did Trudeau think that it was his
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right to not recuse himself from this discussion?
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And by the way, Seamus O'Regan and Katie Telford, also two very high ranking liberals, one in
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cabinet, one in the PMO, also have fundraised hundreds of thousands of dollars for We.
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And as a taxpaying Canadian, I think most people are looking at this and saying, like,
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You could not get away with this in any other sector.
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You could not get away with it in any other space.
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But this is what passes for integrity in Justin Trudeau's government.
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And look, Mary Dawson, who's the former ethics commissioner, says she's fairly certain that
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he's going to have been found to have contravened the rules.
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But I would look at, again, Mary Dawson's thing and say, look, she may be right.
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But this reinforces why it is so dangerous right now that we have an ethics regime that
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He can cover it by doing just a five minute speech for We and that will be enough.
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There's no real remedy that the ethics commissioner can force.
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And more importantly, there's no real punishment for breaking the rules, even if you are, as
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Justin Trudeau is when it comes to federal ethics rules, a repeat offender.
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So the conservatives on the finance committee are calling Justin Trudeau to the committee
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This is what the conservatives are trying to seek here.
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Pierre Paliyev is the conservative finance critic and a member of parliament.
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So let's talk about, I mean, there are a lot of aspects to this.
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I mean, I made a comment on the show the other day that I think we should be getting a bulk
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But we're talking about a situation here that I think is continuously rearing its head, which
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is just a fundamental disrespect for the federal ethics laws and just, I'd say, for political
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I think the problem we have here is that the prime minister thinks he's a king.
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He has been told his whole life that he's a prince.
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And princes and kings often don't think that the rules of the realm apply to them.
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So he would probably subconsciously anyway say, yes, normally it would be unethical for a prime
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minister to direct a billion dollar sole source contract to a group that had paid his family
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I think that is the prime minister's personal sentiment.
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And the media, the mainstream media on Parliament Hill, not the media out in the real world,
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but those around him in the precinct, reinforced that notion.
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And they were doing everything they could during the pandemic to treat him as though he was a
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king who would come out of his castle and grace us all with his presence daily, giving
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And that even questioning his conduct was completely, almost treasonous.
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And I think through that experience, he started to think that he could just do anything he
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And when you mentioned questioning, the Conservatives have now tried to get him before the Finance
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Number one, how likely do you think it is that that'll happen?
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And number two, what is it that you can really get out of this?
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I mean, it does seem plain as day what happened.
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What more is there that you think we need to learn?
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Well, we want to know where this idea came from.
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I mean, he continually claims that the public service concocted this scheme.
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Andrew, I used to be the minister responsible for employment and training.
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And I can tell you there's no way the bureaucracy in that department would have concocted this
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It just doesn't make any sense, especially given that the purported purpose of the program
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is to pay young people to help charities and non-for-profits.
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In fact, the amounts that they subsidize hourly wages is similar to what Trudeau proposes with
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So in other words, it's basically a duplication of something already done within the public
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I would be stunned if public servants, knowing that, and they do, would have recommended
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farming the program out that they already run inside.
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And so I believe that we need to find out where this idea originated.
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And I suspect that what we will find as we follow the breadcrumbs is that it was the Trudeau,
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the Team Trudeau, the elites around him, and those who stood to profit from this transaction
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You mentioned something interesting there about the pre-existing program.
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If you were to take out the Trudeau-We connections and all of the connections between Bill Morneau
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and We and Seamus O'Regan and We and take out all of those things, does it seem like it
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I mean, or something that was unnecessary, even if you take out the conflicts of interest?
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I mean, you know, Orwell warns us that whenever governments abuse language, they're probably
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And to start with, he calls it a paid volunteer program.
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I mean, you can't, you can't, you can either be paid or you can volunteer, but you can't
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If you're paid, then you're not, by definition, a volunteer.
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Then it's a summer job, a la Canada summer jobs program.
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Now, they needed to invent a new name, though, in order to justify a new program.
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And that was the only reason why this program, why this name was created.
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They would have loved to just say it's a summer job program.
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But if they did that, then they wouldn't have been able to justify creating a separate
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Everyone would have said, well, why wouldn't you just use the program that already goes by
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So, so whenever you see language that is abused, you'll see other abuses.
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You know, the other thing, Andrew, I would point out is that so often with these scandals,
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they result from governments doing things that they have no business doing in the first
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Like the sponsorship program, you know, was it really justified for any government to
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be putting advertise, advertorials and advertisements up at these events all over a particular province?
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Well, I mean, even if it had cost one dollar, it was something the government should not have
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And here again, we have government interfering with the charitable sector to effectively corrupt
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the very meaning of a benevolent word like volunteer.
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And so whenever governments venture outside of their core purpose, they tend to attract
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corruption or perhaps it's the other way around.
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Perhaps corruption attracts government outside of its core mandate.
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And, you know, I'm all for finding ways that we can, you know, perhaps download the bureaucracy's
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responsibilities and find private sector delivery of services.
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But that doesn't seem at all like what this was.
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This was really just expanding the bureaucracy to a group that wouldn't even have the accountability.
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And this is something we always have to watch out for.
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We as conservatives, we say, look, let's remove government and allow either the private sector
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or the societal sectors like charity and philanthropy to replace it.
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But we have to be careful that we don't get the opposite of what we are looking for.
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So instead of, in this case, instead of vacating the space, the government vacating the space
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so that the volunteer and charitable sector could fill it, they tried to nationalize the
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And instead of expanding the role of society and shrinking the role of government, they did
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And we see this, for example, with the infrastructure bank.
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We'd all like to see more private sector investment in infrastructure.
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But with the infrastructure bank, what they're doing is the opposite.
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They're taking things that are already privately financed and nationalizing the risk.
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So we have to be very careful to watch the real meaning of words and actions to determine
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if government is, in fact, just grabbing more power and controlling more and more of our lives.
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I mentioned earlier on in the show, one of the big problems is that our ethics infrastructure
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that we have for investigating and pursuing these doesn't really have any teeth.
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And we know this because Justin Trudeau has been found to have violated this multiple times
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What do you think needs to be done to reform the ethics and conflict of interest process
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so that there's actually some heft behind it when they go after lawmakers that have broken
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Well, listen, I don't know that there are I think that the problem with the previous violations
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is that the police didn't do the job and we have law enforcement for to to apply the criminal
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In the case of the Aga Khan Island, the police simply just didn't do the job.
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There are provisions in the criminal code that ban government officials from accepting benefits
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from entities that are that are seeking assistance from government.
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And so in the case of the Aga Khan Billionaire Island vacation, Trudeau took two hundred thousand
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dollars of vacations from someone asking him personally for a 15 million dollar grant.
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The RCMP doesn't disagree with me on that, by the way.
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They wrote back and they didn't say, you know, no, he didn't break the law.
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They said, no, we can't productively pursue an investigation.
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You can't productively pursue an investigation.
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Did someone in the government block you from doing your job?
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You know, so in other words, the RCMP did not do its job.
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And frankly, if the Mounties felt they were implicated in that scandal, they should have
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just referred it to a different police force to do an independent criminal investigation.
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And so and I think maybe that's what the Mounties are going to have to do in this case,
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to simply say we're too close to the prime minister.
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Maybe the Mounties ought to simply redirect the complaint to the OPP, the QPP, the Ottawa
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Police Service or some other police entity that is not compromised by prime ministerial
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So do you think the police should be involved in this situation as well, then, just to be
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I don't I'm not saying I haven't concluded that there was a criminal code breach.
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I'm neither a police officer nor a judge, so I don't have the and we don't all we don't
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But I certainly think that the police should examine whether or not there was a breach of
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trust, whether or not the prime minister considered the payment to his family to be an inducement,
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you know, that that motivated him to create this extremely unusual contract.
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And and so there should be a high level inspector investigator with a police force
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go in, establish all of the facts and determine whether or not the criminal code applies.
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Just turning before we wrap things up here to the broader financial state of Canada right
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now, we found out last week a deficit to over three hundred and forty billion dollars.
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I know that a lot of that was inevitable just given government forcing people to shut down
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How much of that do you think was avoidable, though?
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I mean, I mean, I know that you've been critical, as has the leader of the Conservatives right
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now, Andrew Scheer, about a lot of the programs and how they were delivered.
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Do you think that we could have had an even smaller deficit?
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Oh, there's no doubt we should have gone into this with a balanced budget from 2016 until
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And for for some of that time, not all of it, some of that time, commodity prices were high
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and the U.S. economy, which we have the privilege of neighboring, was on fire.
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And therefore, we had all the winds blowing at our backs.
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And there's no reason we ought not to balance the budget in that time period.
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If we had, then the balance going in would have been strong.
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And the debt load we carry, total debt load, would have been about 80 or 90 billion dollars
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The other thing I would point out is that the programs that are designed to respond to
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COVID have serious anti-growth, anti-work attributes.
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Like if you're on this CERB program, you go back and earn more than $1,000.
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So a lot of workers are saying that they can't go back to work and they can't earn money for
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We should remove that anti-work penalty, let people earn more than $1,000 and let them
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phase out their CERB as they earn more with their jobs.
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Both of them require businesses keep their revenues down 30 or in some cases 70 percent
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So that requires businesses to artificially suppress revenues in order to get government
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They should remove that and make those scalable programs so businesses are always better off
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with an extra sale or an extra dollar of revenue.
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Those kinds of pro-growth policies would allow businesses and workers to recover.
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It would reduce dependence on government and increase the taxes that businesses and workers
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We cannot, the government and the Bank of Canada cannot simply pay the wages of the nation
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And I guess that just in closing, we know there's a conservative leadership race on right now.
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The election could be theoretically at any point in the next couple of years.
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What do you think the conservatives moving forward need to do, either in running for an election
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or even if they form government, to get the books in check?
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I mean, because obviously you have to close that deficit somehow.
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You don't want to raise revenues by increasing taxes.
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And certainly cutting spending is going to be something that will unleash the mass of criticism
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Well, I think we need a pro-growth free market agenda that will unleash the economy.
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We have trillions of dollars in natural resources locked beneath the ground because of anti-development
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We have a tax system that punishes work and business earnings.
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We have some of the slowest approvals for normal economic activity.
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It takes almost three times longer to get a warehouse approved for construction in Canada
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Just as one example, we need to remove all of those obstacles to unleash the full power of
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That will generate the wealth necessary to phase out our deficit over time
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and enable our people to carry the enormous debt load that governments have thrust upon them.
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Conservative finance critic Pierre Polyev joining me on the line.
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Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
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Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.