Trudeau to testify over family’s ties to charity after scandal leaves his minority government in trouble

In a rare move for a Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau is set to testify before a parliamentary committee on Thursday in the burgeoning ethics scandal that’s casting a pall over his minority government.

The House of Commons finance committee is one of several groups probing his government’s decision to pick a charity with longstanding ties to his family to run a $670m (£512.9m) grant programme for student volunteers.

The Liberal leader, who has already apologised for his failure to recuse himself from discussions on the deal, will try to put an end to the saga that has sparked his third ethics investigation and calls that he and finance minister Bill Morneau resign.

But that could prove tough. Since Mr Trudeau announced in June that the Toronto-based WE Charity would administer the programme, a steady stream of revelations in the press and in parliamentary testimony have only led to more questions.

The agreement, for which there was no competitive bidding process, garnered negative attention immediately. Mr Trudeau has spoken at several WE Charity events, including its annual WE Day youth empowerment rallies. His wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, is a WE “ambassador”.

Amid the swirling controversy, the agreement was dissolved and the federal government said the programme would be run by public servants instead. Canada’s independent ethics watchdog launched the probe of Mr Trudeau.

Then media reports and testimony revealed that the charity and its for-profit arm had paid Mr Trudeau’s mother, Margaret, and his brother Alexandre more than $220,000 (£168,397) to appear and speak at its events from 2016 to 2020, and covered more than $150,000 (£114,816) in their expenses.

Mr Trudeau and Mr Morneau, whose family has its own ties to the charity, apologised for failing to recuse themselves from the cabinet discussions. But that wasn’t enough to tamp down the controversy.

During Mr Morneau’s turn in the hot seat last week, the finance minister told the committee that he had that morning cut a check to WE Charity for more than $30,000 (£22,963) in travel expenses incurred in 2017 when he and members of his family travelled with the organisation to Kenya and Ecuador.

Mr Morneau, who is also being investigated by the ethics watchdog, said he had realised only that week that he had not paid those expenses. He insisted it was always his intention “to pay the full costs of the trips” and offered another apology.

But WE Charity said the trips had been “complimentary”. In a news release, the organisation said it occasionally invites potential donors on trips to see its work up close, and extended invites to Mr Morneau and his wife because they were well-known philanthropists.

The government has offered inconsistent information about the youth grant programme, and several questions about its origins remain. It said in June that WE Charity would be paid $14m (£10.7m) to run the programme, which would help students who were having trouble finding summer jobs during the coronavirus outbreak by paying them to volunteer in their communities. Later, news reports and testimony revealed that the agreement was with the WE Charity Foundation, an entity the charity says manages “legal liability”, and that it stood to receive up to $32m (£24.4m).

Mr Trudeau has insisted that the charity was chosen on the advice of the nonpartisan public service, which indicated it was the best and only one for the job – a claim that others in the charity sector have challenged.

After a senior public servant testified that WE Charity had sent proposals for youth-related programmes to cabinet ministers’ offices in April, before the programme was announced, opposition lawmakers wondered whether political staffers put their thumbs on the scale.

WE Charity’s co-founders, brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger, defended themselves before the committee on Tuesday. Craig said neither he nor his brother had ever socialised with the Trudeau family, that the civil service initiated the programme, and that there was “no financial benefit” for the charity.

“WE Charity agreed to implement the Canada Student Service Grant not to be helped by government, but to help government and to help young people across Canada,” Craig Kielburger said during an often-adversarial four-hour hearing.

Polls suggest the scandal is chipping away at support for Mr Trudeau, who had been flying high thanks to his government’s generally lauded response to the pandemic.

Mr Trudeau, who campaigned on promises to bring “sunny ways” and transparency to government before he was elected prime minister in 2015, was rapped twice by the ethics watchdog for contravening conflict-of-interest laws during his first mandate. His Liberals lost their majority in the October election – he now leads a minority government.

The Kielburgers founded WE Charity as Free the Children in 1995. Its finances, real estate empire and governance model have come under scrutiny amid the controversy, prompting several sponsors to sever ties and raising questions about whether the federal government did its due diligence.

Michelle Douglas, a human rights activist who chaired the charity’s Canadian board of directors, testified this week that the charity’s executives refused her request to show the board financial documents that justified laying off hundreds of workers. She said she was asked to resign in March and did.

Ms Douglas said she had raised concerns about the WE Charity Foundation. She said it was the board’s understanding that guests at WE Days were not paid.

WE Charity said this month that it would launch a review and restructuring, scale back activities and cancel future WE Day activities for the foreseeable future.

The Washington Post