Mere Unfortunate Forgetfulness : A Finance Minister Who Fails to Audit His Personal Expenses

Finance Minister Bill Morneau . Screen grab/CPAC

"It's my mistake. When we took a look at our personal records we found expenses for flights and personal hotels, but we didn't find expenses for the WE facilities."
"I did not know that those expenses were not paid. I did not have any awareness of that. It was a mistake and I take responsibility for it."
Finance Minister Bill Morneau

"The average Canadian living in Red Deer or Halifax would notice if there was a $400 expense they didn't pay. You're saying that a $41,000 expense happened right under your nose and you didn't know about it until the very day you were set to testify at a parliamentary committee?"
"Do you realize now that was illegal? You as a minister are strictly prohibited from accepting any type of sponsored travel."
"Canadians will find it impossible to believe that this organization showered you with $41,000 in luxury accommodation and somehow you didn't know about it."
"Who did you think paid for all the wine and food and luxury travel?"
Conservative Member of Parliament Pierre Poilievre

"Have you read the Conflict of Interest Act?
"You are not thinking there is a problem here, but they [WE Charity] are paying for [your] influence."
NDP Member of Parliament Charlie Angus

Canada's Finance Minister has much to answer for. Just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's personal relationship with the Kielburger brothers, Co-founders and heads of the WE Charity whose mother received $250,000 in speaking fees from the charity, whose brother was paid as a speaker by them, and whose wife also received an honorarium, as a spokesperson for the charity. This is a charity that the prime minister insisted was the only group in Canada with the skills and contacts enabling them to administer a $912-million fund to pay students up to $5,000 for volunteer work.

The charity itself was scheduled to receive about $43 million for its troubles. Its troubles began when a gonzo news site, CANADALAND uncovered all manner of connections between the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau and the charity which has in the past received additional funding from Canadian taxpayers, courtesy of the Trudeau administration. Mr. Poilievre asked Mr. Morneau about a grant for $3 million given WE the same month his daughter took a job with the charity.

Failure on the part of Canada's minister of finance to divulge that one daughter is a speaker for the charity and another a contract employee though he failed to recuse himself on a vote to give the untendered contract of close to a billion to the charity contravened Section 21 of the Conflict of Interest Act. The issue of paid travel and hospitality dating back to 2017 for two family vacations in Ecuador and Kenya, courtesy of the WE Charity represented a breach of Sections 11 and 12 of the Act, barring public office holders from accepting gifts that could conceivably influence decisions.

This is not the first time that the minister has been in breach of parliamentary ethics rules for which he previously was censured and the same is true for Justin Trudeau. There are now two parliamentary committees struck to investigate the entire Canada Student Service Grant which WE Charity was supposed to manage, placing students into volunteer placements. Once it was publicly revealed that Trudeau's brother, mother and wife had received payments from the organization, the agreement fell through under the weight of the scandal.

But the issues of ethical misconduct keep growing.

Under the scrutiny of the parliamentary finance committee, Mr. Morneau saw fit to claim that the issues revolving around the strange relationships between government figures and this charity's influence in gaining contracts, Mr. Morneau chose to name Employment and Social Development Canada Minister Bardish Chagger responsible for the chaos, certainly not himself. The parliamentary opposition Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois called for the minister to resign.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives on stage at We Day on Parliament Hill. The House of Commons finance committee begins its probe today into the federal government's decision to have WE Charity run a $900-million student grant program. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)