In the process, in order for me to understand the past, my first reaction was to find the charity tax receipt that had been submitted at the time.
Two receipts were signed and issued by my predecessor, Morris Rosenberg. As soon as I learned of the two receipts, a number of questions came to mind.
The first receipt mentions an address in China, with the name of that company, but without the names of the two donors who were mentioned in the contract that was signed on behalf of these two donors—on behalf of the foundation by Alexandre Trudeau, and on behalf of Université de Montréal. The names of these two donors do not appear in 2016 on the receipt issued by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and signed by Morris Rosenberg, and the address was in China.
The second receipt in 2017 is different from the first one. The name of the company is there. The address is in Quebec, and the names of the donors are there.
I immediately started to ask questions about why we would have two receipts that were so different. One seemed to be international, with money that seemed to come from China, and the other one had an address in Quebec. The CFO, Caroline Lin, was working with me on that file. We tried to understand what was sent to the government.
There are two considerations. First, when receipts like that are issued, they obviously have to go to the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA. My first response was to figure out what had been sent and what was different in this particular case.
Second, there were the annual reports from 2016 and 2017. The foundation is required by the federal government to submit reports. Annual reports have to be approved by the board, posted on our website and submitted to our partner, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, or ISED.
In putting the pieces of the puzzle together, I realized that, in the 2016 and 2017 annual reports, which are publicly available, the company's name didn't appear but the two donors' names did. That means information was reported publicly, but it differed from the information on the receipt provided to the CRA.
I dug deeper, and I came across emails dated before I joined the foundation that were from an association in China. The association was asking staff at the foundation to put certain information on the tax receipts issued to the association.
The association said, “Please don't put the names of the donor. Please put that address in China,” and so on.
It's very important to clarify that I wasn't there then and I wasn't the president. As you can appreciate, I had access to only some of the information.