I'll read it into the record. That's fine. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It is important that as a committee we're able to take up urgent issues of the day, therefore I'm moving a motion that I provided notice of, which is aimed at getting to the bottom of dishonest conduct and attempted foreign interference in the Trudeau Foundation.
The motion is as follows:
That, given that (i) the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation received a $125-million taxpayer-funded payment in 2002, when the Foundation was created, by a former Liberal government, (ii) the President and CEO and a majority of the board of directors of the Foundation resigned recently, (iii) the Foundation was reported to be incapable of repaying a large donation received from a wealthy individual connected to the CCP regime in Beijing because the donor's true identity is not known, (iv) the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had uncovered a plot by the CCP regime in Beijing to donate to the Foundation, and (v) it has been reported by media that some Foundation directors had considered calling in the Auditor General, the committee undertake a study concerning the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and its governance and funding, as well as the management of its taxpayer-funded endowment, provided that the committee hear testimony from (a) Morris Rosenberg, former president and CEO of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, (b) Pascale Fournier, former president and CEO of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, (c) the Auditor General of Canada, (d) the Minister of National Revenue, (e) the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, (f) Bob Hamilton, the commissioner and chief executive officer of the Canada Revenue Agency, (g) Sharmila Khare, director general of the Canada Revenue Agency's charities directorate, and (h) other witnesses as deemed necessary by the committee.
Mr. Chair, as you know, Conservatives have been working hard to get to the bottom of the serious problem of CCP interference in Canadian democracy. It is becoming clear that there was from the beginning a concerted effort by the Xi Jinping regime to co-opt and shape the direction of this Liberal government, and that those efforts targeted Justin Trudeau even before he took office. It could be, in certain cases, that efforts at influence were rebuffed by the intended target, but in this case it is becoming clear that the Prime Minister and those around him were aware of this attempted interference and accepted it because they benefited from it. They benefited from it in the form of dollars for a family foundation and in the form of electoral support.
This is an urgent issue because Canadians and their representatives on this side of the House are deeply concerned about threats to Canadian sovereignty and about the reality that hostile foreign actors with interests contrary to Canada's are trying to capture our leaders and subvert our institutions.
In response to these pressing concerns about foreign state-backed interference and threats to our national security and our sovereignty, Liberals have been desperate to bury the story. They and their proxies have attacked journalists, attacked CSIS, attacked the opposition, stonewalled studies through extended filibusters at various committees, and refused to answer basic questions during committee appearances.
Conservatives continue to push, as we have from the beginning, for a full public inquiry into foreign interference, an inquiry led by someone who is truly independent of the government and of the organizations implicated in this scandal, so my motion today is about the role of the Trudeau Foundation in attempts by the CCP to interfere in Canadian democracy.
The role of the Trudeau Foundation in this scandal is particularly important. As soon as a prime minister also named Trudeau took office, foreign donations to the foundation skyrocketed. It does not take a Trudeau Foundation scholar to figure out that there was some relationship, at least in the minds of these foreign donors, between the foundation and the Prime Minister, such that they had a reason to donate to the foundation after 2015 that they did not have before 2015.
Again, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
In fact, Le Devoir recently reported that the Trudeau Foundation began actively soliciting these foreign donations. Again, they can't have been ignorant of the implications of having a Trudeau prime minister and soliciting money from foreign donors to this family foundation who also wanted to have an influence over the direction of the Canadian government.
This was quite obvious and was, in fact, the subject of repeated questions by our party in question period in the early days after 2015. These questions were blown off by Liberals at the time, who continued to praise and defend the Trudeau Foundation.
Since that time, though, the leadership of the Trudeau Foundation has faced further scrutiny, promised to return a donation to a CCP insider, claimed that it had returned the donation, failed to return the donation and then resigned en masse. Through these events, there has been a great deal of bluster from senior Liberals, Liberals who want to blame the media and Conservatives for the problems of the Trudeau Foundation and the Trudeau government.
In response to some of this misinformation, it's important to put the facts about the Trudeau Foundation on the record. The Trudeau Foundation is not a normal charity. It is defined in law as a government institution. The Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act define the Trudeau Foundation as a government institution. In fact, the Trudeau Foundation's privacy policy says as much on its website. The Federal Accountability Act also specifically names the Trudeau Foundation and empowers the Auditor General to follow the money that it spends.
Importantly, though, the Trudeau Foundation was not directly set up by government. It was created as a family foundation, with a preferred position in governance given to members of the Trudeau family, including the current Prime Minister. It was a family foundation that was subsequently turned into a government institution through the injection of $125 million of taxpayers' money.
Regardless of the merits of its work, this is an extremely odd governance structure for any organization. You have a family foundation that is a registered charity but that also has many of the characteristics of a Crown corporation, insofar as it has been heavily subsidized and insofar as it is defined as a government institution in various statutes. In effect, it has the freedom of a private charitable organization while benefiting from the Prime Minister's name and taxpayers' money, even while members of his family continue to shape its future.
Liberals have claimed that this Frankenstein had bipartisan support, but that does not appear to be the case, based on my review of Hansard. John Williams, a former chair of this committee, said in the House on March 19, 2002, when the appropriations for the Trudeau Foundation were being discussed, “Mr. Speaker, could the President of the Treasury Board confirm that the bill is in its usual form for an appropriation bill and that the $125 million donation to the Pierre Trudeau foundation and opposed by the opposition is actually in order?”
On the governance structure specifically, the governance of the Trudeau Foundation is invested in the foundation's membership, which in turn selects the board of directors. These are clear facts, and you can find them on page 53 of the foundation's latest annual report. There are 30 members of the foundation. Six seats out of 30 seats are set aside for members appointed by the Minister of Industry, and three are reserved for “liquidators of the succession of the late Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau”, effectively members of the Trudeau family or family appointees. Nine of 30 spots of those who control this organization are selected by either the Trudeau government or the Trudeau family.
Both Sacha Trudeau and Justin Trudeau are members of the foundation. The Prime Minister identifies as an “Inactive Member”, although he continues to be a member of the foundation with, apparently, the associated powers and privileges. This is an even more curious relationship, that a sitting prime minister retains membership in a foundation, along with his brother and up to six members that his government directly appoints, and along with David Johnston, who is apparently responsible for investigating this whole mess. Claiming non-involvement is a bit odd, given that he maintains membership in the foundation.
The members of the Trudeau Foundation select the Trudeau Foundation's board of directors—up to 18 directors—with two seats reserved for representatives appointed by the Minister of Industry and two seats set aside for members or reps of the Trudeau family. At the time of the last annual report being published, Sarah Coyne, the Prime Minister's half-sister, was one of the family representatives on the board, so the Trudeau Foundation had the Prime Minister as one of 30 members, though he identifies as inactive, another sibling as an ostensibly active member, and another sibling as a member of the board of directors. About one-third of the membership spots and one-third of the director spots are reserved for appointees of the Trudeau government or the Trudeau family.
Whatever the Prime Minister's ongoing involvement in the Trudeau Foundation is or isn't, the CCP were not incorrect in their calculation that this family foundation is close to his heart. Allan Rock said as much when he announced the Liberal government's massive injection of funds into the Trudeau Foundation in 2002. He said, “Two people deserve particular credit. Without Sacha and Justin Trudeau's determination, idealism and, yes, their father's famous stubbornness, today's announcement would simply not have been possible.”
Liberals like Allan Rock know that the Trudeau Foundation is close to the Prime Minister's heart and subject to his potential influence. That reality is evident from even a cursory review of the Trudeau Foundation's governing documents. When, today, Liberals like Allan Rock whine about how we shouldn't criticize a charity, they are being highly misleading, and they know it.
Government institutions such as the Trudeau Foundation should be held accountable by parliamentary committees. The Trudeau Foundation was supported by Allan Rock and others to be able to use taxpayers' money and created to be subject to the ongoing influence simultaneously of the Liberal establishment and the Trudeau family.
When the good book says to build one's foundation upon a rock, it wasn't referring to Allan Rock. Unfortunately, the governance of this foundation is not on anything solid, but is on the shifting sands of politics and the preferences of the Trudeau family.
The Trudeau family has rightly been subject to significant criticism over the fact that they cashed cheques from foreign entities that were clearly trying to use those donations to curry favour with the Government of Canada. It appears now that they solicited these donations from foreign sources. Further, it is now very clear that the Trudeau Foundation lied to Canadians about its decision to return a donation.
On March 1, the Trudeau Foundation issued a statement, which included the following:
The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation has learned in recent days through the media that there was a potential connection between the Chinese government and a 2016 pledge of $200,000 to be received by the Foundation.
It went on:
In light of these recent allegations, the Foundation has refunded to the donor all amounts received with respect to the donation pledge.
On March 1, the claim was made—past tense—that “the Foundation has refunded to the donor all amounts received with respect to the donation pledge”. It did not say that they were thinking about or planning to or intending to. It said, “The Foundation has refunded to the donor....” That was a lie. The statement did not say that they were intending to. It said that they had, but they hadn't. This failure contributed to the governance crisis that we have since seen at the Trudeau Foundation. This government and this Trudeau family institution were subject to a sustained campaign of foreign interference. They accepted the money and then lied about when they were returning it.
The Trudeau Foundation has now asked the Auditor General to investigate, and we need a thorough investigation by the House of Commons audit committee of where the money went and what governance problems at this government institution led us to that point.
That's why we have put forward this motion. It is squarely within this committee's mandate as the committee responsible for the audit function of Parliament to study this issue, to understand what auditing processes were involved and could be involved, and to look at the appropriateness of a CRA audit and a review by the Auditor General—things that of course we support—along with a fully independent public inquiry into the whole mess.
This government has commissioned two different people to investigate the foreign interference issue: Morris Rosenberg and David Johnston, both from the Trudeau Foundation. Liberals should not investigate Liberals, and Trudeau Foundation members and directors should not be investigating the Trudeau Foundation.
Honestly, Mr. Chair, sometimes this government behaves as if this country has only a dozen families in it. They keep recycling the same people who are part of the same well-connected Laurentian insider circles, from the same families related to themselves, who have served them in the past—Trudeau Foundation members investigating foreign interference, Dominic LeBlanc's sister as Ethics Commissioner.... I could go on.
In this massive country of almost 40 million people, with immigrants from all corners of the world, they nonetheless keep recycling the same insiders from the same insider families. This Liberal government is a government for their friends, for the connected corporate insiders who work for McKinsey and volunteer at the Trudeau Foundation. If you were born into or if you married into one of the 30 or 40 families that hold the cards, then no problem: You get the government contracts, the foreign donations, the ethical cover—whatever it is you're looking for. But I say that this is a big country. Let's act like it. Let's have proper parliamentary oversight. Let's call in the truly independent actors to get to the bottom of this ethical mess and get to the bottom of this corruption that is undermining trust in our institutions.
Conservatives would never dream of even trying a thing like this. Can you imagine if Conservatives started a Stephen Harper foundation, put all of Stephen Harper's heirs into leadership positions in the organization and then pumped $125 million from taxpayers into that foundation? Can you imagine the extent to which Liberals would lose their minds over such an arrangement? Conservatives would never do such a thing, because we will stand with the common people.
Liberals like Allan Rock, Gerry Butts and Justin Trudeau do not want to see powerful people and institutions held accountable. It's clear from their comments, but Conservatives will continue to speak truth to power on behalf of the common people, and we hope that other opposition parties will support us in passing this motion and helping us get to the bottom of this mess.
Thank you.
