Thank you, Chair.
As foreshadowed, I would now like to move another motion:
That, given that the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation received a $125-million taxpayer funded payment in 2002, the committee hold 3 hearings into the situation at the Trudeau Foundation and report its findings to the House.
Colleagues will recall that last Monday I spoke a bit about the importance of this investigation into the Trudeau Foundation. At the time, we presented a detailed motion that included specific suggested witness names and called for a somewhat broader study than the one we are proposing today. Debate was adjourned on that motion.
I'm hopeful that this motion will find the favour of the committee. Recognizing that there are competing priorities from different members, I think three meetings provide us with a good opportunity to look at this issue while at the same time leaving space for other things, and we'll start the work of identifying what we can identify in the context of those public hearings.
The background of this story I think members and the public know generally, which is that as soon as Prime Minister Trudeau took office, the foundation that bears his name started receiving substantial amounts of new money in foreign donations. The foundation said they had returned certain monies and that turned out not to be true. Subsequently, this provoked a kind of governance crisis in the board and mass resignations.
I think it's important to add today, in light of some new revelations from La Presse, that the Prime Minister has made claims about his relationship—or lack of a relationship—with the foundation that bears his name that have turned out not to be true. The Prime Minister has repeatedly told the House that he has had no connection, no involvement, with the foundation in the last 10 years, despite the fact that he is listed as a member of the foundation in their latest annual report.
In particular, La Presse identified that six months into his premiership, there was a meeting, an event, hosted by the Trudeau Foundation that happened in the office of the Prime Minister's own department. It was attended by the president of the Trudeau Foundation and was attended by five deputy ministers. It seems that not only the Chinese Communist Party but also multiple senior members of the bureaucracy felt that it was in their interest to have a warm relationship with the Trudeau Foundation at a time when a Trudeau was Prime Minister, at a time when that foundation was benefiting from significant amounts of foreign donations and while the Prime Minister was still listed as a member of the foundation.
This poppycock about a firm wall between the Prime Minister's Office and the Trudeau Foundation is, needless to say, hard to take. The Prime Minister's Office and PCO are in two separate buildings. There's a bridge between them, and I think that's maybe an apt metaphor for the relationship that may have existed between the Trudeau Foundation, itself a public institution in statute.... It's not a regular charity. It's a public institution in statute that has received massive injections of taxpayers' money.
I think all of these facts suggest that (a) the Prime Minister of Canada has been less than truthful in his explanation of events and (b) three public hearings at the public accounts committee is the least we can do to try to help the public understand and get to the bottom of what took place.
Thank you.