The CRA decides what it's going to do. I saw briefly some of the testimony from CRA senior officials here. I think Mr. Johnson said, yeah, okay; if the CRA wants to look at the Trudeau Foundation, that would probably be desirable at this point, because there's been so much noise and so much smoke raised about this that there has to be some sort of a process to sort it out.
With all due respect, it's not going to happen at a parliamentary committee. There's just a lot of partisanship within a parliamentary committee. It's going to have to be another process.
The CRA is one way of doing it, and I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive. What the Trudeau Foundation is trying to do now with an independent forensic audit by a firm it has no association with, as I understand, is another way of doing it. There are ongoing discussions—I read the newspapers—between representatives of all the political parties on what the way forward is after Mr. Johnston's resignation.
I wonder, given some of the issues.... I'm not saying the Trudeau Foundation issue doesn't need to be looked at. It absolutely does, but there are a lot of issues that need to be looked at in terms of foreign interference: bullying and intimidation of expat populations, hostage diplomacy, trade sanctions and the kinds of censorship practices that are alleged to have been carried out by the Confucius Institutes. These are quite different from what we were looking at in terms of this “gift” to put on conferences. We could have put on a conference about Tiananmen Square, and these guys would not have had a word to say about it. It's a pretty weird influence operation, because it likely would have ended up embarrassing the Chinese.
They started off saying, “Let's do scholarships.” Scholarships are a much lower-risk proposition than conferences. Even if the conferences had a benign name, I know the people in the Trudeau Foundation. They would not have let human rights go. They would not have let climate change go. You would have had a very robust discussion, and it's not something the Chinese would have wanted to hear, so I thought this was actually great.