From the viewer-voter’s point of view, the more this soap opera unfolds its new chapters, the more one doubts the transparency with which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approaches the affair of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation and its hints of Chinese interference. The Trudeau government is still turning a deaf ear to any request for a public inquiry aimed at truly shedding light on this muddle, but nothing in its response to date is satisfactory and guarantees an independent examination. .
This week, the Board of Directors and the President and CEO of the Trudeau Foundation resigned en bloc, alleging without too much convincing that this seemingly partisan hodgepodge of the past few days hardly suited the charity’s apolitical creed. — fed, let’s remember, by an initial donation of $125 million made by the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien in 2002. At the center of the controversy: an apparently poisoned gift of $200,000 promised in 2016 by the man of Chinese businessman Zhang Bin, and guided by the Chinese government, according to revelations from the Globe and Mail from the end of February.
The Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation tries to move the gallery on its non-partisan status, but it fails miserably. Without wishing to attack the merits of its mission of supporting students through generous scholarships, it would be illusory to believe that a foundation bearing the name of the father of the Prime Minister of Canada, and including his brother around the table of leaders , does not at least appear to float in a certain political environment. The Foundation, which saw donations pour in when Trudeau Jr. became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, would like to plead absolute independence that it could not.
Since the discovery of this seven-year-old case, but awakened by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, misunderstandings have been piling up, which has fueled a climate of suspicion. The latest revelations from The Press and Globe and Mail now inform us that when the Trudeau Foundation wanted to reimburse this nauseating donation, it came up against an uninhabited address and the check came back to it! Worse: the name of the donor signing the check was not that of the real patron, which would have complicated the operation of returning the money. The affair would almost make you smile if it did not involve, perhaps by the tape, the government of Justin Trudeau or his close guard, made up of friends of the party.
Everything therefore contributes to holding the most independent examination possible, in order to shed light on what really happened. Mr. Trudeau is stubborn – which is definitely becoming an annoying habit – and rejects the idea of a public inquiry, which is however loudly demanded. The solutions proposed to date are moving him further and further away from the transparency he cloaks himself in as the first head of Canadian democracy. Starting with the idea of appointing former Governor General David Johnston as a “special rapporteur”, and entrusting him with the mission of investigating allegations of foreign interference in the last two federal elections, in the wake of the information revealed speak Globe and Mail.
David Johnston has noble qualities, far from it. But the fact that he has so far been a member of the Trudeau Foundation should disqualify him from the outset. We cannot blame Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre for asking him this point-blank question: “Dear rapporteur, how are you going to investigate Beijing’s donation to the Trudeau Foundation when you were part of the Trudeau Foundation? The reviews of these two elections add up without a clear and definitive answer. Mr. Trudeau asked a cross-party parliamentary committee on national security and a group of experts responsible for monitoring intelligence activities to examine these two elections. Prime Minister Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, will be bombarded with questions on Friday, moreover, and we’ll see if she’s a master of dodging.
David Johnston is not the only member of the clan who unfortunately feeds the appearance of conflicts of interest. Before him there was Morris Rosenberg, former president and CEO of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation from 2014 to 2018, commissioned by Justin Trudeau to write another of these reports on threats of foreign interference during the elections. of 2021. Conclusion: everything was going like clockwork, nothing to be alarmed about, Madame la Marquise.
The proliferation of these missteps, which take us further from the truth rather than closer to it, only confirms the obvious: only a public inquiry, from which those close to the Trudeau Foundation and the government will be excluded from the outset, will be able to answer the questions of Canadian voters.