There has been a lot of talk over the past few weeks about the “Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation”. However, in general, a foundation that bears the name of a person means that this person or his family has chosen to invest his millions of dollars accumulated over the course of a lifetime to put them at the service of a cause that is dear to heart.
In the United States, where these foundations are numerous, we think of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or, older, the Rockefeller or Carnegie foundations. In Quebec, let us mention the Trottier Family Foundation or the Lucie and André Chagnon Foundation. In short, these people have chosen to leave a trace of their passage on earth by putting part or all of their assets at the service of the community. This is to their credit, we will agree.
However, contrary to what one seems to believe, the real scandal with the Trudeau Foundation is not that it accepted money coming, it seems, from the Chinese government, but rather that its endowment fund does not come from the Trudeau family, as one might think — because members and friends of the family have always sat on the board of directors — but essentially from public funds!
As has sometimes been recalled in passing, it was curiously Prime Minister Jean Chrétien who decided, in 2002, to take 125 million dollars of public money to promote the ideas and image of Pierre Elliott Trudeau . In short, it is an embezzlement of public funds in the service of a private cause that should have been entirely assumed by the Trudeau family if it had decided to use its own financial resources for this purpose, as all family foundations do.
Of course, people will say that this foundation gives scholarships to Canadians in the field of social sciences and that this is useful. But this is to forget that these scholarships in fact only promote the ideas and image of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It is above all to pass over in silence that if the Liberal government had really wanted to help research in the humanities and social sciences by offering grants, it could have simply added these $125 million to the budget of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). , an organization created by the government in 1977 and whose mission is precisely to offer scholarships and grants to researchers, all without any political or ideological bias, through peer review of submitted projects.
Having myself sat on the board of directors of SSHRC from 1999 to 2005, I can assure you that this “gift” would have been appreciated by this organization dedicated to supporting research in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. Being well known, the SSHRC does not have to insist as the Trudeau Foundation does to say that it is “independent and without political affiliation”, even if family members sit on its board of directors…
At least until 2016, the Foundation’s website fueled further confusion about the source of the funds by indicating that it had been created “by the family, friends and colleagues of the former Prime Minister”. Today, we read instead that it “is an independent, non-politically affiliated charitable organization created in 2001 to pay tribute to the former Prime Minister”. We no longer say by whom and we certainly do not insist on the fact that the bulk of its endowment fund comes from Canadian citizens, whose opinion we have certainly not asked. Struggling to attract private funds, we understand that she looked favorably on a Chinese donation of $200,000.
Of course, for the “Trudeau Scholars”—probably reluctant to advocate Quebec independence—and other laureates of this foundation, money has no smell. The current controversy surrounding this curious foundation, however, reminds us that it is indeed Canadians who, without really knowing it, offer the bulk of these self-interested grants and not the Trudeau family and their friends.
We could even take advantage of the current crisis to withdraw the 125 million from him and finally put them in the coffers of SSHRC, thus putting an end to the embezzlement of public funds for the sole purpose of promoting the ideas of a former Prime Minister. which has never been unanimous, especially not in Quebec.