It was a representative from the University of Montreal who demanded that Alexandre Trudeau sign the controversial donation agreement between the foundation that bears his father’s name and Chinese businessmen, documents show.
“Perhaps Alexander [Trudeau] could sign at the same time as representative of the Foundation AND the estate [de Pierre Elliott Trudeau] suggested Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens, then dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal, in an email dated September 8, 2015.
This communication is recorded in the 160 pages produced under the Access to Information Act in 2017 and obtained by The duty. As promised last week, the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation has sent these documents to the parliamentary committee studying this question in Ottawa. However, its members are waiting for them to be translated before being able to consult their content.
“It is very suspicious that we have just one example of a donation” which bears the signature of Alexandre Trudeau, Conservative MP Michael Cooper released Tuesday before the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Protection personal information and the ethics of the House of Commons.
He had just heard the chairman of the foundation’s board of directors, Edward Johnson, criticize the “unwarranted or unjust attacks” aimed at the organization since the publication of an article by the Globe and Mail which linked a $200,000 donation to a Chinese interference operation, citing unnamed intelligence sources.
Mr Johnson is one of three directors who remained at the helm of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation after the rest of the board resigned in April.
The chairman of the board was also careful to point out that the original article actually mentioned a sum of one million dollars. The duty reported elsewhere that the two Chinese businessmen quoted in the article originally wanted to offer this amount to the University of Montreal and were even upset to learn that the Trudeau Foundation was demanding its share of the amount to use the name of the former prime minister.
Question of legality
During question period in the Commons, Quebec Conservative MP Luc Berthold called the donation an “illegal contribution from the Beijing regime”. Like other Tory members of the committee, who believe there is an attempt to hide an attempt at political interference, he was deeply disappointed by the evasive answers offered by Mr Johnson on Tuesday.
He gives more credibility to the testimony of the resigning CEO of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation, Pascale Fournier, who said two weeks ago that she found this donation suspicious, ultimately limited to $140,000, since the tax receipts issued for the two payments were not identical. She also claimed not to understand why the name of Alexandre Trudeau was on the contract, which dates from before he took office. She also said she was unable to conduct the investigation on her terms.
Both the brother of the Prime Minister and the CEO of the foundation at the time, Morris Rosenberg, on the contrary affirmed that the donation was in the rules. “The circumstances were such that I had to sign,” said Alexandre Trudeau, criticizing in passing the journalistic rigor of the Globe and Mail and Montreal Journal. Justin Trudeau had already cut his ties with the family foundation when he was elected prime minister on October 19, 2015.
Conflicts at the Foundation?
One of the other directors who remained at the head of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation in the turmoil accompanied the chairman of the board of directors in Ottawa on Tuesday: international law lawyer Peter Sahlas, who offered to answer questions. of Duty.
He also contradicted several elements of the testimony of the former CEO Pascale Fournier. “Mme Fournier said “something has been hidden from me”; that’s not true at all! It was she who was the depositary of the documents, of the servers of the foundation, ”he said.
According to her version of the facts, a conflict broke out within the board of directors because the leader did not want to recuse herself within the framework of this investigation, which she nevertheless asked others to do. “It was not supposed to be a management investigation! […] Since after the arrival of Mme Fournier, the management was involved in the management of this donation, as for having tried to return the donation to the University of Montreal, we wanted Pascale Fournier to recuse herself as well. »
Mr. Sahlas also alleges that the CEO would have “fired” a first law firm, before turning to another lawyer of his choice, based in Toronto, who publicly posted on his Twitter page his support for Justin Trudeau . According to Peter Sahlas, the worst “mistake” of Mme Fournier is, however, to have claimed that the administrators had legal opinions supporting his actions, which would then have been denied by the lawyers. “I felt gagged and pushed aside by the president, and I didn’t know why,” he testifies.
The current chairman of the board, Edward Johnson, also mentioned in his introduction to the committee “never having received a legal opinion on a possible conflict of interest [le] re “. He then avoided answering several other questions from elected officials, to their great dissatisfaction, repeatedly mentioning ignoring the information requested.