44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 1, 2023 11:00AM
- May/1/23 2:25:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, according to Pascale Fournier, former CEO of the Trudeau Foundation, his predecessor, Mr. Rosenberg, is caught up in the infamous Chinese donation of $140,000. He personally talked to donors through an organization with ties to the Chinese regime. He personally sent a receipt to an address in China. He then publicly claimed this was a donation from a Canadian company. Imagine: The man appointed by the Prime Minister to look into interference in the elections was personally up to his neck in Chinese interference.
I guess the Liberal investigation into interference is just a charade. Is that it?
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- May/1/23 2:25:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as everyone in the House knows full well, for 10 years I have not had any direct or indirect involvement with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. As a government, we have taken meaningful action over the past few years to combat interference by the Chinese and others. We will continue to do the work to ensure the security and safety of Canadians, their institutions and their democracy.
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- May/1/23 2:26:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a charade.
First, to investigate foreign interference in the election, the Prime Minister appointed Mr. Rosenberg, a former member of the Trudeau Foundation who was involved in a case of Chinese interference. Next, to investigate Chinese interference, more specifically, the Prime Minister appointed David Johnston, another former member of the Trudeau Foundation. The entire Liberal investigation into Chinese interference is being carried out by two old boys from the Trudeau Foundation, which is directly linked to a case of Chinese interference.
How can the Prime Minister ask Quebeckers to have any faith in that? When will there be a real, independent and public commission of inquiry?
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- May/1/23 2:39:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the end is drawing near. Pascale Fournier, former CEO of the Trudeau Foundation, appeared at committee, and her revelations were troubling. She testified that under her predecessor, Morris Rosenberg, an association with ties to Beijing dictated the terms for transferring the controversial $140,000 donation to the foundation. It was Beijing that dictated those terms and that got Mr. Rosenberg to address the receipt to a location in China and not include—
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- May/1/23 2:40:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Pascale Fournier, former CEO of the Trudeau Foundation, appeared at committee, and her revelations were troubling. She testified that under her predecessor, Morris Rosenberg, an association with ties to Beijing dictated the terms for transferring the controversial $140,000 donation to the foundation. It was Beijing that dictated those terms and that got Mr. Rosenberg to address the receipt to a location in China and not include the donors' names.
However, that same Mr. Rosenberg was then appointed by the Liberals to investigate Chinese foreign interference. He concluded that there was no interference.
Should we blindly believe him?
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- May/1/23 2:41:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as the Prime Minister has repeatedly stated, there has been no relationship between the Prime Minister and the Trudeau Foundation for more than 10 years. It is an independent non-profit organization that hands out scholarships.
It is important that we do not attack an independent foundation here in the House. If the member has questions about the foundation, he should direct those questions to the foundation.
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- May/1/23 2:42:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when Ms. Fournier realized that this donation was linked to Beijing, she demanded two things: first, that an investigation be conducted, and second, that members of the foundation's board at the time recuse themselves from the investigation. The foundation refused to comply with either of those demands, and no light was shed on this.
Nevertheless, it was from the Trudeau Foundation that the Liberals recruited their experts, who are supposed to investigate any electoral interference, by China in particular. The Liberals can no longer claim that the truth will be made known without an independent commission of public inquiry.
When will they launch such a commission?
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- May/1/23 2:43:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let us recap. The Trudeau Foundation accepted a donation from China in 2016. China dictated the terms of the donation to the foundation. The CEO of the foundation later told the media that the donation came from a Canadian company. Years later, the foundation's new CEO wanted to investigate that donation and was persecuted for it.
When Chinese interference started making headlines, the Liberals chose two former foundation members, Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Johnston, to investigate. What a farce.
When will there be a real independent public inquiry, one that does not involve any members of the Trudeau Foundation, for goodness' sake?
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- May/1/23 2:52:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada's intelligence agency warned the Liberal government that Beijing was the foremost offender for perpetrating foreign influence on Canadians and that it feared no repercussions from the Liberals.
In fact, a Beijing-backed donation of $140,000 to the Trudeau Foundation was designed to influence the Prime Minister. What did he do in response? He appointed two former Trudeau Foundation board members to investigate: $140,000 bought a blind eye from the Prime Minister.
How can Canadians believe anything he says about foreign influence or about the Trudeau Foundation?
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- May/1/23 2:53:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, who sowed fear and division? The Prime Minister? Who has been standing, but taking no action? The Prime Minister.
I am extremely concerned that Beijing is not at all concerned about repercussions for foreign interference in our democracy. Between the intimidation of MPs and Chinese Canadians by the Communist regime and now knowing money was directed by Beijing to the Trudeau Foundation to influence the Prime Minister, then the appointment of a past director of the Trudeau Foundation as special rapporteur to investigate interference, this whole situation stinks.
How does the Prime Minister expect us to believe anything he says about the Trudeau Foundation or about preventing foreign inference in our democracy?
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- May/1/23 2:54:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me tell the House how the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, explained to the Prime Minister what China thinks of us. China sees Canada as a high-priority target for influencing legislators, business executives and diaspora communities in Canada. CSIS also said that Beijing is the foremost perpetrator of foreign interference in Canada. It could not be any clearer. The Prime Minister knew it.
He also knew that by accepting financial contributions from the Communist regime, the Trudeau Foundation made it easier for the Chinese government to run its influence operations.
Does he agree with the former CEO of the Trudeau Foundation, who spoke out against all of this?
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- May/1/23 2:56:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is all well and good for the minister to announce a few million dollars to work with in the future. The problem we have is finding out that the government and the Prime Minister have known what is going on for several years now. They know that China is a critical threat. I am not making this up; the CSIS reports say as much.
Can the Prime Minister now tell us whether he knew that the Trudeau Foundation was influenced by the donation it received and that the transaction was intended to influence operations in Canada, yes or no?
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- May/1/23 3:09:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in April, the Trudeau Foundation president and eight board members resigned due to controversy over a Chinese government-linked donation. Furthermore, last week, it was alleged that the donation was not even flagged as foreign money because the former Trudeau Foundation president, Morris Rosenberg, allegedly misled the public and qualified it as a Canadian-based donation.
With all of these questions around the foundation and its role in foreign interference, when will the government finally clear the air and call a public inquiry?
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Madam Speaker, hope is the glue that holds us together and allows us to go on when we think we cannot. It is a powerful force that has carried humans through the worst of times. In order to have hope, we must face reality. We must acknowledge the truth.
I ask everyone at home if they are happy with the cost of living. Are they happy with the rise of crime? Are they happy with the homelessness crisis? Are they happy with the addiction crisis? Are they happy with our country?
The truth is the government, which is currently the Liberal-NDP coalition, cannot give us anything it has not taken away from us. The government does not have any money. It has our hard-earned money, and every dollar it spends is our dollar earned.
The most important piece of legislation that is voted on in this House is the budget, which we are debating today. The budget tells Canadians where the priorities of the government are. The budget determines the future of our children and our grandchildren. The Liberal-NDP coalition has doubled government spending, yet nothing in this country is twice as good. In fact, it is twice as bad. Housing prices have doubled, rent has doubled and health care wait times for treatment have doubled.
The overdose rate in this country is 300% higher than when the Prime Minister took office. Each day, 22 people in this country die from an overdose. Do people know how much money is allocated in the Liberal budget for treatment and recovery? None. The Liberal Prime Minister continues to fund people to stay stuck where they are in their disease of addiction, rather than funding off-ramps to help them break free. Remember the 2021 election promise of $4.5 billion in a mental health transfer? The Liberals must have forgotten about it because it is nowhere to be found in the Liberal-NDP budget.
The truth is Canadians are suffering. There are many Canadians who make good money, almost $100,000 a year, yet these same people with full-time jobs are relying on food banks. Food banks across this country are reporting record high usage, the highest in history. We are a G7 country and middle-class Canadians are relying on food banks, so we can imagine how awful life must be for our most vulnerable, including seniors on fixed incomes.
Albert from my riding is a widowed senior on a fixed income. His gas bill tripled with the carbon tax, and he is angry and scared. How does the Prime Minister expect Albert to pay his bills?
People are suffering in a way that many have never experienced. Innocent people are being stabbed in broad daylight while onlookers video it, because, under the Prime Minister, there are no consequences in this country. Our bail system is broken and there is nothing in this budget to fix it.
In a cost-of-living crisis, we have forced women out of choice, like the choice to go back to work because they cannot access child care. Yes, the Liberals will tell people their $10-a-day child care has saved the nation. I can tell everyone with certainty the detail the Liberals left out is that only a select few can access it. This is another classic winners and losers Liberal bill. There are thousands of families left out because there are no spaces and there is no labour strategy to help with the labour shortage. Women cannot go to work because they cannot access child care and the wait-lists are years long.
One female child care operator wrote on a public forum this morning, “Why are so many child care providers closing? Well, I just filed my taxes and 56% of incoming funds went directly back into my program. They are closing because they cannot afford to stay open.” This is another anti-feminism Liberal bill.
Nine out of ten young people have given up the dream of ever owning a home. Many young people say they will never start a family because they do not think they can afford to bring a child into this world.
People are applying for medical assistance in dying because they cannot afford rent or food. Seniors are freezing because they cannot afford to turn on the heat. There is no accountability, there is no transparency and it has eroded trust in the government and leaders.
What is happening? How did we get here, and more importantly, how do we get out of this? We need hope but we need to face the facts to change the facts. It is time to acknowledge that what the Liberals are doing, what the Liberals have been doing, is not working.
The current Liberal government is so far down a rabbit hole, it does not know how to get out. Instead of acknowledging the suffering it has created, its members double down on their failed policies. Every day in this House of Commons during question period, a Liberal MP or minister tells Canadians how great things are and what a great job they are doing, and it is simply insulting to Canadians who are barely getting by.
The New Democrats are just as guilty. They too have failed to acknowledge that their coalition is not helping Canadians, but it is hurting them.
Social programs rely on a healthy economy in order to secure sustainable funding. The government has run up the highest ever debt. Yes, the Prime Minister has accumulated more debt than all other prime ministers combined. Canada's debt is $1.18 trillion. That is a pretty tough number to imagine. There is $44 billion spent on interest. Just for comparison, the government spends $24 billion on EI and $25 billion on the Canada child benefit. That means the Liberal government spends almost double the amount servicing its debt compared to supporting social programs to support Canadians.
The current Liberal government is hurting Canadians, and it has no intention of stopping.
It is important to try different approaches, but it is also important to recognize when those approaches are not working.
We tried safe drug supply, and more people are dying and living on the street. We tried spending more, and now life is unaffordable. We tried to be soft of crime, and now violent crime is up almost 40% under this Trudeau government—
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- May/1/23 6:47:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak about the Trudeau Foundation.
The Trudeau Foundation is the talk of the town in many ways, so it is important to review what the foundation actually is because the Trudeau Foundation is a curious beast. As far as its structure and its governance goes, it is kind of a chameleon, conveniently identifying as a charity some of the time and as a government institution at other times. Similarly, the Prime Minister identifies as sort of involved and sort of not involved. These blurred lines make the Trudeau Foundation and, through it, the government, highly vulnerable to foreign interference. Let me explain.
The Trudeau Foundation was created as a family foundation with a protected role in its governance for members of the Trudeau family. However, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien, through minister Allan Rock, decided to give the foundation $125 million of taxpayers' money without actually changing the role of the Trudeau family in its governance.
It became government-funded and, in law, a government institution, according to the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act, but it retained a protected role in its governance for members of one family, making it a government-funded government institution, which is also a family foundation with a protected role in its governance for one family.
I think that this is incredibly bizarre in a free, democratic and egalitarian nation. Giving members of one family privileged control of a government-funded government institution is not consistent with the idea of a just society.
The Trudeau Foundation is controlled by 30 members. Up to four of those members are appointed by the Trudeau family, and six are appointed by the Minister of Industry. In its governance, the Trudeau Foundation directly fuses the intellectual estate of the Trudeau family with the Government of Canada, and that is just wrong.
The Prime Minister himself, incredibly, is and remains a member of the Trudeau Foundation. He has professed repeatedly, and seems to want us to take at face value, the claim that he is not involved, not at all involved, in the Trudeau Foundation, that he has not been involved for years. That is wrong. He is involved. He is involved in a number of ways.
First, the Prime Minister of Canada is necessarily involved, by virtue of the fact that he appoints the Minister of Industry, who appoints six members. He is involved because his brother is a member of the foundation and his half-sister is on the board of directors, and he is involved because he himself is a member of the foundation. He has not resigned. He remains a member of the foundation. It bears his name.
Whether he goes to the meetings, the membership that he retains matters for effective control, should he choose to exercise it at any point. It demonstrates his deep, personal investment in the Trudeau Foundation. The personal investment is precisely why a foreign government has sought to curry favour with him through funnelling money to the Trudeau Foundation.
The system is clearly broken and the worn-out talking points the government is using clearly do not hold water. The structure is quite evidently broken, even before we start talking about the issue of what happened in this instance of foreign interference because it is this crude hybrid between a family foundation and a government institution. Its charitable face elicits direct donations from foreign entities, while its government face sits by and smiles. The Prime Minister, known, by the way, for wearing many faces, smiles all the more.
Canada Post would not collect money from foreign political parties nor would it allow members of a former prime minister's family to have a locked-in role in its leadership. That is because Canada Post is part of the government. The Canadian Cancer Society would potentially get donations from abroad, but it likely would not be a target for foreign interference because it is not closely tied to the government and does not bear the Prime Minister's name. It is purely a charity. One has roles for a government institution, and one has roles for a charity.
The problem is that the Trudeau Foundation is trying to have its cake and eat it too. It is trying to be both. The vulnerabilities are not only obvious, they are built into the structure of this organization, and members of the Trudeau family exploited those vulnerabilities to take the foreign money.
After attending a cash-for-access fundraiser with thePrime Minister—
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- May/1/23 6:51:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is interesting that the member continues to push this particular envelope. I have actually been very clear, as have the Prime Minister and other ministers. No matter what the member continues to try to propagate to mislead Canadians, at the end of the day, the Prime Minister has had no direct or indirect communications with the Trudeau Foundation for over 10 years. It is actually a very simple truth. One would think that even members of the Conservative Party would understand that truth.
I do not want to insult the member across the way. Maybe the Conservatives are just trying to avoid the truth in order to push an envelope that they have been in since 2014. I think that was the year the leader of the Liberal Party was first elected as leader of the Liberal Party. Virtually from day one, the Conservatives have spared no expense in advertising and in research in terms of trying to find ways they could make this personal and make personal attacks against the Prime Minister. Absolutely nothing has changed. All one needs to do is go back to the days when he was the leader of the third party and listen to some of the S. O. 31s back then. At the end of the day, 2015 proved that what the member just finished saying was wrong and Canadians did not believe the Conservative Party.
The Conservatives have never changed the channel. There are so many issues that Canadians are facing today. Instead of dealing with those issues, the Conservative Party continues to use character assassination and attack the Prime Minister.
Today, the Conservatives get a kick out of the name of the foundation. We have non-profit foundations that do a lot of wonderful things, including the Trudeau Foundation. The questions the member wants to ask or Conservatives want to ask would be better put to the foundation itself, which is independent, just like many other foundations out there. However, this does not meet the Conservatives' cause. In a tin hat sense, they say there is this and that and who cares if it is true or not. It does not have to be true to be put on the Conservative agenda. They just grab from all over the place, put it together and say there is this huge conspiracy.
The reality is that it is very clear. The Prime Minister, over the last 10 years, has had no direct or indirect connection or communication with the Trudeau Foundation. No matter how the Conservatives try to spin conspiracy theories over there, it does not change the facts. The members across the way know the facts, but their approach is not to let the facts get in the way. Their job is to be critical of the person and the family, and that is what the Conservatives have been focused on since before the 2015 election, and it is still the case—
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- May/1/23 6:55:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, very simply, I laid out, in my previous comments, the governance of the foundation and the problems with it, the way the governance of the foundation integrates government with control by the Trudeau family of this public institution.
The member opposite asks why we do not take his word for it that the Prime Minister has not been involved and is not involved. Does he know why I do not take his word for it? It is because I read the annual report. It is not a conspiracy. It is not off somewhere on a web forum; it is in the annual report. Any member of the public watching can go to the annual report and look at who the members of the foundation are. They will see the name of the current Prime Minister listed in the annual report as a member of the foundation. He retains his position, which he has never resigned from, as do multiple other members of his family. They are members or members of the board of directors. This is the governing structure of this institution.
The Prime Minister's Minister of Industry appoints six members. He is clearly involved.
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- May/1/23 6:56:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is interesting. I would wonder if the member opposite would walk outside the chamber. Inside the chamber, he has parliamentary privilege. He can say what he wants to say inside here, almost without any limitations. Outside the chamber, would he entertain going out there and having a press conference and saying that the Prime Minister has been directly involved with the Trudeau Foundation? My bet is that he would not go out and say that because if he were to go outside and have a press conference and make the allegation that the Prime Minister does have direct communication with the Trudeau Foundation, he might find himself in a bit of hot water. There is a bit more expectation that if one is outside they have to be a bit more truthful than they are on the inside at times if one is a Conservative member of Parliament.
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