Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the signing of the Nunavut devolution agreement in Iqaluit, on Jan. 18.Dustin Patar/The Canadian Press
Earlier this month we wrote that the bigger issue with Justin Trudeau’s controversial Christmas vacation in Jamaica was not the fact that the Prime Minister was able to lodge his family in a luxury resort for nine nights for free, but that the Conflict of Interest Act allows him and other public office holders to accept undisclosed gifts of unlimited value from friends and family members.
We stand by that. The Conflict of Interest Act and the Conflict of Interest Code for MPs need to be amended to require every Parliamentarian to disclose gifts from friends and immediate family worth more than a nominal value.
Ten days later, though, questions raised by the Prime Minister’s shifting explanations about how the trip was paid for have put the focus on him instead of the rules.
His nonchalance about the public’s perception of his holiday hasn’t done him any favours, either.
When asked Wednesday if he thought his gifted accommodations, worth a reported $84,000 in commercial value, might be poorly viewed by Canadians who are tightening their belts, his curt answer showed a disdain for the whole issue: “Like a lot of Canadian families, we spent the Christmas holidays with friends. All the rules were followed.”
There are two problems with that cosmically glib statement. First, lots of Canadian families may have spent the holidays with friends, but Mr. Trudeau is not just any Canadian. He is the Prime Minister, and his friend gave him a gift worth tens of thousands of dollars. The implied equivalence is the stuff of parody.
Second, Mr. Trudeau has been implying that there has been some sort of official adjudication of his nationally lampooned Christmas vacation. That is misleading.
Mr. Trudeau’s office has insisted that the federal Ethics Commissioner “was consulted prior to the travel to ensure that the rules were followed.” But any notion that the Ethics Commissioner signed off on the trip is inaccurate.
According to Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch, a non-partisan organization that advocates for government transparency and accountability, the Ethics Commissioner cannot and does not rule on whether a gift is appropriate without undertaking a proper investigation.
Indeed, the office of Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein has made it clear that it does not “preapprove” gifts; it merely offers guidance on what steps to take in order to avoid being in a conflict.
This misdirection is important, because Mr. Trudeau has twice changed his original story about the trip. He first said he was paying for the cost of his family’s stay. Then he said he was staying “at no cost at a location owned by family friends.”
Now he says that he and his family stayed with friends, rather than at a location owned by friends. The only part of the story that hasn’t changed is Mr. Trudeau’s statement that he covered the equivalent of the commercial airline cost of their flights to Jamaica (he is obliged to use a government jet for security reasons).
So which version did Mr. Trudeau or his office present to the Ethics Commissioner? The public deserves to know.
Herein lies more potential misdirection. The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics voted this week to call Mr. von Finckenstein to a hearing to answer questions about Mr. Trudeau’s free vacation, and about gifts and travel for MPs in general.
But the MPs on the committee voted down a motion from a Conservative Party member calling on Mr. von Finckenstein to produce any and all communication between his office and the Prime Minister’s office about the Jamaica trip.
The MPs argued that requests for guidance are confidential, but Mr. Conacher at Democracy Watch says that’s not true – that the law states that the advice the Ethics Commissioner provides is itself confidential, but the request for that information is not. Nor, he said, would it be protected by cabinet confidentiality.
It may be too much to expect a tired Liberal government that appears to be aging out of office to co-operate with the ethics committee on this matter, or any other like it.
Far better that the committee reverse itself and ask Mr. von Finckenstein to produce, if it exists in electronic or paper form, the communications his office received about Mr. Trudeau’s excessively generous Christmas vacation. The Prime Minister may be indifferent to conflict of interest rules, but let’s not let that infect the rest of Parliament.