Month: July 2020

Well the halls of Parliament or at least the video airways reverberated with great sound bites as Trudeau testified on WE or shall we call it the WE scandal.

Now let us be clear, Trudeau did not save himself- he just managed to survive.

The real problem is who cares and who is listening?

This is a real inside the Queensway story that reporters feast on and the general public in the rest of Canada replies with when am I supposed to wear a mask?

Outside of the media and political partisans few people care.

That average voter that the political parties are playing to does not care about the intricacies of whether you recuse yourself or not on an issue.

What is clear is that Trudeau is either lying or incompetent. God help the staffer of Prime Minister Harper or I suspect Chretien or Mulroney who proceeded to bring forth a file the PM had said stop or put a hold on. That some staffer obviously kept the file moving forward shows their contempt for Trudeau’s opinion on files. The question is who was that staffer? It would have to be someone very senior.

This story will blow over because in the end the drop in the polls after Trudeau ended his daily COVID 19 briefings should not be unexpected for the Liberals.

In the end the Conservatives have to elect a new leader who can hire the necessary staff to milk this issue in an election when Canadians actually pay attention. The chances of that happening is anyone’s guess but still to be determined.

Judging by the sudden flood of articles that Trudeau feels Morneau was wrong to have accepted WE trips it looks like Morneau will pay the price. Yes, folks PMO does hint to reporters as to what might happen.

My advice for Trudeau goes back many, many years. Look at who your biggest challenger might be for your job and make that person your finance minister. I wonder who that new minister will be? Pretty obvious actually.

As I write this, Bill Morneau still has a job.

While it is hard to imagine that anyone feels this finance minister should still be a cabinet minister, his arrogance is keeping him in the job. Do not count on Trudeau who suffers similar ethical lapses doing anything- he is just as bad if not worse.

This is from the Prime Minister’s Mandate letter to Morneau.

“As Minister, you must ensure that you are aware of and fully compliant with the Conflict of Interest Act and Treasury Board policies and guidelines. You will be provided with a copy of Open and Accountable Government to assist you as you undertake your responsibilities. I ask that you carefully read it, including elements that have been added to strengthen it, and ensure that your staff does so as well.”

“Give particular attention to the Ethical Guidelines set out in Annex A of that document, which apply to you and your staff. As noted in the Guidelines, you must uphold the highest standards of honesty and impartiality, and both the performance of your official duties and the arrangement of your private affairs should bear the closest public scrutiny. This is an obligation that is not fully discharged by simply acting within the law.”

If Morneau has significantly breached his mandate letter obligations and if Trudeau won’t fire him for doing so, who then takes the fall?

If we rule Trudeau and Morneau out, the weakest person in the power structure is Bradish Chagger. While only a junior minister, she did handle the file. But does anyone think that she acted alone?

Junior ministers do not bring $912 million dollar files to cabinet without being backed by other senior ministers and PMO. To do so without advance approval would run the risk of committing political suicide and banishment to the back benches.

Chagger knew she was OK to bring this forward. There had to be discussions with PCO, the department and of course almighty PMO.

Now of course PMO has to find a scapegoat. Chagger who is just a junior minister looks like the one and while her mandate letter says she is to “Support the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion to enhance the Youth Employment Strategy and the Canada Summer Jobs program” don’t expect that senior minister (Carla Qualtrough ) to take a hit either.

Trudeau will hang tough until he does his smoke and mirror routine before the committee. The Liberals can then spin that he was open and accountable and blah, blah, blah. I can write these talk points in my sleep. After that, he can go back to taking personal days off.

Once the Liberals see who the next CPC leader will be, he can do a small shuffle, demote Chagger maybe push Morneau sideways and get ready for the next election.

The WE controversy continues to build and get more interesting every day. It is not going away.

Day after day we see one more item coming to the surface which makes the Trudeau deal with WE look more suspicious. From internal financial issues with WE and ME, to procedural issues there are plenty of red flags.

Usually when a government decides to let a minister testify at a committee hearing they do so to shut a story down. This has not happened- instead, other avenues of attack have opened up. However, because a minister appeared, media stories about whether the PM or the Clerk Of The Privy Council should appear before the committee have largely disappeared- success for the Liberals on that point.

Do not kid yourself, ministers will be well briefed, often directly by PMO staff. They will be handed precise talk points and they will be told not to deviate from them.

One of the roles for opposition research is to look beyond the talk point answer and look for what the minister or bureaucrat is hiding.

When a minister answers “I was not directed by the Prime Minister’s Office,” the key word is “directed”

For someone to use the word “directed” is unusual. It has been inserted into the talk point for a reason. It is up to the opposition to figure out what that word is hiding. Was there instead an “informal chat” with someone in PMO that would encourage the minister to see WE’s proposal in a positive light?

Being so precise and using the word “I” eliminates her from a conversation, but what about her staff? Let’s face it most conversations are between PMO staff and a minister’s staff, not PM to minister. Her staff will not direct her, but they can certainly report on conversations they had and what points were emphasized in the conversations they had with other staff in PMO or the Finance Minister’s office.

It would be better to ask did you or anyone on your staff speak to anyone in the PMO, including the PM about this project before it was announced. Did you or your staff receive any emails, texts or voicemails from anyone (minister or staff) in PMO or the Finance minister’s office and so on. The opposition still need to dig down below the surface on this one.

The exact same question can be put to the senior bureaucrats in this case starting with Rachel Wernick. The key is always to go in with your strategy and questions laid out knowing exactly what you are looking for. Do not get sidetracked by a talk point answer.

With this bureaucrat you can replace “PMO” with “PCO”. No minister will approve a huge program (almost a billion dollars) without extensive consultations between her department and PCO. Officials in her department will also be talking to staff in her minister’s office (assigned to this file) to get a feel for what direction the minister wants to go and why.

Anyone who has seen how departments function, know they rarely make decisions this fast. For one thing bureaucrats like collective decisions-making and rarely stick their neck out. Every department has a sign off sheet for briefing notes, decisions etc.

It would be fun to see who signed off on this decision. I remember when at External Affairs in the 1980s (now Global Affairs Canada) seven bureaucrats signed off on every briefing note going to the minister- each one watering it down. The real truth was in the original note written by the desk officer.

This story is far from over if the opposition knows where to look.

Trudeau has apologized again for another ethical mess of his own making. He played his part well staring into the camera, voice soft and low, looking contrite etc. You have to give him high marks for his performance and it certainly took over the daily news coverage.

My guess is most voters will shrug this one off for now. Surviving the pandemic, wearing a mask, trying to figure out if and how their children will be going to school in the fall matters more to them now than the nonsense coming out of Ottawa.

Trudeau’s apology came a week too late. Someone in the PMO, maybe the Prime Minister, was too stubborn to admit an obvious wrong when the story broke and they dragged this out far too long allowing the PM and the Liberals to take a week of hits from the media and the opposition parties.

In spite of the Conservatives glee over this issue, barring any new major revelation this story is running its course. Yes, there will be the drama of whether or not Trudeau will appear before committee to be grilled by opposition MPs. But, why would he subject himself to that when it would only move the story from the back pages to the front page again? They are better to run out a few cabinet ministers who can stick to their talk points. After a few hours of that, the Liberals can shut the committee down and say they gave the opposition and public what they needed to know.

The Conservatives need to be careful. They are treading on dangerous ground when they ask for his resignation, or for him to step aside or for a police investigation. For one thing, setting that precedent now, can come back and bite you when you are the party in government.

They should not push the Liberals too hard when they do not have a leader. The PM can always ask the people to decide if he should remain the leader and while polls have dipped slightly over this issue it is far from a fatal blow to the government or to the PM’s personal popularity.

This issue will not defeat the government, nor would it have defeated previous Liberal or Conservative governments. Governments are defeated over time as they become more arrogant and mistake after mistake piles up diminishing their record and popularity and that applies to all political parties.

The present government and its ethically challenged leader have not reached that point yet.

The WE scandal continues to gain momentum with each passing day.

What first looked like a case of bad judgement has turned into claims of cronyism, ethics violations, an ethics investigation and now demands for a criminal investigation.

The bigger issue is that Trudeau just shrugs this off as something he is entitled to do because after all he is a Trudeau. I have even seen articles where variations of that excuse are offered up to defend his complete lack of ethics.

Back in 2015, I was writing that eventually Trudeau’s arrogance will catch up to him and to his party as well. Over decades of doing political research and tracking that party and its misdeeds, this type of behavior always surfaces. The Liberal Party and their present leader really do believe that they are “Entitled to Their Entitlements” a slogan that came from a comment of David Dingwall in 2005 and used very successfully by the Conservatives in the 2006 election.

We are also seeing what appear to be leaks of serious information about WE, such as the monies paid out by the charity to Trudeau’s mother and brother and also linking the Finance Minister and his family to the charity. Someone has an axe to grind and it is adding to the mess created by this scandal. This type of drip…drip…drip leaking is very hard for PMO to contain and defend against.

Trudeau will survive for now because the Conservatives have said they will not attempt to bring down the government- thankfully, they are smart enough to know they do not want to campaign under Scheer again. I also hope they are smart enough to save some of the best things they find out to use later.

These scandals have a habit of resurfacing at election time and they make for wonderful political attack ads. In an election, we called these “channel changers”. We could unload these stinkers at anytime, but they were especially useful to divert the press if the Liberals were doing well

Just wait, there will be more to come in the days ahead.

This morning Trudeau announced that the Federal government and WE had mutually agreed to part ways on the $900 million grant program.

It is a smart move for both. WE doesn’t need all of the negative publicity surrounding what had become a growing scandal about Liberal/Trudeau cronyism. Trudeau needed to cut his political loses on this file and move on.

Day by day more came out, fanning negative media coverage. Even today more was coming out.

I hope the three blogs I wrote outlining how to investigate this issue helped newer reporters to get organized and start digging.

As for the Conservatives, those blogs are there for them to read the next time Trudeau hands them an issue on a silver platter.

It appears the Trudeau-WE Charity story has legs.

Anyone with a background in politics could see there was an issue here and a lot of unanswered questions. The big surprise, unless they were blinded by their own arrogance was that PMO and the PM didn’t see they were going to get hit hard on this issue.

I asked in a previous blog who made the initial contact. This is a key point in Trudeau’s story which is rapidly disintegrating.

If the PM and staff in the PMO were not involved, it would have been someone in the department to make the first contact with WE to see if there was any interest in taking on this challenge. After-all this is a major undertaking that is usually done by the civil service such as with the CREB program.

The media are now reporting that one of the founders of WE (Marc Kielburger) is on video saying PMO called him first. There would be no reason for this to happen if the PM or his staff in the PMO were not directly involved.

That comment undoubtedly sent PMO into damage control mode. And later it was reported he misspoke. Walking back your comment using that term in politics is like waving a red flag at a bull.

Some additional questions come to mind.

Trudeau wants to “pay” people to volunteer. That is the direct opposite of what volunteer means.

This leads to an interesting question. Was this a political plan hatched in PMO and did the department refuse to support it?

It has the potential to be an administrative nightmare. Is that why according to Trudeau WE is the only organization capable of doing this? Did the department recommend not going forward with this scheme to pay volunteers?

Inquiring minds want to know.