After digging in his heels for days, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau changed tactics on Monday and apologized for participating in the decision to award a government contract without a tender to a charity closely related to his family.
The apology came four days after it was revealed that the prime minister’s mother and brother had received more than $ 200,000 over four years to give speeches at events for the development organization, called WE Charity, which had received a government contract. to monitor disbursement. hundreds of millions of dollars of student scholarships.
“I made a mistake by not immediately recusing myself from the discussions given our family’s history, and I sincerely regret not having done so,” Trudeau said from outside his Ottawa home during one of the regular briefings. since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
At the Monday press conference, the virus took a backseat due to constant questioning by journalists about the charity scandal.
The controversy started sparking earlier this month, when opposition politicians demanded an investigation into government approval of the contract from the charity to distribute about $ 660 million in grants to student volunteers affected by the weakened economy.
The prime minister, who said Monday that the contract was selected by the country’s public administration, spoke at many of the WE Charity events, and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, presents a podcast connected to the charity.
Then last Thursday it was revealed that the organization had paid Mr. Trudeau’s mother and brother a total of $ 207,000, about C $ 282,000, for participating in conferences.
The country’s ethics commissioner has already launched an investigation into the matter, marking the third time that the prime minister has been investigated for violating conflict of interest rules since coming to power in 2015 with the promise of openness and transparency.
The previous two times, he violated the rules, which seriously damaged his brand. His Liberal Party barely won reelection last year.
“The question is, ‘Does the scandal go away, or does it continue?'” Said Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, a Canadian nonprofit survey company based in Vancouver. “A lot of it is out of your control. It all depends on what the opposition parties do. “
He noted that the prime minister’s approval rating, which has skyrocketed in the past four months due to his skillful handling of the coronavirus, had dropped to 50 percent according to data his firm released Monday.
So far, the scandal has shown no signs of diminishing as revelations have emerged about other people in Mr. Trudeau’s inner circle with personal connections to the charity.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau, whose daughter works in the charity’s travel department, also apologized Monday. “I did not recuse myself from discussions on this topic and since my daughter works for the organization in an unrelated branch, I now realize that I should do so to avoid any perceived conflict,” he said on Twitter. Send.
Craig and Marc Kielburger, who founded WE Charity together, published a full-page ad on Monday in The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper, stating that “they had made a mistake that we sincerely regret” and that the past two weeks they had carried to “take a closer look at our own internal structures, governance and organization”.
The charity said it would forgo all administrative costs incurred in setting up the program and would return government funds already received. The charity had been slated to receive a total of $ 14 million to oversee the program.
Mr. Trudeau has built a reputation in Canada for offering repentant apologies, both for the government’s historic transgressions and for his own personal mistakes, including going to parties at blackface and brownface as a student and young teacher.
At Monday’s press conference, Mr. Trudeau said he deeply regretted that students did not have such rapid access to the aid program, established to award some students up to C $ 5,000 in grants for volunteer work. The government took over the program after the scandal erupted.
With no elections on the horizon, the scandal is unlikely to seriously harm Mr. Trudeau, said Lori Turnbull, principal of Dalhousie University’s school of public administration in Halifax.
“It is not a terribly damning apology. He is quite intelligent. He is not saying that the decision was wrong, he is saying that he should not have been at the table for it, ”he said. “I think this is very, very low risk for him.”
