Trudeau promised openness, prefers secrecy to hide scandals

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Justin Trudeau has a problem being honest with Canadians.

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Despite coming onto the national stage with a promise to be open and transparent, Trudeau and his government are anything but open.

Consider that for the last month, the House of Commons hasn’t dealt with any government business because they’ve been debating the green slush fund and the government’s refusal to release documents. This is a debate over the public’s right to know about the abuse of taxpayer’s money in a billion-dollar fund that was the subject of a damning audit earlier this year.

The report into the fund by the Auditor General was so bad – allegations of conflicts of interest and misspent money – that the Liberal government immediately shut down the fund. The documents that Parliament has demanded and that the government has refused to hand over are clearly so damaging to the government that they would rather the Commons be at a standstill for a month than follow the legally binding order to hand over the documents.

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The Justin Trudeau of 2014 would be very disappointed in the Justin Trudeau of 2024.

“The ability of a citizen to access information on what government is doing with their tax dollars, in their name, is one of the fundamental tenets of building confidence around government,” Trudeau said in June 2014 when introducing his first and only private member’s bill.

Trudeau’s bill was all about making government open by default – he said Canadians deserved to know. He was so passionate about the issue that he ran on the concept in the 2015 election.

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“Government and its information should be open by default. Data paid for by Canadians belongs to Canadians. We will restore trust in our democracy, and that begins with trusting Canadians,” the 2015 Liberal platform said.

Then the Liberals got elected and instead of living up their promise they began to clamp down on releasing information.

In the early years of their government, the Trudeau Liberals boasted constantly about openness and transparency. In reality, they have allowed the already broken access to information system to crumble while fighting any attempts to inform the public of what the government in Ottawa is up to.

The refusal to release the green slush fund documents isn’t the first time the Trudeau Liberals have ignored a vote in the Commons legally calling for the release of documents. In 2021, the Speaker of the House of Commons found the government in contempt to Parliament for refusing to hand over documents in the Winnipeg lab case.

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The Trudeau Liberals took the Speaker to court in a case that was ultimately thrown out when Parliament was dissolved for the 2021 election.

Now, we have the foreign interference issue, something Trudeau has known about in detail since at least 2019. Rather than dealing with the issue, including within his own party, he kept things hidden for years, including from other party leaders and even MPs who were the targets of foreign governments.

Now, Trudeau is trying to use the foreign interference issue for partisan gain by smearing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

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Trudeau won’t make any names public but has said he knows of Conservative Parliamentarians involved in or the subject of foreign interference. Poilievre has dared Trudeau to name anyone involved so the air can be cleared, but Trudeau refuses.

It doesn’t suit his agenda.

When Independent MP Kevin Vuong asked Trudeau in Question Period about allegations that one of his cabinet ministers, Trade Minister Mary Ng, was an unwitting participant in Beijing’s foreign interference, Trudeau reacted with outrage. He didn’t address the allegations; he dismissed the idea as “absolutely disgraceful” while attacking Vuong’s character.

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It seems in Trudeau’s Canada, he’s the only one who can make accusations about foreign interference.

On the green slush fund, on the Winnipeg Lab scandal, on the issue of foreign interference, the public deserves to know the truth.

The Justin Trudeau seeking votes in 2014 would have agreed with that. But the Justin Trudeau desperately clinging to power in 2024 thinks being honest with Canadians is dangerous and outrageous.

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