I really don’t like blogging on a charity twice in one day but hard to ignore a CBC headline “Former Trudeau Foundation head says past leadership misled Canadians on Chinese donation.” The article by Steven Chase and Robert Fife of the Globe and Mail notes “Former Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation president Pascale Fournier told MPs Friday she believes the non-profit organization’s earlier leadership misled the country by characterizing a donation from wealthy Chinese benefactors as a Canadian donation.” This does not look good.
Personally, I don’t think that the big story is about a Chinese donation. The big story is that no active or aspiring politician should have $170 million in taxpayer-funded foundation that they control. As I noted earlier today, there are some simple fixes to these problems but if we wait a few more weeks or months the Trudeau Foundation may not exist. Oh and please don’t blame the whistleblowers or the critics – the Trudeau Foundation has some control over its own governance and destiny.
As an aside, I am going to suggest to journalists that if they use Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) documents, which is an expensive system of disclosure that some refer to as Federal government freedom of information, that those journalists also publicly disclose the complete ATIP along with the story. Taxpayers are paying a huge amount of money for the ATIP system and it requires very little extra work on their part to disclose the PDF, but it allows others to see the complete disclosure and also form their own opinion on the documents. Also, many journalists may not even realize when they are writing a particular story that the ATIP contains other information that they are not utilizing and maybe even more important. Very few journalists do this, but if you believe in the importance of transparency, then it makes sense to do it.