Front Burner - After millions in gambling debts, questions remain for MP

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

On Nov. 22, Raj Grewal said he would resign from his seat as the Liberal MP for Brampton East for 'personal and medical reasons'. Since then, new information has come to light...including a gambling problem, and a RCMP investigation into Grewal's finances. On Friday, Raj Grewal posted a video that addressed many of these allegations, and how he may not be resigning after all. Toronto Star parliamentary reporter Alex Ballingall explains what we actually know about the case.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. On November 22nd, Liberal MP Raj Grewal said he would resign from his seat as MP for Brampton East.

This came as a surprise to a lot of people, even his own colleagues. At the time, all that anyone knew was that it was for, quote, personal and medical reasons. But in the last couple of weeks, there's been this drip after drip of information. A gambling problem. A million-dollar debt. An investigation by the RCMP into his finances. And then on Friday, Raj Grewal, he releases this 11-minute video about all of this and pretty much says that he may not be resigning just yet.

Some of you might think that it is right for me to resign. For me, this is a very difficult decision. I made a commitment to the people of Rampton East, this job remains unfinished. So, what is going on with this very strange case? That's today on FrontBurner. And that's today on FrontBurner. I'm Alex Ballingall. I'm a reporter with the Toronto Star's Ottawa Bureau. Hi, Alex. I'm hoping that we can start with the basics, which is give me a sense of who Raj Grewal, until very recently, was a Liberal backbench MP, first elected in 2015. And he's 33. His dad was a cab driver. He's a very proud son of immigrants, as he calls himself. I always say that when we're going door to door, as a son of immigrants, we're living the Canadian dream.

Because I got to go to some of the best schools in this country. And we're running to ensure future generations have that same opportunity. Until earlier this year, in March, April, sort of in the spring, he was sort of just known really for nothing much more than this pretty cool basketball drop-in session that he hosted in his community. Sports was a big part of my life growing up. And that's why when I became a member of parliament, I wanted to ensure that local youth in Branton had an opportunity to play basketball free of any distractions. He was sort of an under the radar politician who, again, until this spring, was just sort of just another backbench liberal MP, really.

And then what happened in the spring? Yeah, so I'm sure people remember the Prime Minister's trip to India. You know, there was a lot of media coverage about his outfits and so much media coverage about his outfits. Yeah. Yeah. And so Raj Grewal was on that trip. And in the weeks after after they all came back, it was reported that Raj Grewal had invited the CEO of a Brampton construction company to accompany him on that trip and to attend events with, you know, cabinet ministers and high-ranking officials.

And this construction company basically has paid him for legal work that he's done even after he was elected, which is not in itself against the rules, but that was raised by the opposition as a potential conflict of interest that he had brought his employer essentially onto a trip with pretty close access to high government decision makers. Now that we have gotten a better sense of who he is and also talked about when he first probably popped onto the radar for a lot of people, I want to move to something that currently at least seems totally unrelated, which is November 22nd.

What happens that day? I think it was after dark. It was Thursday afternoon, evening kind of time. And Gray Wall just sort of dropped this statement on his Facebook saying, you know, I've had to make a really tough decision. This has been really hard. But after consulting my family and the party and the PMO, I have decided to resign my seat as the MP for Brampton East.

And I'm doing this for, and this quote was, personal and medical reasons. So it was sort of vague, but it sounded like he was going through some sort of health trouble, potentially. And does this come as like a complete surprise to you that is Raj Grewal resigning? Yeah, like I was sort of blindsided by it. I had no inkling that it was going to be Grewal or that he might have had some sort of issue like this. I had no clue. And so since November 22nd, since he resigns on his Facebook page, what's interesting is that all of this information has been coming out around Raj Grewal, but in drips. And this information is raised like all of these questions.

And I'm hoping that what we can go through today is how that's unfolded. So let's start first with the prime minister's office. You know, what do you hear in the aftermath of Grewal resigning from the PMO? The PMO, you know, people were asking questions. The PMO Friday afternoon puts out its own statement saying, People were asking questions. The PMO Friday afternoon puts out its own statement saying, actually, Graywall had admitted to us this week that he has a gambling problem and that has driven him into significant personal debt.

So they clarified what he was talking about in his earlier statement. They also said something about alluding to the India trip where the RCMP had made inquiries about the circumstances of what Gray Wall did on that trip. It sort of clarified things, but also brought up more questions about what was going on. Okay, so the PMO gives this extra information that the reason that Graywell is leaving is because of a gambling problem. And they give this other piece of information that previously he had been subject to RCMP inquiries around this India trip. But then we started to hear more information about a police investigation into his gambling debts. Tell me about this.

Yeah, so there was some great reporting from the Globe and Mail, Daniel LeBlanc with the Globe and Mail over that weekend and early the following week. And what he was hearing from his sources, as he reported, was that Gray Wall was basically a high roller at the casino, which is across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, Lac Alimi Casino. the casino, which is across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, Lackalimi Casino. And he'd go there and gamble. And he got pretty deep in the hole. The reports were that it could have been, you know, seven figures, at least a million.

And that the other piece of this was that there's an agency called FinTrack, which is responsible for tracking potential money laundering. When there's big transactions at a casino over 10 grand, if somebody cashes out 10 grand or cashes in 10 grand at a casino, casinos have to report that to FinTrack. And sometimes FinTrack flags those transactions to the RCMP or to police if they think there might be something worth looking into there. And apparently that had happened with Graywall's gambling, according to these reports that the RCMP was tipped off about, you know, some pretty serious gambling transactions at the casino from Graywall and that the RCMP had started looking into that. And I know that this raises a lot of questions among fellow members of parliament. What are they saying? This sort of, among fellow members of parliament what are they saying this sort of uh

with this sort of like phased in revelations that uh occurred over the late that week and in the weekend there was a lot of questions about um when exactly the pmo knew uh the rcmp might be interested in what gray wall was doing when they found out about his uh potential debts we've learned that the gambling debts of the Liberal MP for Brampton East came to light as a result of a police wiretap. The wiretaps were part of an OPP investigation into, quote, particularly shady guys suspected of money laundering and terrorist financing. When did the Prime Minister's office first learn about this serious investigation

involving a sitting Liberal member of Parliament. And their answer to that has been pretty much the whole time that they found out, just a matter of days before Gray Wall made his Facebook resignation announcement. It was last week that we were informed, and the member has told us that he is addressing certain challenges and receiving the treatment from a health professional. We hope he receives the support that he needs. So yeah, there's been a lot of questions about timing and then a lot of

questions about what the PMO knew. And just to clarify, when you say potential debts, you mean gambling debts? Yes, yes. And you know, one interesting aspect of this story is that Gray Wall was on the finance committee for the House of Commons up until September of this year. And is a massive gambling debt something that committee should have known about? Yeah, so questions came up, I guess, about his membership on the finance committee, which were sort of linked with what the PMO knew, because he was shuffled away from that committee on September 19th to a new spot on the health committee. committee on September 19th to a new spot on the health committee. And this came after he had,

earlier this year, officials from the finance department and other agencies were testifying at the committee. And Graywall was asking them about FinTrack, the money laundering tracking agency, how they would pick up on big transactions and what they would do with that information, what would prompt them to start an investigation, and would somebody who's being investigated or whose bank had flagged big transactions know that they're being investigated or know that they've been flagged? How much resources does FinTrack have to actually go after each little $10,000 transaction?

And if I'm money laundering, I'm not doing transactions in the millions to catch attention. I'm doing them at that $10,000, $15,000 limit in order to actually get away with it. In the context of what the Globe had reported about FinTrack and the RCMP, these questions seemed, the fact that he'd asked those questions, I guess, seemed to bring up more questions about was he feeling anxious about his gambling or did he think that he was getting flagged or something? So they just seemed, they took on a new light, I guess, at that point. And we don't know at this time why he was shuffled from that committee at the time.

Well, yeah, the chief whip for the Liberals basically says it's not, we didn't know at that point about his gambling problem. And they say it's not because of that. So they are basically denying that he was shuffled because of concerns about those questions or about his gambling or something. They say that it was an unrelated shuffle. So it's interesting because while all of these drips of information are coming up, had Raj Grewal actually resigned? I know he said on his Facebook page that he was resigning on November 22nd, but does he actually resign? Yeah, so through all this, you know, all these media reports coming out,

sort of the heat getting cranked up on the PMO about what they knew and what Grewal was up to, he's sort of MIA and not responding to requests for comment, not seen on the Hill. And then it sort of becomes apparent by like mid last week that he's still an MP and he hasn't resigned yet. So what's going on? And then on Friday night, sort of late on Friday night, he releases this video. He released it to the Globe first and then published it with the transcript again on his Facebook page.

I know my silence this past week has raised questions and speculation. And for that, I truly apologize. And it's this, you know, 11-minute video where he's, you know, quite calm and measured sitting in front of a window. And he's making this statement where he sort of methodically goes through the whole story. And he talks about how he has, you know this mental illness of gambling addiction this has been an agonizing time for me as i've wrestled with the issue of how my illness impacts my role as an mp when he became an mp he started staying at the hotel that's actually connected to that casino across the river from parliament hill and then he started going to the casino and playing high-stakes blackjack,

and he just started getting more and more in the hole. I either won a lot of money, which made me continue to chase wins, or I lost a significant amount of money, which threw me into complete despair. Over this three-year period, I accumulated a personal debt in the millions of dollars. He said that he fueled his addiction with loans from his friends and family

and insisted that there was nothing sinister going on. I want to make it clear that every single personal loan that was made to me was made by cheque, that everyone has been paid back, and every loan and repayment is transparent and traceable. And how does he respond in this video to the questions that he was asking the finance committee, those questions that you brought up earlier about money laundering? Yeah, so he addressed that too. And he said that those questions had nothing to do with his own situation.

They were prepared by his own staff, and that they were just sort of fair questions in the context of a study about the government's legislation that governs how they police money laundering. To infer that my motivations were unethical or that I was using a chance opportunity to figure out if Fintrack was aware of my gambling is to stretch reality and to take the situation completely out of context.

But I guess, I mean, the big sort of lead in my mind of that was that he revealed there that, well, actually, I'm going to resign from the Liberal caucus, but I'm not yet resigning. So he sort of retracted his first statement that he was going to resign because of his gambling problem. In a highly emotional state, completely exhausted, and facing extreme time constraint, I made an ill-advised statement on Facebook. And so he wanted to take more time to go into treatment, reflect with his family, and then finally make his decision

about whether he will step down as an MP. My sins are not ones based in corruption and dishonesty. They are born out of human frailty. I want to apologize to my family, friends, and supporters. So currently he's an independent MP. Currently he is an independent MP, but still an MP, yeah. It seems like this video has raised even more questions. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. And I think one of the big ones was underlined by the NDP's ethics critic.

On the weekend, Nathan Cullen was saying, you know, well, how could he pay back millions of dollars if he had a gambling addiction? Where did the money come from? Unless he's independently wealthy, which I don't know, but MPs owing money. The reason we have all these ethics rules, why he's under investigation, is that if we owe a great amount of debt to undisclosed sources, that can put us under undue influence. That's the point of the rules. That's sort of a big question that he didn't address in his video that the NDP is raising in the wake of that, for sure.

And did the liberals comment on this video at all? Have they said anything since Friday? Yeah, so we reached out to the PMO Saturday and asked that question, basically. And they didn't really say anything. They just sort of pointed to their earlier statements where the prime minister had tweeted when Graywall had made his first sort of I'm going to step down statement. The prime minister had said, yes, that's the right decision. We hope he gets some help. He needs to step down. That's the right call. And so the PMO is just basically saying, well, we said that then. So that's basically their position. You know, you mentioned earlier in this conversation, this trip to India, how the RCMP had made inquiries into potential conflicts of interest there and that the ethics commissioner was also investigating this case.

Where do we stand with that? Did the RCMP go any further than inquiries? Where is the ethics commissioner on its investigation? Yeah, so the RCMPs, what they're doing is sort of, you know, they won't confirm or deny whether or not they're investigating anything. So we don't know where that stands, if they just sort of looked into it and asked some questions and then that's it, or if there's an actual full-blown police probe into that. there's an actual full-blown police probe into into that but we you know we also don't know if the two if his gambling and and that is somehow linked or we or if it's just a totally separate thing but the ethics investigation that was launched a couple months after that trip is is still ongoing and still open and um in the wake of uh gray wall's um initial announcement that he was going to leave politics, the ethics commissioner's office tweeted that even if he resigns, they're going to finish the investigation. So that is,

that is, as far as we know, still going on. So lots of questions about that, too. You know, is it fair for me to say, just to try and wrap my arms around the story, which is like, there's a lot going on here, that it's just sort of bizarre at this point, that there are just way more questions than answers, that it's also very possible that everything that's happened here is exactly what Raj Grewal says it is, that he has a gambling addiction, which is a serious mental health issue, and that this money that fueled it and the money that he used to pay it back now has come from people close to him, like loans or gifts. Yeah. I mean, that it's totally,

it's certainly possible that it's, that's exactly what's going on. Well, I hope that you'll come back as the story develops. Oh yeah, for sure. Thanks for, thanks for having me. Thanks so much, Alex. We reached out to Raj Grewal's office for comment on Sunday. At the time that we recorded this podcast, we did not receive a response. Raj Grewal, in his 11-minute video

that he released on Friday, he says he'll make a final decision about his political future before Parliament resumes in 2019. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe.

As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.