The Decibel - Behind the Trudeau Foundation controversy

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation has been coming under fire in the past few weeks over a controversial donation it received back in 2016. The Globe and Mail learned back in February that the donation – which was initially said to be from two Chinese billionaires – was allegedly tied to the Chinese government. Now, there’s even more to the story.Today, The Globe’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife is back on the podcast. He and Globe reporter Steven Chase have been breaking this news. He’ll tell us the story of this donation, how the Trudeau Foundation handled it and how this latest controversy ties into the larger web of Chinese interference.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

For years, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation was held up as a charity providing scholarships for PhD students. Now, it's coming under fire. Last week, the CEO and board resigned. They're going to do their own forensic audit, and the foundation has asked the Auditor General to investigate a controversial donation they received back in 2016. Now, there's even more questions about how the Trudeau Foundation handled the donation and how the money traces back to the Chinese government. Robert Fyfe is the Ottawa Bureau Chief, and he's been breaking this news with Globe reporter Stephen Chase. Today, Bob tells us the story of this donation. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Bob, it's great to have you back on the podcast. Always happy to be on the podcast with you. Well, I'm glad we can talk to you because there's a lot going on here. And I want you to kind of catch us up here, Bob. If we can start, I'd like to go back to 2016, actually. And this is when Trudeau attended a fundraiser, which is really where all of this kind of began. Can you just remind us what was going on then, Bob? Like, maybe even start with setting the scene. What was this fundraiser?

Okay, so what happened back in 2016, after Mr. Trudeau won a large majority government, he began having what we called cash for access fundraisers, both the prime minister and his finance minister and a few other senior ministers would go to private homes and people would show up. They'd pay $1,500 or a little more, which isn't a lot of money, but it's the fact that they could have private time with the prime minister. And a lot of people were from the Chinese-Canadian community as well. One of them, by the way, was a guy who wanted a WealthOne bank, which is now under investigation. A month after that fundraiser, he got approval for his bank,

which is now under very serious review by the finance department and has been on CSIS's watch. At that same fundraiser was a man named Zheng Bin, who is a very senior and very wealthy Chinese man who lives in Beijing. He is a political advisor to the Beijing government and heads an organization called the China Cultural Industry Association, which is a state-affiliated organization, which he is the president of. And he has a partner in that organization. And some of his

business dealings is a man named Nu Jingxin. Anyway, this guy shows up at this fundraiser at the Toronto home of Canada-China Business Association. And it's rather unusual that a Chinese citizen would be at a fundraiser because they can't give money. They shouldn't have been there. Only Canadians could give money. Only Canadians can give money. A month later, there was an announcement that Mr. Zhang and his business partner, Mr. Nu, are going to give a million dollars in memory of Pierre-Eliot

Trudeau. $200,000 was going to go to the Trudeau Foundation, the Pierre-Eliot Trudeau Foundation. It was set up in Montreal. $750,000 went to the University of Montreal Faculty of Law, where Pierre Trudeau had studied and got his law degree and also had taught there before he became a politician. And $50,000 was meant to go for a statue of Mr. Trudeau to put outside the University of Montreal Faculty of Law. I just want to focus for a second on the so-called cash for access scandal, because that was big news at the time in 2016 when this was all happening. Can you just remind us, Bob, why was that so important? Well, my colleague and I, Stephen Chase and I,

began to work on these stories because there were a lot of wealthy businessmen who had dealings with the federal government who were showing up at these fundraisers. It was a way for them to lobby the government without having to declare that they were lobbying. How does that square with rich people meeting you at private mansions where they may get to bend your ear for $1,500? I mean, how do those rules meet reality? The fact is, at the federal level, our fundraising rules put very strict limits

on personal donations. They have completely eliminated corporate and union donations. And there is absolute and total transparency for anyone who gives money in anyone who gives money to the. So it became we made it more transparent by writing about it because these were all secret. It took us a long time trying to find out who was behind this one. So that cash for access thing is where we first learned that there was this Chinese businessman who had showed up and then he gave money to the Trudeau Foundation. It was a big controversy at the time as well, because people were saying, this is really fishy. Also, at the same time, Trudeau at this particular

time was trying to open up to China. He wanted to have a free trade agreement with China. There was talk, believe it or not, having an extradition treaty with China so that if there were dissidents here that they didn't like, the Chinese would say, oh, well, they're criminals. We want them sent back to Canada. That didn't happen, but they were talking about it. So all of these things were going on at this time. And it certainly looked like this very wealthy Chinese businessman who was so well connected to the Chinese Communist Party that it was some kind of influence operation. But we didn't know that. Not at the time. So 2016, this Chinese businessman, Zhang Bin, makes this donation after attending this fundraiser. Let's fast forward then.

Here we are in 2023, Bob. You and Steve Chase learned more about that donation this year. What did you find? Okay. We, as you know, had a very high-level senior government official who told us that CSIS had captured a conversation in 2014 between Mr. Zhang and a unnamed commercial attache at one of the consulates in Canada. This is in 2014.

They were talking about there was an election coming. You know, there's a possibility that liberals may become – form the government. We would like you to make a million dollar contribution in memory of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and we will reimburse you for it. So we wrote that story on February the 28th. And of course, it was pretty explosive because it shows that the Chinese government was using their influence operation directly aimed at the Prime Minister of Canada. Can you just spell this out for us, Bob, though? Like what exactly does that mean?

What does that tell us about the donation here? Where's that money? What it tells us is that China was trying to see anything they could to try to help influence the government. And, you know, look, this was a memory of his father. This is a million dollars. Now, I'm not saying that Mr. Trudeau is or anybody who's going to be influenced by that or all by that. But that is a classic way that China operates. They use every means they can to try to influence governments, particularly Western governments, but not just Western governments in any way that this was to curry favor with the prime minister? We should say Justin Trudeau himself was not involved with the organization at the time. He'd stepped away a couple of years before when he became liberal leader.

I have not been in any way associated formally or informally with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in many, many years. I stepped down from any of my family-related responsibilities shortly after having gotten elected in order to demonstrate... I mean, couldn't the Chinese billionaires or, I mean, guess even the Chinese government, could they just not be interested in supporting the Trudeau Foundation because of Pierre Elliott Trudeau's history there opening up diplomatic relations with China back in the 70s? Couldn't that just be kind of a gesture there? Yes, except that according to the official we had, the CISA's recordings show that this was a Chinese state effort to influence the government.

If the Chinese government felt that they wanted to honor the peer Elliot Trudeau and gave a million dollars of their own money and publicly announced it, that's a different issue. There's transparency. People would say, why are you doing this? This doesn't smell right. But when you try to go through basically a front, a cutout to give the money, it shows that that is their intention was to try to, in some way or another, influence the government. Okay. So just to be clear, CSIS is overhearing this conversation between this Chinese billionaire, Zhang Bin, and an attaché discussing the 2015 election, the possibilities of the liberals winning, and then also in the same conversation, having this discussion about donating money to the Trudeau Foundation that would be reimbursed by the Chinese government.

Correct. When we're actually looking at this money, can we trace what happened with the tax receipts? Where was it tied to? Okay. So the annual report for that year lists the two gentlemen from Beijing as the people who made the donation. But the tax receipts do not say that. The tax receipt for 2016 lists the company called Millennium Golden Eagle International Canada. And Millennium Golden Eagle International, that is owned by Zhang Bin, isn't that right?

He's one of the directors of it, yeah. Okay. And the tax receipt was sent to a Hong Kong address. The address in Hong Kong is basically a place that sets up shell companies. So it claimed that they had an office there, but there is no office there. We sent somebody. There's nobody there. The new president and CEO, Pascal Fournier, who is a University of Ottawa law professor, she began to look into it. And in that file, she found that there was a note from a Chinese-affiliated association, which is a state association, an official saying,

don't send that tax receipt now to Hong Kong. Send it to our address here in Beijing. Wow. So there was a request from a state-affiliated organization for who should be on the tax receipt and where this address is. Correct. Okay. And so this was a request made to the Trudeau Foundation,

and I guess the foundation complied and they did that? The foundation complied and sent the tax receipt to an address in Beijing on the directions of a state-affiliated association. We'll be back after this message. The Global Mail has done a lot of the reporting on here, Bob, and I know you and Steve Chase in particular have done a lot of reporting on here. I want to go back to the tax receipts that seem to be causing a lot of the issues here, where we're finding out from these tax receipts about these issues. Can you just take us behind the scenes a little bit there? How do we get access to that? Well, we had got access to information documents, which we actually got back in like 2017.

But we only had access to them for two days and we were busy on something else. We lost access to them. This does happen in journalism. We dropped the ball here. And it was only after when this story broke, some people on the board were saying, well, you guys have those documents. You know, they all assumed we had everything. And I said, what? Oh, yes.

Oh, of course I know the documents. I go to Steve. I said, Steve, what about these documents? He said, oh, my God. And so anyway, to make a long story short, we got the documents, these access documents provided to us again. And then we went through them. And when we went through them, it was very clear that that's where we found the tax receipts. That's when we found out that Alexander Trudeau had –

It's Justin Trudeau's brother. Justin Trudeau's brother. He was on the board at the time. His vice president, he is the person who signed that contract with the two billionaires. There's a lot of details here, but I really want to get to the point of why these details matter. So if we're looking at these tax receipts, for example, the person recorded as the donor was changed. It was different than the address on file. Why do those details matter?

Well, the details matter because this is a publicly funded foundation. A few steps removed from the government for sure. It was set up in 2002 with $125 million of Canadian taxpayers' money. The Trudeau family did not put a penny into that. It was all taxpayers' money. The government still appoints some members of the board. So does the Trudeau family. And the foundation members appoint members of the board. So this is a foundation that has a lot of government involvement in it. And just to be clear, it's not getting ongoing government funding right now, that's worth knowing about.

And not only worth knowing about, let's make sure it doesn't happen again in other aspects of life. All of this comes because the whole country is now trying to figure out how China is interfering in Canadian politics, in Canada's domestic affairs. And it just isn't in elections. It is influence operations. Canadian politics in Canada's domestic affairs. And it just isn't in elections. It is influence operations.

Clearly, what seems to be is directed at the prime minister. We know that they try to do this with Canadian businesses. They try to do this at the university level. They are definitely doing it within the Chinese Canadian community because you have so many dissidents coming out and saying it's pretty bad. So all of these things are real issues and the public is now having a conversation about this and that's why the Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives and everybody say we need a public inquiry. And if we have a public inquiry, presumably, we could get also to the bottom of what happened with the Trudeau Foundation.

The CEO and the board of the Trudeau Foundation resigned last week. So, Bob, what happened in the weeks leading up to that big shakeup at the foundation? So amongst the new directors, there was a lot of deep concern of whether there was possibly fraud here. This was just so smelly and that they wanted to have an audit. board who had been there at the time were not keen on a forensic audit and certainly did not want a special committee set up of directors who had not been involved at any – in any stage with this donation. They would have overseen the terms of reference for the law firm and the forensic audit. March 31st, there was a big fight about that. And then a few days later, everybody resigned. Yeah, it was quite dramatic.

Except for three people who were there at the time of the donation. So this became a pretty major story. For a couple of weeks, as you know, these issues were being raised in the House of Commons by opposition parties. It drew in former Governor General David Johnson, who had been a member of the foundation. Right. And David Johnson was appointed special rapporteur by the prime minister to look into Chinese interference in Canadian elections. So everybody's saying, how can you have him be the special rapporteur when he sat on the Trudeau Foundation? And he's also a good, and he's admitted he's a good family friend of the Trudeaus. And the same thing happened with Morris Rosenberg.

Yes. And Morris Rosenberg, of course, he was asked by the government to look into foreign interference in the 2021 election. And he put out a report on that back in February. Yeah. The opposition party is saying, well, you appointed a guy to look into Chinese interference in the 2016 election campaign when he sat on the Trudeau Foundation board when they accepted the money. Yeah, there's a lot of people kind of getting caught in the crosshairs here that have been

affiliated with the Trudeau board, which is why I think it's raising a lot of eyebrows here. It's raising a lot of eyebrows here. It's raising a lot of eyebrows because perception is everything in politics. And here you have this what looks like tainted money in a fishy deal involving what we now know to be money that was given at the behest of the Chinese government. And then anybody who's associated with it, Mr. Trudeau keeps looking to these people to help them out of trouble. But one thing is clear, if the Auditor General goes in and agrees to go in, which I believe they will, you know, they do very thorough work. So we will find out at the end of the day what really went down. Bob, one of the consequences of your story back

in February is that the Trudeau Foundation promised to give the money from that donation back, the $140,000 back. Has the foundation done that? On Friday, they told us that they had given the money back, wrote a check to Millennium Golden Eagle International Canada, and delivered it to the residents in Dorval. And we were told that the money has been cashed. You know, from the time they announced that they were going to give back the money, they were unable to find anybody at home at that place to deliver it to. That's crazy. They're trying to give it back and they couldn't then at that point.

They couldn't give it back. Okay. This charity seems to be – from all the things that we've talked about here, Bob, the charity does seem to be linked to the prime minister of the foundation, it's a liberal who's who's list of very prominent liberals. Let me just say first of all the foundation does excellent work. It is a superbly important foundation because it provides travel and grants to PhD students, often many people who are underprivileged, so don't have a lot of money. We do not want to see that organization fall apart. But I do think that there needs to be a recognition that this isn't a foundation that's set up for the Liberal Party of Canada or for the Trudeau family and I would hope that the foundation members when they look to appoint new members of the board, that they will look outside

of people who are not partisan but are highly respected in the Canadian community, in the academic community so they can oversee what is a really, really good organization. So I hope and I have a sense talking to some of the foundation members that they're going to do a much better job of selecting board members who credentials aren't the fact that they happen to be a member of the Trudeau – aren't friends of the Trudeau family or the prime minister or that they're liberal party members. Bob, it's always good to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here today. Happy to do so. I know it was complicated. I hope we were able to take people through it.

That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.