BONOKOSKI: Donations poured into PET foundation once Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader
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When Justin Trudeau was elected Liberal leader in 2013, the money was soon raining down on the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation — not to mention Trudeaumania 2.0 making him prime minister two years later.
Suddenly the foundation had a pied piper in spirit as the younger Trudeau stepped aside to avoid the bane of bad optics.
But he remained the figurehead — and the money magnet.
Founded in 2001, a year after former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s death at 80 of prostate cancer, the foundation got a nice little boost in 2002 when the Liberals of prime minister Jean Chretien bequeathed it $125 million.
The government, in turn, gets to appoint two directors.
The independent, supposedly non-partisan foundation “supports creative and critical thinkers who make meaningful contributions to critical social issues through scholarships, fellowships, mentorships and public interaction events.”
It claims to have granted hundreds of major awards to top researchers and highly accomplished individuals in Canada and abroad.
In 2014, for example, when the foundation earned $9.4 million in interest alone on the back of the Chretien government’s $125-million chip-in, $1.4 million was spent on scholarships and $1.1 million on mentorships and fellowships.
According to access-to-information documents, the foundation was getting comparative nickel-and-dime donations until Justin Trudeau was having the populace swooning as leader of the third party in Parliament, as well as growing anxious in 2015 to finally see the back of prime minister Stephen Harper after 10 years of Conservative rule.
There was that uncomfortable time in 2016 when $1 million was donated to the foundation by two Chinese businessmen — one with connections to Beijing — after one of the men attended Trudeau’s controversial cash-for-access private dinners at the home of a Chinese multimillionaire. The donation included $50,000 for the building of a statue to Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
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Those revelations, ultimately that a senior apparatchik in Chinese state-run organizations whose purpose is to project Communist Beijing’s influence abroad had given such serious money to the foundation, had former Conservative MP Chuck Strahl quit as a director.
In his resignation letter, Strahl explained what prompted him to quit was Liberal MPs using his directorship in their defence of the contributions, which included $50,000 to go toward erecting a bronze of the former prime minister in Montreal.
“I cannot allow them to imply that my position with the foundation somehow justifies their actions,” Strahl, once a cabinet minister in the Harper government, wrote to foundation president Morris Rosenberg.
According to its 2018 report, the foundation boasted its top donors were Air Canada, RBC and the tech giants Google and Twitter.
All these companies, of course, have no intention of influencing the now prime minister, bien sur. But one cannot help but see the similarities between the Clinton Foundation and the Trudeau Foundation, even if the latter was almost exclusively funded by a government endowment of taxpayers’ money.
Back in 2016, an analysis of the Trudeau Foundation’s public disclosures found the amount of money contributed to the foundation by foreign donors grew each year after Trudeau claimed the party’s leadership. Moreover, a significant proportion of the charity’s donors, directors and members have ties to companies and organizations that are actively lobbying the federal government.
Administration costs also blossomed, from $430,000 pre-pied piper to $1.6 million, with one unnamed payee pulling in $250,000-plus in salary and another $120,000-plus, and nine others at more modest incomes.
As the old saying goes, it takes money to make money.
The Trudeau Foundation excels at that maxim.
