The primary reason for last year’s Parliament prorogation was to get Prime Minister Justin Trudeau out of the WE Charity controversy, the Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) heard on Thursday.
On June 25, 2020, the WE Charity was awarded a federal contract of $43.5 million to administer a student summer grant program, despite the organization’s close ties to the Trudeau family. In July 2020, the federal Ethics Commissioner launched an investigation into whether Trudeau and his then-finance minister Bill Morneau had violated the Conflict of Interest Act.
Morneau resigned on Aug. 17, and within 24 hours, Trudeau announced the decision to prorogue Parliament—a move that would effectively shut down all committee investigations in the current session, including the WE Charity scandal.
While the Liberal government said the purpose of proroguing Parliament was to reset policy focus to address the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, Duane Bratt, a political science professor at Mount Royal University, said two key pieces of evidence suggest that the move was more politically motivated.
The first, he said, was the timing of the prorogation.
“If at any time in the spring of 2020, the government had decided to prorogue Parliament in order to give it more time to effectively respond to COVID-19, that would have made perfect sense,” Bratt told the committee. “But waiting until August, and only after the WE scandal had been percolating for weeks with future bad news for the government showed what I believe was the real political calculation.”
The second piece of evidence was manifest in the context of the Throne Speech. Bratt said while the Speech from the Throne usually offers a vague vision of the government’s policy direction, the one delivered in September 2020 should have had explicit content for dealing with the pandemic.
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