Finance Minister Bill Morneau reveals he paid back more than $40,000 to WE Charity for family trips

It started with a confession and ended with a demand for the finance minister’s resignation.

On Wednesday, just hours before testifying before a parliamentary committee probing a now-cancelled government deal with WE Charity, Finance Minister Bill Morneau sent WE a cheque for more than $40,000 to cover expenses for trips he and his family took with the organization.

In his opening statement to the finance committee now reviewing the Liberal government’s decision to strike a deal with WE Charity to administer a $900-million student grant program, Morneau said he had made a mistake.

Several days before testifying, he said, he reviewed his family’s personal records and found that WE covered some costs during overseas trips, including for accommodation and around WE activities.

“This was to my surprise,” said Morneau, who insisted several times during his testimony on Wednesday he was previously unaware of the unpaid expenses.

“Today, I wrote a cheque in payment of $41,366,” he said. “I expected and always had intended to pay the full cost of these trips and it was my responsibility to make sure that was done.”

“This was a mistake on my behalf,” said Morneau.

The revelation immediately sparked calls for Morneau’s resignation from Conservative MPs Pierre Poilievre and Michael Cooper, who sit on the committee. Allegations were levelled by Opposition MPs that he’d violated ethics rules by accepting the payments for his trips.

The deepening scandal comes just as COVID-19 cases are spiking across Canada, economic havoc continues due to the pandemic, and scrutiny intensifies around the WE deal.

The new financial ties to WE also come during an ethics probe of Morneau — which is focused on his decision to approve the student grant deal — and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose brother and mother received a combined $282,000 between 2016 and 2020 from the WE organization in speaking fees.

In 2017, Morneau said he and his family took a trip to Kenya to learn about WE school projects. Later, Morneau travelled with his family to Ecuador to take part in WE programs there. The $41,000 cheque was to cover expenses for these trips, he said.

Morneau also revealed that his wife has made two $50,000 donations to the WE organization over the last several years.

Still, he stuck to the line that while he should have recused himself from discussions about awarding WE the deal to receive upwards of $43.5 million to administer the student grant program, he didn’t think he had a conflict of interest.

“I do not believe I had a conflict, although I fully recognize that there are legitimate questions about the perception of a conflict,” said Morneau on Wednesday.

The minister said he turned over the new information about the expenses paid by WE to Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion.

Earlier this month, Dion announced his ethics investigation into Morneau after it was revealed that the finance minister’s daughter works for WE.

But with Morneau’s Wednesday testimony, questions continue to swirl, and the finance committee will have the chance to put some of them to Trudeau.

The prime minister has taken the rare decision to testify before the group of Liberal and Opposition MPs, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. The committee hopes to hear from Trudeau on July 28.

The latest scandal is not the first time Morneau has been at the centre of an ethics controversy.

In 2017, he paid a small fine for failing to disclose that he set up a corporation that owned his villa in France. He also faced Opposition criticism as he sold off shares in Morneau Shepell, a move that followed allegations of a conflict for his introduction of a pension reform bill that critics said could have boosted the share price.

Get the latest in your inbox

Never miss the latest news from the Star, including up-to-date coronavirus coverage, with our email newsletters

Sign Up Now

Opposition MPs sitting on the finance committee have been grilling witnesses for days, asking if red flags were raised around the WE agreement and financial ties between ministers and the charity.

The Canada Student Service Grant program was developed throughout April. In a tight timeline of events Morneau laid out, he said that he had a conversation with Craig Kielburger, co-founder of WE Charity, on April 26.

“We would have broadly discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Morneau said. “He did not raise the Canada Student Service Grant, nor did I.”

But the life of the program began earlier.

During the height of the pandemic, Morneau said that on the evening of April 5, he had a call with Trudeau and talked about getting support to students who were hit hard by the coronavirus-created economic crisis.

The finance minister said department of finance officials and his ministerial team began to look at how to tackle this.

On April 7, Morneau said about a dozen organizations, including WE, were contacted by officials as part of an “engagement effort.”

Several days after that, WE sent a proposal to Morneau’s office, but he said it had to do with “social entrepreneurship” and not the summer student grant program, which was in its infancy, and that he didn’t look at it at the time.

On April 18, officials told him that a partnership with a third party might be the way to go in delivering a program with the scale that the government was hoping for, said Morneau. WE was raised as one potential option.

“This was the first time that I’d been involved with any discussion related to WE Charity and what would become the Canada Student Service Grant,” he said.

On April 21, he “verbally approved” the grant program being potentially administered by a third party, but said that WE, or another group, hadn’t been selected at that point.

The social entrepreneurship proposal that had gone to Morneau’s office earlier in April, and had been before other ministers, was adapted to fit a pitch to run the grant program.

That proposal was received by bureaucrats working on the file on the same day the program was announced, April 22.

Throughout May, Morneau was part of cabinet meetings where the agreement with WE was discussed and he said again on Wednesday that he should have recused himself.

“I provided approval on the final revised funding decision for the program on June 3,” said Morneau. “That was my last direct engagement with the program’s development.”