OTTAWA- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has run afoul of federal ethics rules yet again, this time missing the deadline for filing a financial disclosure statement with the ethics commissioner.<\/p>\n
Every MP is required to file a disclosure statement within 60 days of his or her election being published in the Canada Gazette; in Trudeau’s case, the deadline was Jan. 13.<\/p>\n
Of the 338 MPs elected last October, only 13, including Trudeau, had failed to file their statements as of Feb. 5, the last time commissioner Mario Dion’s office updated a status report on members’<\/p>\n
compliance with the disclosure requirement.<\/p>\n
The Prime Minister’s Office says the failure to file was an administrative oversight that is being corrected.<\/p>\n
The compliance status report, available on the ethics commissioner’s website, is to be updated again Wednesday.<\/p>\n
There is no penalty for missing the deadline for filing the statements, in which MPs are supposed to detail their own and family members’ private interests, as a hedge against winding up in a conflict of interest.<\/p>\n
Trudeau has twice been found to have violated the Conflict of Interest Act: by accepting a 2016 family vacation on the private Bahamian island owned by the Aga Khan, billionaire spiritual leader of the world’s Ismaili Muslims; and by improperly pressuring his former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to intervene to stop the criminal prosecution of Montreal engineering giant SNC-Lavalin.<\/p>\n
Others who had not filed their disclosure statements as of Feb. 5 included Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet, Liberal MPs Wayne Easter and Hedy Fry, and Conservative MPs John Barlow and Arnold Viersen.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 11, 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OTTAWA- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has run afoul of federal ethics rules yet again, this time missing the deadline for filing a financial disclosure statement with the ethics commissioner. Every MP is required to file a disclosure statement within 60 days of his or her election being published in the Canada Gazette; in Trudeau’s case, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":""},"categories":[32,39],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n