Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s RCMP handlers were vetting The Bahamas as a vacation destination for the prime minister at least nine months before Trudeau took his family on the 2016-2017 Christmas vacation that would cause so much controversy, according to a new document provided to Global News as a result of a request under federal records laws filed more than two years ago.
The new document, in combination with other information published by parliament’s ethics commissioner late in 2017, establishes that the planning for Trudeau’s trip to The Bahamas island owned by the Aga Khan appears to have started earlier than previously thought, a finding which raises, yet again, questions about the judgment of senior political and bureaucratic aides serving the prime minister — aides who, over the months ahead of the trip, never appeared to warn Trudeau of his obligations under the federal Conflict of Interest Act.
Trudeau would later become the first prime minister in history to break a federal law while in office when parliament’s Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner ruled in December, 2017 that, in accepting the gift of a free vacation on a private Bahamas island and free travel in a non-government aircraft, Trudeau violated four provisions of the Conflict of Interest Act.
“I am not surprised that more information is coming forward on Prime Minister Trudeau’s trip to billionaire island,” said Charlie Angus, the NDP MP from the Ontario riding of Timmins–James Bay who is his party’s ethics critic.
“This was the first inkling we had of a leader who would not give a straight answer about clear breaches of his ethical obligations. Many people wrote it off to a lack of experience. We now know it was rooted in a much deeper problem — that Justin Trudeau simply doesn’t believe that the rule of law applies to him.”
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