Are Sponsored Trips Opening the Door to Foreign Influence?

My great concern is that what are these countries seeking in return from these MPs, in return for all expenses paid and putting them up in the best hotels.

—Errol Mendes

Last year, 67 Canadian MPs took over 90 trips sponsored by lobby groups, business associations, or foreign governments, totalling in cost to around half a million dollars, to destinations such as Taiwan, Israel, Spain, China, Ethiopia, and Turkey.

The practice might make it convenient for MPs to learn more about world affairs, but critics say it also raises the question of whether it opens the door to foreign influence over the nation’s representatives if they are catered to by foreign governments that have their own vested interests.

The conflict of interest code, while making it illegal for any MP to accept gifts given to buy influence, allows parliamentarians to accept sponsored trips related to their position.

Nelson Wiseman, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, says sponsored travel is not a concern as long as it is made public. MPs are not so gullible as to be influenced or become “captive of their sponsor,” he says.

“Let’s say you’re being sponsored by the Saudi government to go over there … and they restrict where you can go. Well, you get a sense of what’s going on.”

But the controversial remarks made last year by Richard Fadden, head of CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency, paint a more worrisome picture. According to Fadden, some Canadian officials are already under the influence of foreign regimes.

“You invite somebody back to the homeland. You pay [for] their trips and all of a sudden you discover that when an event is occurring that is of particular interest to country ‘X,’ you call up and you ask the person to take a particular view,” Fadden said in an interview with CBC last year.

That’s the same concern that makes Errol Mendes, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, uneasy about these trips.

“My great concern is that what are these countries seeking in return from these MPs, in return for all expenses paid and putting them up in the best hotels, etc.,” he says.

“Is that not a form of lobbying and influence-purchasing?”