CRA May ‘Take A Look’ At Auditing Trudeau Foundation, Says Commissioner

The Trudeau Foundation office in Montreal on April 19, 2023. (Noé Chartier/The Epoch Times)

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) may “take a look” at auditing the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation after reports that it received a Beijing-connected $140,000 charitable donation, MPs on a House of Commons committee heard from the agency’s commissioner.

As Commissioner Bob Hamilton appeared before the Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts on May 12, MPs asked him if recent happenings at the Trudeau Foundation would merit a CRA probe, as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter.

“What if an organization’s entire board resigned?” asked NDP MP Blake Desjarlais, referring to the Trudeau Foundation’s leadership team resigning on April 11 following internal tensions concerning how the controversial donation, made in 2016, was handled.

Hamilton was hesitant to answer questions about specific scenarios pertaining to the Trudeau Foundation, but told MPs that the CRA would “generally” look at investigating a charitable foundation if it saw “turmoil” within its leadership or had “some suspicions that maybe things aren’t working as well.”

“We might not necessarily go in depending on what we think, but it could be something that we factor in and say, ‘Maybe it’s worth a look,’” he said.

The Trudeau Foundation, named after former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is a charitable organization whose goal is to provide scholarships and mentorship to develop “future engaged leaders.”

In 2016 it received a $140,000 donation from Beijing-linked Chinese billionaires Zhang Bin and Niu Gensheng.

Conservative MP Kelly McCauley asked Hamilton what specific threshold of suspicious activity needs to be met to trigger a CRA audit of a charitable foundation.

“I’m just not going to comment on that,” Hamilton answered, while adding that if the CRA believed there was enough available information about a charitable organization to assume that some of its behaviour was “offside,” it might have the “potential” for an audit.

McCauley asked Hamilton if the Trudeau Foundation would have that “potential” based on available information through media reports and committee testimony.

“The potential for us to take a look?” asked Hamilton.

“Yes,” said McCauley.

“Could be,” Hamilton said.

Audit

The Trudeau Foundation previously said it would welcome an investigation by Auditor General Karen Hogan into the donation, including a probe of “all aspects concerning the receipt and handling of these donations by the foundation.”

However, the auditor general said on April 24 that her office would not conduct an investigation into the matter because the amount and private nature of the donation put it outside of the office’s authority.

Some days earlier, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote a letter to Hamilton asking for the CRA to audit the Trudeau Foundation.

“Allegations suggest that the donation was directed by a state-backed group in Beijing with the stated goal of expanding the communist regime’s influence around the globe,” Poilievre wrote on April 14.

“These facts raise serious questions around foreign influence peddling, attempts to hide the true source of the funds, and potentially, fraud.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has denied having any involvement with or connection to the foundation over the past 10 years.

His brother Alexandre Trudeau, who was the foundation’s director in 2014 when he met with Zhang Bin and Niu Gensheng, told the Commons ethics committee earlier this month that investigating the donation is “a waste of time because there is not a foreign interference issue here.”

“I refuse the idea that those people [the donors] were trying to interfere,” he told the committee on May 3.

Matthew Horwood and Noé Chartier contributed to this report.