The Liberal party’s WE scandal and the future economy is on the mind of the Foothills MP this summer.
“I initially thought this is playing favourites with WE, an organization that he (Prime Minister Trudeau) has had very close ties with — having spoken at their events,” said Foothills MP John Barlow, a member of the Conservative Party. “But when you see the money his family has made of it and the finance minister’s (Bill Morneau) daughter employed by them, it’s dirty.”
WE Charity was awarded the contract to outsource a $900-million student volunteer program.
The charity group has a history of working with youth.
Its holds WE Event festivals for students across the country. Many Foothills and CTR Catholic Schools students have attended the WE festivals at the Saddledome over the years. The students often earn the opportunity to represent their school for their service and leadership at the school and in the community.
It has been reported that Margaret Trudeau, Justin’s mother, received as much as $250,000 for speaking at more than 20 WE events.
His brother, Alexandre, has also received money for speaking at WE.
The prime minister said at a July 13 press conference that although he was aware of his mother and brother taking money for public speaking he did not know how much they received for WE events.
He also stated he should have recused himself from the WE contract decision. As well, the prime minister said a major regret is that youths may not be able to serve their country due to a delay in the program.
Barlow scoffed at that notion.
“There is nothing stopping any youth from volunteering with any organization,” Barlow said. “They don’t have to do it just because they are going to get paid.
“There are a lot of non-profits that youths can help out. To say this is stopping them from serving their country is ridiculous.”
Although not as gobsmacked as by the WE controversy, Barlow said the financial snapshot announced last week by Morneau of the projected $343-billion deficit due to the COVID-19 took him and the Conservatives aback.
“It’s staggering – we were all sort of anticipating something between $175 billion and $250 billion as the deficit, to see it at now $345 billion is almost unfathomable for a country of our size to now have a trillion-dollar debt,” Barlow said.
Morneau announced during his fiscal snapshot on Wednesday the deficit for 2020-21 would rise from $34.4 billion to $343.2 billion. $212 billion was for support to individuals and businesses. An additional $81 billion was due to the slowdown in the economy.
Barlow admits the government had to move quickly to help Canadian businesses when businesses were forced to close and the economy came to a standstill in March due to COVID-19.
“They were very quick decisions but we did a survey with our business recovery task force in the riding and there were a quarter of the businesses that were actually eligible for a lot of these programs, like the emergency business account,” Barlow said. “Even though these programs were out there they seemed to be unattainable for a lot of our businesses.
He said many rural businesses are family owned, small proprietors, agriculture, which may be running their businesses through a personal account, may not have been eligible for programs.
“On the one side, I think they (the programs) had to be more flexible for the eligibility programs,” Barlow said. “On the other side, with CERB, there has to be program to reward people to go back to work.”
CERB provides Canadians who are unemployed due to COVID-19 $2,000 a month. Barlow said he has heard from businesses in his riding that employees are not returning to work because of the CERB payments.
At present, if an employee makes more than $1,000 a month, he or she loses all of their $2,000 a month payment.
“That’s a disincentive to get people to get back to work,” Barlow said.
He said the Conservatives would like to see a graduated scale where the more the person earns, the less CERB he or she receives but they don’t lose everything.
Going forward he would like to see a process in which Canadians can see how the dollars were spent.
“We also have to find ways, in a safe manner, to get Canadians back to work,” he said
