iPolitics AM: Rodriguez set to face House ethics committee after senior PMO staffer told not to appear – iPolitics
Mar 29, 2021
As the two-week Easter recess gets underway, a potentially precedent-setting standoff over the power of parliamentary privilege may be about to unfold across the table of the House ETHICS committee, where, as previewed in the iPolitics weekly lookahead, opposition members had expected to get the chance to cross-examine a top-level aide to the prime minister over the now-defunct deal to put WE Charity in charge of divvying up hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic-related student volunteer funding, but will now apparently have to direct those questions to Government House Leader Pablo Rodriguez instead.
According to Canadian Press, Rodriguez advised the committee yesterday afternoon that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policy director Rick Theis — who was one of four senior Liberal staffers named in the House order adopted last week — “has been instructed to not appear before the committee.”
