OTTAWA – The Conservative Party expressed outrage this morning that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was not one of the many world leaders recently exposed by the Panama Papers as having a private offshore bank account.
“Canadians have a right to know exactly what kind of man our Prime Minister is,” said interim Tory leader Rona Ambrose on the floor of the house of commons. “How can they have any faith in their government if their leader is not maintaining a vast web of illicit financial transactions and tax evading foreign bank accounts?”
“Clearly Mr. Trudeau was too busy taking selfies to behave like politicians are supposed to,” she added.
The Conservatives pointed to both British PM David Cameron and former Iceland leader Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson as examples of leaders who “get it.”
“Look we all know the score. A career politician who has never worked in the private sector gets elected Prime Minister, rules for a while and when they leave, they are inexplicably worth millions of dollars, and no one questions it. That is the beauty of our democracy. But now that dream is being destroyed by a Liberal government too inexperience to know how to properly take bribes” said finance critic Lisa Raitt.
Liberals however were quick to jump to Trudeau’s defence.
“Just because the Prime Minister was not named in the Panama Papers, the opposition is jumping up and down saying he doesn’t have any money hidden away,” said house leader Dominic LeBlanc. “But Panama is only one country with lax banking laws. How do we know Mr. Trudeau is not hiding all the assets from his father’s estate in a semi-legal trust based out of the Cayman Islands? Or moving money around bank accounts in Switzerland registered under his wife’s name.”
“The government wants to assure all Canadians that Mr. Trudeau will at one point be involved in a financial scandal, it just didn’t happen this time.”
Mr. LeBlanc’s words did not appear to mollify the outrage however, as critics on both the left and right say the embezzlement targets set by the government will be impossible to reach.
