None of the following is news to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or his advisers.
While the public is only now learning the details of his Caribbean vacation, these details, and the red flags they raised, would have been well known to the PMO weeks ago – long before the boss packed his bags.
His advisers would have known that some of the Trudeau family's holiday plans were ethically questionable and legally problematic, as they involved accepting luxurious travel benefits from the Aga Khan, a family friend of Mr. Trudeau's who also happens to head a charitable organization registered to lobby the federal government, and which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from it.
And yet instead of responding to these obvious red flags by modifying Mr. Trudeau's itinerary, Team Trudeau decided the best approach would be to go ahead with this troubling trip – but try to keep it a secret.
Mr. Trudeau, the Instagram Prime Minister who never misses an opportunity for a selfie and is often accompanied by his own photographer, spent his vacation making no mention of what he was up to on his social-media handles. Neither did his travel companions, Liberal MP Seamus O'Regan, Liberal Party president Anna Gainey, and their respective spouses.
Normally, a Canadian politician who is lucky enough to meet the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the world's Ismaili Muslim community, does not miss an opportunity to have themselves photographed with him. But in this case, they mysteriously tweeted not a peep about their vacation on his private Bahamian island, or their travel there aboard his helicopter.
In fact, for several days, his spokespeople flat out refused to say where Canada's PM was, who he was with, or how he got there.
There is nothing wrong with a politician, even the leader of a government, occasionally taking a holiday. Nobody should begrudge the PM a vacation. There's also nothing wrong with taking that vacation in a sunny place outside of Canada; nobody said that Canadian public officials have a civic duty to spend their winter holidays north of the 49th parallel.
And there's nothing wrong with a politician using his vacation to visit a "friend" – the argument that has been the centrepiece of Mr. Trudeau's defence of his trip. Nor is the Prime Minister obliged to limit his travel options to those that would be affordable to the average middle-class Canadian.
But the PM, who is well paid for his work, and has many of his personal needs picked up by the taxpayer, does have to limit his travel options to those affordable by him.
The same goes for all public officials. It's about preventing our legislators from being bought, or looking as if they are for sale. And even if they aren't influenced, they have to avoid giving the appearance of a conflict of interest – and that includes not accepting otherwise unaffordable accommodations on a private island, with transportation thrown in, to boot.
That's where the red flags on Mr. Trudeau's trip go up – and surely went up in the office of the PMO, weeks ago.
Over the Christmas break, the PM did not go just on a vacation with a friend. He appears to have accepted a vacation partly provided to him by that friend; an extremely wealthy friend who heads a charitable organization that, however good its work, is nevertheless a lobbyist of the federal government and a seeker of taxpayer funds and favour.
As part of the vacation, the PM on Thursday admitted that he arrived at the Aga Khan's island by means of his host's private helicopter. The federal Conflict of Interest Act is very clear about how something like this is to be handled:
"No minister of the Crown, minister of state or parliamentary secretary, no member of his or her family and no ministerial adviser or ministerial staff shall accept travel on non-commercial chartered or private aircraft for any purpose unless required in his or her capacity as a public office holder or in exceptional circumstances or with the prior approval of the (Conflict of Interest and Ethics) Commissioner."
It does not appear that Team Trudeau sought such prior approval; it is not clear why, if sought, it would have been given.
In a few days, Donald Trump will be sworn in as U.S. president. The billionaire owner of global businesses he refuses to divest, he embodies the potential for conflict of interest – between public duty and private benefit – to an unprecedented degree. Mr. Trudeau's holiday malfeasance is, relatively speaking, minor league.
But the fact that the PM's advisers wanted to keep his trip secret strongly suggests that they knew how bad it would look. The first to know where Mr. Trudeau was going were also the first to know that something about it was not quite right.