Finance minister fires back at Tories
Finance Minister Bill Morneau is threatening to sue the Conservatives for suggesting he used his inside knowledge of a pending tax change announcement in 2015 to sell off stocks before their value dropped.
On Tuesday, a day after sidestepping more than a dozen questions on the issue, Morneau called the insinuations by Tory finance critic Pierre Poilievre “absurd.”
“If the Opposition want to continue with these absurd allegations, which have no basis in any sort of fact, they can take them outside of the House and I will give them a sense of exactly how our legal system works,” said Morneau.
Anything said in the House of Commons is subject to parliamentary privilege, which gives MPs legal protection from libel and defamation laws. Poilievre first raised the allegations Monday during question period in the Commons.
He claimed Morneau’s December 2015 announcement that he would raise income taxes on the highest earners caused the entire stock market to drop, including the value of Morneau Shepell shares — 680,000 of which were sold off roughly a week earlier.
Poilievre alleged the early sale of the shares saved the owner half a million dollars.
He repeatedly asked Morneau if it was a coincidence that the 680,000 shares were sold off a week before the tax announcement. And he asked Morneau repeatedly to confirm he was the “someone” responsible for selling off those shares in the company founded by the minister’s father.
When the Speaker questioned the appropriateness of questioning the government on the matter, Poilievre retorted: “It is actually the responsibility of government to ensure that no minister ever uses inside knowledge to benefit from transactions on the stock market.”
While Morneau dodged those allegations of insider trading Monday, he had more to say at a hastily called news conference Tuesday.
“What we’re hearing now is in my mind (an) absolutely crazy idea that something that we campaigned on, that we talked to 36 million Canadians about which was a rise in taxes in the top one per cent was somehow knowledge that was only my knowledge,” he said.
Poilievre maintained he hasn’t “actually accused him of anything” and has only asked Morneau whether he was the one who sold the shares a week before the tax announcement.