The leader of Ontario's official opposition says a minister in Doug Ford's government needs to "come clean" about a trip to Las Vegas that sources told The Trillium he and a close aide to the premier took in 2020 with a developer who has since benefited from the Greenbelt land swap and other government decisions.
NDP Leader Marit Stiles' call out of Kaleed Rasheed, a PC MPP since 2018 and cabinet minister for the last two years, came on Thursday from Queen's Park.
"Why not simply come clean and provide the information, and answer the questions?," Stiles said about a trip to Las Vegas that multiple independent sources, including ones in the government, linked to it, and unassociated with it, indicated to The Trillium that Rasheed and Amin Massoudi, then-Ford's principal secretary, took with developer Shakir Rehmatullah in February 2020.
In responding to questions about the Las Vegas trip before it was reported two weeks ago, neither Rasheed nor Massoudi denied going. Both denied having ever gone on trips paid for by Rehmatullah. Neither responded when asked if they paid for it themselves. Rehmatullah didn't respond to questions sent to him by email about the trip.
"If there's nothing to hide," Stiles said on Thursday, then Rasheed should answer questions about it, including "who paid for this boys' trip to Las Vegas."
A day earlier, Rasheed refused to answer questions related to the trip at a media availability. "I stand by my statement," Rasheed said when asked by The Trillium if he'd been in touch with Ontario's integrity commissioner about the trip, or if he thought it was appropriate for senior officials to go on personal trips with stakeholders who majorly benefit from government decisions.
The June 28 statement from his spokesperson that Rasheed referenced said he's never been on a trip paid for by Rehmatullah, and that he has an "ethics screen on any government decisions related to Mr. Rehmatullah and his companies." Government officials can set up ethics screens to follow as a means of procedures to ensure they're kept out of dealings that could impact the business of a spouse, family member or close friend.
On Thursday afternoon, after Stiles' callout, Rasheed's office responded to The Trillium about if he'd gotten in touch with the integrity commissioner, or vice-versa, about the Las Vegas trip. His spokesperson replied in an email, "No."
"One of the things that many of us (MPPs) do if we have any question or concern — or frankly, it's just part of the routine proceeding, I think, for a lot of us as elected officials — is you run these things by the integrity commissioner and make sure that you're not stepping outside the (Members') Integrity Act in some way," Stiles had said earlier.
Ontario's Members' Integrity Act allows MPPs to contact Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake's office for his opinion about whether an action of theirs would be, or has been, against the ethics and conflict-of-interest laws they're meant to follow. MPPs often go to Wake for opinions. He provided 277 opinions to MPPs in the 2021-2022 fiscal year, according to his spokesperson.
Wake's spokesperson wouldn't say whether anyone who went on the February 2020 Las Vegas trip contacted the commissioner's office about it when The Trillium asked in late June. The integrity commissioner's office's work is carefully shaped by five different laws that significantly limit what it can disclose about its work, aside from what's included in the reports it publishes.
The NDP leader also said she would "absolutely not" condone a New Democrat MPP going on a similar trip. "It doesn't look right, and it's not," Stiles said.
It's Stiles' "hope" that Wake would address the Las Vegas trip, she said, while adding that she wanted to "look into it a little more closely" before deciding whether to request an official investigation.
The integrity commissioner can only decide to launch a Section 31 inquiry — the typical kind of investigation his office focuses on MPPs — under the Members' Integrity Act after being asked by another MPP. In the annual report for the previous fiscal year that his office released on June 27, Wake suggested that MPPs should consider changing the act so that he and future integrity commissioners can launch inquiries on their own accord, or based on requests from members of the public.
