Chris Selley: Harjit Sajjan goes to a Taylor Swift show … for charity, you see

On Tuesday we learned that federal Liberal cabinet minister Harjit Sajjan will be attending a Taylor Swift concert at BC Place in Vancouver, in a private suite, courtesy of PavCo, the Crown corporation that operates the stadium. The federal government partially funds PavCo, including $116 million earlier this year for improvements to the stadium in advance of the 2026 World Cup.

It’s a textbook conflict of interest. Open and shut. Dead to rights. So much for Sajjan’s political career. Only … not. The only people who seem to disagree that it’s a conflict are federal Liberals and, sorry to say, the office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner — because Sajjan donated $1,500 to a food bank as a gesture to compensate for the coveted opportunity.

“If an item is paid for through a charitable donation, then it would not be considered a gift,” a spokesperson for the commissioner said in response to questions from National Post. “In the case of Minister Sajjan, for example, the original market value of a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver was roughly $600.”

Where do we even begin with this nonsense?

PavCo offered private-box seats to various dignitaries on the understanding they would donate some appropriate amount of money to good causes. Sajjan says he’s proud to have participated.

But you can’t “pay for” a free concert ticket — to use the commissioner spokesperson’s term — by giving money to a food bank. That’s like The Keg offering you a free dinner so long as you pay for it at Montana’s … except food-bank donations, unlike steak dinners, come with tax receipts.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument that $600 per ticket — or $750, which Sajjan deemed appropriate — is a reasonable estimate. (I suspect it isn’t.) The offer itself had enormous value as well. Plenty of regular parents would have given their eye teeth for a chance to pay $1,500 for two tickets for their kids (or themselves) to see Swift.

Regular parents had to jump through astonishing hoops, online and off, for a chance to buy tickets at any price. Sajjan did not, because he is not a regular parent. He is a federal cabinet minister, in a government that funds the organization offering him the free tickets.

I asked the commissioner’s office where this rule about charitable donations came from, and didn’t get an answer. There’s nothing about that in the Conflict of Interest Act. There is, however, this: “No public office holder or member of his or her family shall accept any gift or other advantage … that might reasonably be seen to have been given to influence the public office holder in the exercise of an official power, duty or function.”

Gifts given by relatives or friends are one exception. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously claimed the Aga Khan was a friend. Then commissioner Mary Dawson disagreed. And that’s a good comparison, actually: Let’s say Trudeau had donated the full cost of his and his retinue’s stay on Bell’s Island to a good cause. So what? The opportunity to vacation on a private Bahamian cay was more than enough special treatment to form a serious conflict, in light of the federal government’s considerable support for the Aga Khan Foundation.

In any event, no one’s claiming Sajjan is friends with a B.C. Crown corporation.

Another exception under the Conflict of Interest Act applies to gifts “received as a normal expression of courtesy or protocol, or … within the customary standards that normally accompany the public office holder’s position.” That doesn’t work here either; Sajjan claims it wasn’t even a gift in the first place, because he gave $1,500 to a charitable organization.

Other politicians who did not consider the offer normal or customary include B.C. Premier David Eby and Tourism Minister Chandra Herbert — the province gives PavCo much more money than the feds — and Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim. None of them took free tickets. “While tickets were offered to (the mayor), he declined and personally purchased tickets for himself, his family and friends,” Sim’s office said in a statement.

So what’s going on here? Essentially, and typically, Canadians are not entitled to know. When the commissioner finds a public officeholder violates the Conflict of Interest Act, we get detailed reports and explanations. When it decides the opposite, the commissioner’s spokesperson explained, “confidentiality requirements limit what we can say about our conversations with the minister (to) general information.”

The commissioner’s ruling isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. Normal people with functioning moral compasses know Sajjan committed a blatant conflict of interest, and will judge him accordingly. It’s not like the Conflict of Interest Act has any real teeth anyway (Trudeau has been found more than once to have violated it) — and at times like these, there are always demands the act be toughened.

It probably should be. But when we don’t even understand how the commissioner interprets the current act, it seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

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