Defence Department CAUGHT LYING about minister's holiday travels

Sheila Gunn Reid has the documents to prove the Department of National Defence lied about the travel plans of former defence minister Harjit Sajjan.

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I want to show you why our investigative work at Rebel News, with access to information investigations, is so important. Because even those investigations that turn up nothing — at least at the time — often prove useful.

We may just have to wait until that time comes. I want to show you this rule in action in a quick little video today.

We caught Department of National Defence bureaucrats lying to us, but we didn’t know it until they accidentally told the truth in an order paper question response tabled in the House of Commons.

This story is almost a year old, and it goes all the way back to last Christmas when Trudeau was telling us all to stay home, stay safe and to not travel or see our families for Christmas.

We filed a request for flight records right after Christmas, and about two weeks into the new year, this is the response we got:

This is further to your Access to Information Act (ATIA) request received January 4, 2021 for: A report on the use of administrative flights for both the Airbus CC-150 Polaris and the Challenger Aircraft for the use of VIPs (including the Prime Minister) for the month of December 2020. Unfortunately, following a thorough and complete search for all records in response to your request, it is determined that no records could be located within the Department of National Defence.

So, no records with the Department of Defence. This is what the Trudeau bureaucrats told us back in January — except that wasn’t true. And they were fibbing about their own minister.

Here is the proof.

Flash forward to April, to an order paper response in the House of Commons to a question asked by the Opposition about who was travelling and when.

Look at this — remember, we specifically asked about the Challenger, and we asked about December, and we asked about ministers who travelled on the Challenger.

And to top it all off, we asked the Department of National Defence. Documents tabled in the House of Commons showed that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan travelled from Ottawa, back to his home riding of Victoria, and back to Ottawa, on December 18.

Looks like the department thought they could get away with lying to access to information filers, but they knew they could not get away with uttering a false document in the House of Commons.

Now, there is more to this story.

In another access to information document, a story I will be publishing in the coming days, we can see federal bureaucrats joking or plotting to hide information or misreport it to obscure it from access to information requests.

And we know they did it — blocked that information — because when we filed for access to information on the same issue, they told us there were no records.

Just like this time. And just like this time, we caught them in another lie.

So, make sure you’re subscribed to Rebel News, and that you check our website, so you don't miss that expose when it goes live. And if you would like to support this sort of paper trail investigations into all levels of government, please consider donating at our special access to information research fund at RebelInvestigates.com.

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