While appearing in front of the House of Commons Finance Committee on Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lied.

When Liberal MP Peter Fragiskatos was reading scripted questions to the prime minister, he asked a very basic question:

“are you friends, have you spent social time together, have you had dinners together [with the Kielburger brothers]?”

Trudeau flatly denied the friendship. “No,” he responded immediately. He went on to say that he had never had any non-public engagements with the two, and had only ever “seen them at events.”

In the opinion of Prime Minister Trudeau, they were not friends in any way shape or form. Unfortunately for Trudeau, this directly contradicts statements made by both the Kielburger brothers and Trudeau himself.

On November 10, 2015 — just days after winning his first general election — Justin Trudeau appeared at a We Day event in Ottawa, where he said (emphasis added):

The big challenge that we're facing — and that our *friends* Craig and Marc have done such an incredible job with over the past years — is showing you that each and every one of us is powerful.

That same presumption that Justin Trudeau and the two brothers are friends has been reiterated by Craig and Marc Kielburger personally.

A timeline of the Trudeau/Kielburger relationship compiled by iPolitics shows that, “in a 2015 interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Craig Kielburger calls Trudeau a friend and someone he has known for more than a decade.”

According to the House of Commons Procedure and Practice manual, “it is generally accepted that witnesses have a duty to speak the truth regardless of whether or not their testimony is given under oath."