Poilievre defends RCMP comments, denies saying Trudeau should be in jail

On Wednesday, Poilievre said he thinks there were some scandals during Trudeau's time in office that should have resulted in criminal charges.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre defended his comments about the RCMP Wednesday and denied saying former prime minister Justin Trudeau should be in jail.

“That’s not what I said,” he said on Parliament Hill when asked about a recent interview on a YouTube channel.

In that interview, which ran on the Northern Perspective channel last week, Poilievre called the RCMP’s leadership “despicable” and accused it of covering up for Trudeau.

“Many of the scandals of the Trudeau era should have involved jail time,” he said. “Trudeau broke the Criminal Code when he took a free vacation from someone with whom he had government business.”

“If the RCMP had been doing its job and not covering up for him, then he would have been criminally charged,” Poilievre added in the interview.

Poilievre was referring to cases where Trudeau was found to have violated conflict of interest rules, including his acceptance of a family vacation on the Aga Khan’s private island in 2016, and the SNC-Lavalin saga in 2019.

The RCMP investigated both the vacation and Trudeau’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin file but did not lay any charges.

In the latter case, the ethics commissioner found Trudeau violated the Conflict of Interest Act by attempting to influence then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to grant a deferred prosecution agreement to a Quebec-based engineering firm.