Ethics Committee Will Meet Tuesday on Carney's Condo Bailout, But Will New Majority Make It an Investigation?
ANALYSIS: Chair has called a July 7 meeting on the $3.2-billion BC condo bailout — but the Liberal majority that took the committee after Carney's spring win decides.
OTTAWA — The Conservative who chairs the House of Commons ethics committee has agreed to convene a meeting Tuesday on the Carney government’s multi-billion-dollar British Columbia condo bailout. But he has told Pierre Poilievre plainly that whether the matter becomes an investigation rests with a committee the Liberals now control.
The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics is scheduled to meet July 7, according to a notice posted Thursday morning. The subject is listed only as committee business arising from a June 26 letter to the chair from Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who asked the committee to consider a probe of the roughly $3.2-billion plan to buy more than 2,200 unsold Vancouver-region condominiums with public funds and convert them to affordable housing.
In a written reply dated June 29 and posted to his own account, the chair, John Brassard, told Poilievre he shared his concerns “and agree with the urgency of looking into this matter,” adding that the prime minister’s announcement, media reports and public concern “have all raised serious questions that deserve the Committee’s examination.” Brassard said he was prepared to use his “prerogative as Chair” to call the meeting.
“Ultimately,” Brassard wrote, “it will be the decision of a majority of Committee members whether they will in fact investigate this further, but I am prepared to put the matter before them.”
A notice of meeting is not a hearing. What convenes Tuesday is a debate over whether to study the bailout at all, and over any motion’s scope, its witnesses, and its power to compel documents. On each of those questions, the numbers have changed.
For most of the current Parliament the government sat in a minority, and the combined opposition could outvote it in committee. It was under those conditions that this same committee produced an earlier report, tabled under Brassard, that drew on reporting by The Bureau into Carney’s China-linked business exposure. The Bureau had documented, among other dealings, a $276-million refinancing of Brookfield’s Shanghai holdings by the state-owned Bank of China during Carney’s tenure as the firm’s chair.
On April 13, after five floor crossings — an unusual wave by modern parliamentary standards — and three byelection wins, Carney secured a majority of 174 seats. Within two weeks the committees were reconstituted, the ethics committee’s membership formally changing on April 27 and 29.
Brassard, whose committee is one of a handful still chaired by the opposition, said the Liberals had “stacked them on steroids,” and had given themselves a share of seats “which would ensure that nothing the opposition wanted to do at those committees would actually happen.” The government House leader, Steven MacKinnon, defended the move as an “undeniable, long-standing principle” that a majority in the chamber carries a majority in committee.
The committee's roster now shows five Liberals, four Conservatives including the chair, and one Bloc member. Because the chair votes only to break a tie, a party-line vote pits five Liberals against three Conservatives and the Bloc — and the government side prevails. One of those new Liberal members, Wade Chang, represents Burnaby Central — part of the region where much of the unsold-condo glut the program targets is concentrated.
Because the chair votes only to break a tie, a party-line vote pits five Liberals against three Conservatives and the Bloc — and the government side prevails.
Andrew Lawton, a Conservative member and commentator, posted the notice within the hour and framed the stakes as a choice the governing party cannot avoid making in public. “Carney won’t even say who lobbied him for this,” Lawton wrote. “Taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for Liberal insiders’ bad investments.” He ended with the question now hanging over the meeting: “Will the Liberals shut this down or work with us to get answers?”
The prime minister has said “no developer asked for this from me directly,” a denial narrow enough to leave every indirect channel open. BC Housing Minister Christine Boyle, and her federal counterpart Gregor Robertson, have not indicated which developers will benefit from the buyback.
The Bureau’s reporting has traced a documented pattern of proximity around the bailout. BC government records for March 2026 show that Premier David Eby was briefed for a meeting with Vancouver condo marketer Bob Rennie — the figure the industry calls its condo king — under a briefing note headed “Rennie Meeting.” The note was opened in February 2026, the same month Rennie hosted “An Evening with Mark Carney” at his own Vancouver offices, a fundraiser whose Elections Canada filing lists 146 attendees paying up to $1,775 each, among them at least 17 of the province’s leading developers and former premier Christy Clark.
A number of those developers hold unsold inventory in the Vancouver region’s glut — the same distressed stock the June 18 program proposes to buy.
On a Postmedia panel in March 2025, Rennie said he was “working with Carney” on a plan to let foreign buyers back in through a CMHC-backstopped 25-year rental pool — a proposal to reopen the channel the foreign-buyer tax was built to close. Rennie was appointed to the BC Housing board in 2012; the agency is now buying the condos.
In the last week of April, Liberal members of the ethics committee voted to move behind closed doors — cameras off, no transcript — to shut down a Conservative motion that would have required the Privy Council Office to report regularly on the prime minister’s ethics screen, the same set of safeguards meant to wall Carney off from decisions touching his former firm. “It’s going to make it more difficult for us to bring that accountability to bear,” the Conservative ethics critic, Michael Barrett, said afterward, “and that’s a choice that Liberals have made.”
Complete joke Canada has become.
As long as the Carney government holds a majority, no matter how slim, nothing will get done that is of advantage to Canada in general. Part of me feels it is futile to call this committee meeting, however, it is still important. If nothing else it will continue to showcase the complete corruption within the liberal party.