PM blasts Tories for push to keep WE probe alive, says government focused on COVID-19

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says opposition parties can keep digging into the WE Charity issue, but his government is focused on helping Canadians through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before Trudeau prorogued Parliament in August, two House of Commons committees spent months investigating a multimillion-dollar federal program for students awarded to WE Charity in the spring.

But the federal Conservatives are calling for a new anticorruption committee to roll those two probes of the now-defunct Canada Student Services Grant into one.

Sidestepping questions about whether he supports the creation of such a committee, Trudeau instead suggests the issue is closed for the government and that its priority is dealing with COVID-19.

Trudeau noted he personally appeared before one committee in July to answer questions about WE, and that the federal government released thousands of pages of documents about the grant program.

The Conservatives have vowed to continue probing the arrangement as well as the Trudeau family's links to WE at the federal ethics and finance committees if the anticorruption committee is not created.