OTTAWA—Federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is offering to compensate all the organizations for which he did paid public-speaking engagements while an MP, saying Canadians expect a lot of him and he wants to make it right.

Trudeau was responding to a simmering controversy over how charities were billed for speeches he delivered between 2008 and 2012, including a demand late last week that he return the $20,000 that he charged a financially troubled seniors organization.

“I’m willing to pay all of it back if that’s what it comes to,” Trudeau told interviewer Kevin Newman on Question Period, CTV’s Sunday political-affairs show. “I’m going to fix this.”

In coming days and weeks, he is offering to sit down with organizations, charities and otherwise, who were billed to hear him while he was doing extracurricular work on the professional speaking circuit.

The Liberal leader says he’ll either give back the fees or find some other way to “make it right.”

He could, for instance, agree to speak again at fundraisers for the groups — for free this time.

“I’m proud of the work I did as a professional public speaker. But I also realize that Canadians expect more from me and I am glad to use what I can, to do what I can, to deal with these organizations straight and to fix it if there’s any problems that they’ve had,” Trudeau said on CTV.

Last week Susan Buck, a board member of the Grace Foundation in New Brunswick, complained publicly that the organization had lost $21,000 at an event last June for which Trudeau was paid $20,000 to appear at. Buck said Trudeau should return the money to the charity, which was trying to raise money for furniture in a seniors’ residence.

Trudeau, who was elected in 2008, earned a total of $277,000 in speaker’s fees during his first four years as an MP — a source of income he says he cleared with the ethics commissioner.

He stopped doing paid speaking engagements in 2012, as he was preparing to run for the Liberal leadership. He voluntarily disclosed the income earlier this year.

Conservatives and New Democrats have been using the information to repeatedly hammer Trudeau. On Friday, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall lent his voice to the outcry.

Wall initially accused Trudeau of using the money to finance his leadership campaign — a charge that, if true, would be illegal. He later retracted that part of his remarks.

Nonetheless, Wall was sticking by demands for Trudeau to return the money.

“I just think, in terms of an example of leadership, that that’s the right thing to do at this point,” Wall said on Friday.

“He’s now an aspirant to be the prime minister of the country. I think it’s wrong for MPs or MLAs, for those elected to office, to take money for speeches that we ought to be giving because we’re already paid our wage and so, because these are charities in the main, I think an offer of reimbursement is the right thing to do.”

Trudeau reiterated on Sunday that he had not used any of his MP’s travel expenses to get to his speaking engagements and that he had kept his political work and his professional speechifying entirely separate.

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