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By all accounts the Aga Khan is a fine fellow and his foundation does wonderful work. And he is, as Purchase said, a close friend of the Trudeau family. But there is a reason his foundation is formally registered as an organization that lobbies the federal government: it’s competing for Canadian taxpayers’ money with which to do those good works, and that competition is supposed to be reasonably transparent. And it seems the Aga Khan just gave the Prime Minister of Canada and some of his friends and family a free vacation in paradise — one even the Trudeaus might struggle to afford on their own. Many will quite understandably perceive that as a conflict of interest. And there is no indication Canadians ever would have known about it had Trudeau and his office been left to determine the appropriate level of disclosure.

Indeed, had the PMO just said right off the bat that the family was in the Bahamas, media inquiries might have been rather less intense. Instead it defaulted to secrecy, piquing journalists’ interest all the more, and now we know they were concealing something that mattered. “Demanding to know what the government is doing, like demanding to know what it’s spending, can never be a piecemeal undertaking,” I argued in my original column. You can’t let it off the hook when things seem to “not matter.”

Again, people asked: Why? Again: This. This is why.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley