The Board · The Liberal family

Dominic LeBlanc

Major Projects Office. Fisheries 2015 to 2018

Caught once, recused 11 times. LeBlanc Report, Dec 2018: "contravened subsection 6(1)".

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Strings on the board

Stephen Kukucha: LeBlanc’s recusal from Kukucha’s SDTC appointment, filed for “my friend” in his recusals’ standard wording (Ethics Commissioner’s public registry)

The stories · 2 on the record

Case fileDominic LeBlancOct 15, 2026

Oct 15, 2026

LeBlanc broke the ethics law.

Then his relative got the ethics office.

In 2018 Ottawa's ethics watchdog found that Dominic LeBlanc broke the Conflict of Interest Act when he moved a clam licence worth about $24.0M in first-year sales toward a company that was to hire his wife's first cousin as its general manager. In 2023 the cabinet he sits in handed that same watchdog's office to a woman his own filings call "my relative". She left after 23 days, the day after MPs voted to study her appointment. His friends, donors and family keep turning up for judgeships, Senate seats and boards, and his filings hold 11 recusals.

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Case fileNavdeep BainsOct 15, 2026

Navdeep Bains, Collision conference, Toronto, May 22, 2019

Oct 15, 2026 · with Annette Verschuren

SDTC's chair moved the motions that paid her company. Ottawa was there.

The government had a man at the table, and it knew nobody recused from the COVID payments.

In March 2020 and again in March 2021, the board of Ottawa's green-tech fund voted COVID cash across its portfolio, including to companies its own directors had declared conflicts with, and the Ethics Commissioner found the chair broke the Conflict of Interest Act "knowing that NRStor would benefit". An assistant deputy minister from Industry regularly attended its board meetings and was in the room for the COVID decision. The department knew no one recused from the COVID payments, and did no audits of the fund from 2017 to 2023. Now Industry has told the Commons that the fund's board chose not to chase the money, because recovery "was not likely to be successful, and not in the public interest", and that the department accepted it.

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Photo credits

Dominic LeBlanc: Press conference, Mar 6, 2023. Photo: Prime Minister of Canada (YouTube), CC BY 3.0.
Navdeep Bains: Collision conference, Toronto, May 22, 2019. Photo: Vaughn Ridley / Collision via Sportsfile, CC BY 2.0.
François-Philippe Champagne: US-Canada Summit, Toronto, Apr 4, 2023. Photo: Eurasia Group, CC BY 2.0.
Steven Guilbeault: COP15, Montreal, Dec 7, 2022. Photo: UN Biodiversity, CC BY 2.0.
Gary Lunn: Economic Action Plan announcement, Mar 29, 2010. Photo: Gary Lunn's staff, CC BY 3.0.