Trudeau’s holiday retreat renews attention on how conflict-of-interest rules define ‘friend’

Mary Dawson, who recently ended her tenure as ethics commissioner, found that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's defence that he and the Aga Khan are family friends did not hold up. While the Conflict of Interest Act has no official definition of a 'friend,' Dawson interprets the term to mean 'mean a person with whom one has some history of mutual personal regard beyond simple association.'