Saskatchewan NDP Leader Ryan Meili says questions remain around two personal trips involving Finance Minister Donna Harpauer to a northern Saskatchewan village in 2016 and 2018.
Both trips were to Pinehouse and in both cases the northern municipality paid for accommodations booked in the finance minister’s name.
Harpauer claims she had no idea the village paid for the accommodations and says she has since paid the money back.
Conflict of Interest Commissioner Ron Barclay says in a letter written in December that the finance minister did not break the conflict of interest act.
However, Ryan Meili says as far as he is concerned Harpauer’s story doesn’t add up and he plans to take it up in the legislature.
“In terms of thinking it was a friend who purchased this hotel room for her but somehow she didn’t know that friend had been the housing coordinator while she was the minister in charge of housing, that he was a member of the local council, that somehow that information she didn’t have,” he says. “So, that’s pretty hard to believe.”
The Pinehouse councillor Meili is referring to is Conrad Misponas.
Just a few months before the first personal trip, in June 2016, Harpauer was in Pinehouse on government business as the minister of social services and minister responsible for the Saskatchewan Housing Corporation.
She joined Liberal Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Minister Jean-Yves Duclos and Pinehouse Mayor Mike Natomagan for a ground-breaking ceremony of a 12-unit affordable rental housing project.
The Sask. Party government’s contribution to the project was $1.5 million.
The Saskatchewan Legislature resumes sitting Monday.
(PHOTO: Finance Minister Donna Harpauer. File photo.)