National

Ben Chin, Morneau's Chief Of Staff, To Join PMO On Friday As Senior Adviser

The Canadian Press, 15 May, 2019 05:37 PM

OTTAWA — Finance Minister Bill Morneau's former chief of staff Ben Chin will start a new job as a senior adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week.

Before joining Morneau's office in fall 2017, the veteran political aide worked for former British Columbia premier Christy Clark and former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty.

Chin, a former TV journalist, will be reporting to Trudeau's chief of staff Katie Telford starting Friday.

He has spent much of his political career out of the headlines — but over the winter his name came up during testimony by former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould about the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Wilson-Raybould asserted that Chin warned her staff about the political impact of potential job losses during a Quebec provincial election if the embattled Montreal-based engineering firm was unable to secure a plea-bargain-type deal with prosecutors over alleged corruption in Libya.

Morneau has insisted Chin didn't do anything inappropriate in discussing the SNC-Lavalin case with Wilson-Raybould's staff.

The company is facing a possible 10-year ban from lucrative federal government contracts because of 2015 bribery and fraud charges.

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