Ottawa is refusing to disclose the terms of a secret settlement it struck with a Montréal consultant whose long trail of openly anti-Jewish statements was overlooked before he was handed a federal cheque for $122,661.Blacklock's Reporter says the Department of Canadian Heritage told MPs in a recently tabled Inquiry Of Ministry that it cannot release details of its deal with Laith Marouf, citing a confidentiality clause. Marouf was hired to deliver anti-racism lectures even though he’d already been banned from Twitter for graphic posts fantasizing about shooting Jews.Conservative MP Rachael Thomas, who pressed the department for answers, asked how much of the nearly $123,000 Marouf received has been returned to taxpayers. Internal documents show the government quietly concluded most of the money was gone for good..A department memo dated October 9, 2024 acknowledged that officials expected to claw back only about $40,000 — a fraction of the $142,696 Marouf owed including interest. The deal represented just 28% of the outstanding amount, with both sides expected to shoulder their own legal bills.The episode has raised longstanding questions about the department’s vetting practices. At 2023 heritage committee hearings, senior managers admitted they never performed even basic background checks before approving Marouf’s six-figure grant. “It was felt on paper that it met the criteria,” testified then-associate deputy minister Mala Khanna.Had staff looked, they would have found two decades of documented anti-Jewish extremism. Public records show Marouf drew a swastika on an Israeli flag and repeatedly posted vicious slurs online, calling Jews “Zionist bags of human feces,” “inbred,” and “little castrated bitches.” In one tweet, he wrote: “May death visit the home of every Zionist on earth.” Another suggested Jews deserved “nothing but a bullet to the head.”.Marouf had been churning out such rhetoric since at least his time as a Concordia University student in 2001, when he claimed Canadian newspapers were controlled by Jews.Telecom consultant Mark Goldberg, who helped expose the scandal, told MPs last year that the real problem wasn’t just one consultant — it was the number of Ottawa insiders who knew about the file and stayed silent. “Too many people in Ottawa knew about this funding and didn’t act on the information and didn’t speak out,” he wrote. “Most did nothing until coverage of the story became too embarrassing to ignore.”Goldberg said he wasn’t seeking to make the fiasco a partisan fight, but insisted Canadians deserve accountability for how public money was spent.
