A former CBC host fired by the public broadcaster for undisclosed art dealings with wealthy Canadians has put his name forward to run as a Liberal candidate in the upcoming election.
Evan Solomon, who hosted CBC’s Power & Politics program, also has ties to Eurasia Group, where Prime Minister Carney’s wife, Diana Fox Carney, served as a senior advisor.
In 2015, CBC “ended its relationship” with Solomon after a Toronto Star investigation found that Solomon had taken commissions totalling $300,000 from art sales.
The candidacy announcement on Solomon’s LinkedIn page celebrates the end of his tenure as publisher of GZERO Media which is a subsidiary of Eurasia Group.
“I will be joining the team led by Prime Minister Mark Carney and will be running as a candidate in the next Federal election. More details on this will be coming very soon!” wrote Solomon.
His tenure at GZERO overlapped with Diana Fox Carney’s role where she worked alongside Gerald Butts, former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary. Butts stepped down from his role at the height of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, where Trudeau and his staff were implicated in pressuring then-justice minister Jody Wilson Raybould.
In his LinkedIn post, Solomon claimed his candidacy was a response to the “urgent challenges and threats facing Canadians.”
Solomon’s return to the political sphere comes nearly a decade after his controversial departure from CBC in 2015.
Reports revealed that while hosting CBC’s Power & Politics, he was secretly brokering art deals with high-profile clients, allegedly including Mark Carney, who was then the governor of the Bank of England at the time.
At the time, Solomon issued an apology: “I did not view the art business as a conflict with my political journalism at the CBC and never intentionally used my position at the CBC to promote the business.” After Solomon was sacked by CBC, he spent over 7 years working for CTV News and then moved on to work for the Eurasia Group.
Insider sources indicate that Prime Minister Carney plans on triggering an election on Sunday.