Government won’t say how much it is spending on its ‘Protect Ontario’ commercials

OTTAWA — Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne released a letter on Monday that he says he wrote in September, vowing not to participate in any decisions about the government-backed organization behind the proposed high-speed rail link from Toronto to Quebec City. The letter, addressed to Prime Minister Mark Carney, was dated less than two months before a federal budget that provided the organization with hundreds of millions of dollars. Champagne writes that he is “proactively applying a conflict of interest filter” about at least two subjects: a bio-tech company that...