Finance committee  That's an excellent point. That's a point our research team will be going through: Was there anything else we could have reported? Yes, we had the ratings. They looked at, we said, those objective measures like overhead costs and balance sheet items. Those show the three-star rating.

Finance committee  There was no additional information provided in the audited financial statements, but the bank had waived the covenants for the current period.

Finance committee  Thank you. I've never seen it before in reading the audited financial statements of over the 1,780 charities. That bank covenant note was new to me. I did additional outside research into that and I disclosed it in the report in August 2019. If I could just take the opportunity to say that when I worked in Burns Fry research way back in the day when I was young, there was a team of 38 people in the research department and our research influenced 25% of the daily volume on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Finance committee  That's an excellent point. To WE's comments or explanation for its bank covenants, it mentioned that the bank covenant was a ratio that may have been affected by fiscal 2018 only being the eight months, but that it would not affect the ratio for fiscal 2019—that was 12 months. WE Charity also stated to us publicly in the letter they posted that it was an accounting paperwork, which is a different interpretation from ours of bank covenants.

Finance committee  WE typically likes to write a letter from the executive director before issuing its financial statement, so while it had the financial statements—just the financials without the management discussion and analysis ready—it wanted to release them all together, and that might have caused the delay in posting.

Finance committee  Mr. Julian, to your question, with so many allegations swirling around about the numbers, I believe that donors and the corporate sponsors would really get a shot of confidence if an international tier 1 auditing firm came in to do the audit on these. The numbers are presented as they are presented.

Finance committee  Yes, we've looked at WE Charity in the U.K. We did that. We went through that, and in my assessment, WE Charity U.K. looks clean, looks really good. It has a nice strong independent board and a lot of domestic programs. I couldn't see any of the concerns about board turnover, the independence of the directors or the interrelated parties at WE Charity U.K.

Finance committee  On the related parties' transactions, with WE Charity providing cash to ME to WE, and ME to WE providing back to WE Charity support, which is cash and also donated goods or time, we would like to have greater disclosure about how much of ME to WE's contribution to WE Charity was cash and how much was donated time.

Finance committee  We research other charities.

Finance committee  It's with very few. It's on an ad hoc basis, with some donors, that we work on wills and estates.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  We work with Quebec donors. We just have one website. You can access the website from anywhere in the world.

Finance committee  It's not frequent in the charity sector to have these shell organizations with limited liabilities, a single vehicle like that, a single-entity vehicle. Mr. Sorbara would be familiar with this from corporate analysis or real estate holdings or construction. I've never seen it before to this extent.

Finance committee  It would be a Canadian bank.