Thank you, Chair.
The issues regarding the Canada summer student service grant and the Trudeau government.... We are now into the fourth, coming now almost into the fifth, month of this issue. I have never, in my 16 years sitting on multiple committees, ever been in a situation where a committee was unable to finish a report it had begun, unable to finish because of continual interference by government members, continual points of order and continual efforts to stop the committee in its work. This is really unprecedented territory.
I find this really disturbing now, because as the Liberals have been doing everything they procedurally can to stop us from finalizing our report, we learn that the Kielburger group has engaged in a massive and it seems very well-paid publicity campaign to counter the work of our committee. They brought in American foundation money and American spokesmen, and these apparently have hired a number of people doing op-eds and supposed reports, to debunk the work of a committee that has been unable to finish its work. I find that very, very troubling for the state of parliamentary democracy that we are having our hands tied by the Liberals while the Kielburger group is able to rely on big American donors to take out full-page ads in newspapers, making claims that simply don't add up to what we've already managed to find in the documents.
I think this is really concerning, because when the issue first came up of the Canada summer student service grant, we had no interest in going after WE Charity. We were not all that interested in their work. We were interested in their connections to the Trudeau government, the deep connections they had built up certainly with the Prime Minister's family; the hiring of the Prime Minister's mother and brother; his wife being deeply involved. Was there a connection? That's a legitimate question.
We then found out about the deep connections with Bill Morneau, with his family, with the free trips. We then learned that a number of the key ministers who were involved in the decision had been invited to participate in WE Day. So that was our focus: How did this group, that is a supposed charity for children, get such an inside track on a deal that was between $500 million and $912 million?
It was the Kielburger brothers who insisted on coming before committee. It was the Kielburger brothers who insisted on swearing under oath, which is a very extraordinary thing to do. It was in that testimony that a number of questions began to get raised, in my mind, about how they run their operations.
I want to speak to this publicity campaign, this disinformation campaign, which seems to be very well funded, that is attempting, I believe, to obstruct the work of our committee and to undermine the credibility of the evidence we've attempted to gather while the Liberals are doing everything they can to make sure we cannot present our report.
Now, before I get into the various people who have been hired by the Kielburgers and how it's laid out, what I find very, very surprising, to me, is a pattern. Again, for a group that is a children's charity, a group that tells really great stories to kids in every school in the country, it seems, they have access to.... Yet we find that when it comes to their very aggressive approach to their public image, for example, they hired the Republicans' oppo firm Firehouse Strategies. WE paid over $600,000 to U.S. political consulting firms, including Firehouse Strategies. That comes from internal revenue sources for the fiscal year ending August 2019, showing that the U.S. arm of the Toronto-based charity paid three firms a total of $605,853, including the $130,000 paid to Firehouse Strategies.
I don't assume that anybody in our committee is aware of Firehouse Strategies, so I think it's worth illuminating who they are. This company was started by veterans of Marco Rubio's presidential campaign. What they claim to do is teach people to do “combative media training”. I'm wondering now why a children's charity needs to do combative media training done by Republican groups that come out of the Marco Rubio team. But the combative and defensive media training, they say, came out of having learned from the Trump campaign. The firm's founders adopted Trump's aggressive methods after he so easily beat Marco Rubio.
The quote is this:
After managing US [Senator] Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign (and, as they say, losing to a reality TV star in the late stages of the primary process) three longtime GOP operatives—Terry Sullivan, Alex Conant and Will Holley—gave up [their] campaign trail to start Washington public affairs shop Firehouse Strategies.
Here's the kicker:
Their strategy: take lessons learned from that wild election cycle—the one in which Donald Trump upended modern communications—and use them to help clients communicate in the modern age.
Again I'm thinking, this is a children's charity that tells us they're worried about children in Kenya. Why would they be wanting to use the Donald Trump election strategy that has “upended modern communications”?
So, how was it used?
Well, this is according to The Globe and Mail:
Last year, before the Firehouse contract came to light, Canadaland
—the journal that had raised serious questions about the Kielburger organization—
questioned why a number of U.S. Republican consultants had written articles attacking the news outlet and whether it was part of an organized campaign.
Among the Republican operatives who attacked Canadaland is Ben Proler, who worked on Mr. Rubio’s presidential campaign and is currently on the board of the U.S. political action committee Maverick PAC, which “provides a platform to engage the next generation of young, conservative professionals in business and politics.”
This is really interesting, because the media strategy used to attack journalists who were raising questions about WE—in this case Canadaland—was that they were “adding to Canada's growing fake news fears”.
Wow. Again, a charity looking after children was hiring a Republican firm to embed newspaper articles in the United States accusing Canadian journalists of fake news.
Here's another place they managed to get their content:
...Zachary Almond, a former chair of the North Carolina Federation of College Republicans and a former political consultant to Representative Robert Pittenger, one of the leaders of Mr. Rubio’s presidential campaign in North Carolina. In November, 2018, Mr. Almond wrote an article for Red State, a U.S. conservative blog, criticizing Canadaland for “false content.”
Moreover:
The IRS filing shows that WE also paid consultancy 202 Strategies US$297,570 during the last fiscal year.
Yet we have no record of what this organization did.
You know, when I'm reading these articles by the media team that's been put together for the Kielburgers claiming that 100% of all the monies go to the charity, I'm thinking, well, then, who's paying these operatives?
We also know that they paid for a private investigation firm to dig into Canadaland's publisher, Jesse Brown, and his employee Jaren Kerr. As part of that investigation, they identified where his children went to school. I mention that because I find it very troubling that the Liberals are so tied to an organization that seems to feel they need to be hiring not just political operatives; a private eye is investigating journalists. I mean, this is Canada that this is happening in.
The other big news story that came out this month, on November 1, was from The Times of Israel:
Wikipedia probe exposes an Israeli stealth PR firm that worked for scammers: Shining rare spotlight on murky business of online reputation management, Wikipedia editor points finger at Percepto—an Israeli firm that helps wealthy clients bury dubious pasts.
That was The Times of Israel on November 1, 2020.
What I find really surprising here is that in their article about scammers and dubious pasts, they have a picture of the Kielburger brothers. I was absolutely floored by that because, again, this is the group that speaks in schools across the country. They have been given almost quasi-ambassadorial status by the Liberal government. When the Liberals wanted to do a big event at the UN, they brought in WE. When WE wanted to go and sell their brand in England, they brought the Prime Minister's wife with them.
Is it possible that a children's charity, which is saying that they only spend money to help children in the third world, is hiring an Israeli disinformation team that comes from former Israeli military intelligence? The military intelligence wing comes from Nir Shafrir, who's the partner and COO and who served in Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces, and Yuval Levi, who's a CPA, partner and CFO, who began his career as a military intelligence analyst for the Israeli army.
What does this group Percepto do? Well, they've described themselves as follows:
Over the years, we have developed a rich arsenal of strategies—
That's interesting for former military. They have a “rich arsenal of strategies”.
—which enables us to respond quickly and accurately in multiple languages and cultural contexts to all sorts of online challenges. We are fully aware of the complexities of our field, are accustomed to its dynamism, and are attentive to our clients' needs.
No matter what circumstances you are facing, we...find a way to protect your image, optimize your digital presence, and tell your story.
Hmm.
Now, they do list apparently in their clients a number of pretty dodgy Ukrainian oligarchs and other quasi-criminal behaviour, so why would the Kielburger brothers, who do so much work in terms of public relations with children and third world charities in Kenya, need to hire a group that does online disinformation?
I want to be clear here. I'm taking this from The Globe and Mail and from The Times of Israel report, but when The Times of Israel reported the WE Kielburger connection to this Israeli disinformation team, WE responded and said:
WE Charity did not hire Percepto or anyone associated with Percepto to edit WE associated Wikipedia pages. In fact, we had never heard of Percepto until reading your article.
Wow. Okay, I could see that. I mean, why would a charity be hiring a disinformation team? But here's the thing: what the Times reported is that there was a Dropbox that identified their clients, and among their clients they list WE.
It's the thing that I find very confusing about this group. Whenever something seems very simple, it's actually much more complex. How is it possible that poor WE is identified out of all the possible groups on Wikipedia to be drawn into this Israeli disinformation team and listed as a client when they say they've never heard of them?
I say that because when I see the latest big media machine that's being rolled out while we are being obstructed by Liberals, it raises questions about the credibility of the documents and the claims being made—claims being made in full-page newspaper ads right now.
The Toronto Star had to apologize for the op-ed it ran that claimed the independent financial audits had exonerated WE completely. I read those reports, and I didn't see it exonerated. I thought it was interesting, but it certainly didn't jibe with the documents we had read. The Toronto Star had to clarify and issue a statement because they didn't bother to tell their readers—and this is Bruce Campion-Smith on November 6, 2020—that “Failure to disclose backer of WE Charity reports left readers in the dark”. The sub-headline was “Transparency, please”. But they didn't bother to say who commissioned these reports that supposedly exonerated WE and pretty much undermine the claims and the work that our committee has been doing.
Who paid for this? Well, it was the Stillman Foundation and David Stillman, who has been speaking on behalf of WE. Again, I don't think many on our committee have ever heard of the Stillmans, because we probably don't travel in the circles where that kind of American money moves.
I'm finding it really interesting that an American group is funding Canadian ads undermining the work of our parliamentary committee. I did a Google search on David Stillman, and the first time his name came up to me was in a September 9 article in Maclean's magazine. Guess what it's about. It's about the Kielburgers.
The article is entitled "The rise and fall of WE: The charity invented by an earnest 12-year-old finds itself engulfed in a cynical, star-studded cronyism scandal." Cynical, star-studded cronyism—that's not me saying that; that's Maclean's magazine.
They're talking about what happened to WE, which was started by Craig Kielburger when he was 12 years old. My god, we bought my daughter that book for Christmas. She was about 11 when she read that book.
They talk in the Maclean's article about the problems in the WE organization and about how, when they are faced with problems, they don't actually present independent, outside credibility to validate. In fact, Kate Bahen, managing director of Charity Intelligence, is quoted in the Maclean's article saying that boards need to be independent from the charities they oversee:
As a WE donor, as somebody who donates to WE Charity, I would want an independent director who hasn’t previously worked with Marc Kielburger.
There's the importance of having independence so that we have credibility.
The fact is that what we learn is that David Stillman, who has become the voice in this media campaign, served on the board. He worked for WE Charity in the United States from 2010 to 2015 as director of their U.S. operations. David Stillman worked for WE Charity for five years as their director and he has served on the board of the WE Charity. When we're seeing a full-page ad from an American who says that he represents the best of the charity sector—and he may do a lot of great charity work—the fact that he worked for WE as director of operations and that he is on their board, to me, is highly problematic. I think that's what got The Toronto Star in trouble; they didn't bother to explain that it is the Stillman Foundation that is hiring these reports.
The Stillman Foundation is paying for these full-page ads, and David Stillman is the spokesman, the same David Stillman who worked for five years as a director of operations for WE in the United States and who is on their board. The Stillman Foundation, when questioned about this connection and this lack of transparency and this lack of independence in terms of why they were stepping forward, stated that that David Stillman is from another branch of the family and has no affiliation with the foundation and no involvement with the reports.
I'm like, "Say what?"
The Stillman Foundation pays for all the reports. David Stillman goes out and is the spokesperson for it, the David Stillman who is on the board at WE and who worked for them. He's not representing the Stillman Foundation? He's from another branch of the family?
This is just wacky.
Chair, I ask you, if there were questions about Oxfam or the Heart and Stroke Foundation or any other charity, would we be thinking that they would hire someone to exonerate them who had worked for them, who then said they were not really involved with how the money...?
It just doesn't make sense.
I ask this because whenever we start to look into the WE group and their multiple numbers of companies, it feels as though we're in this rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper into a labyrinth. We're talking about what should be pretty straightforward; a child charity and how that child charity got this government contract. Was it done right or was it done wrong? These should be very straightforward answers. The fact that my Liberal colleagues have spent four months obstructing a simple parliamentary report on whether this was done right or wrong to me raises serious questions.
I want to go now to what they're claiming is the exoneration—the Torigian report. They say that the Torigian report completely exonerates WE and the Kielburgers:
The evidence is clear that the government reached out to WE Charity, not the reverse. Bureaucrats examined their options, considered other organizations, like the YMCA and Shopify, but concluded that WE Charity was the right choice.
That's a pretty declarative statement, but what I find really surprising is that when you actually look at the documents the government turned over, there were no meetings listed with the YMCA or Shopify, so how do they claim that WE was considered out of a number of independent organizations? It also came forward that this was the choice when these other organizations had not been spoken to.
The other thing he said is that it was the government that reached out to WE Charity, not the reverse. He states:
As has been documented by the finance committee, it was senior bureaucrat Rachel Wernick who contacted Craig Kielburger to discuss WE’s potential involvement in administering the program that would later be known as the CSSG. While that’s not as enticing a storyline as the generally accepted narrative, it happens to be the truth.
Well, that's not the truth. I don't know where the Torigian report read their documents. I know that they certainly took the words of Minister Chagger. That was her line. They certainly took the claims of Craig and Mark Kielburger—that's their line—but if you look at the documents that identify how this deal came about, we see that the Kielburgers were reaching out for an initial program. We're going to talk about that later, because that is a very interesting one that has been very overlooked.
On April 7, they met with Minister Ng. On April 10, Craig Kielburger wrote to Minister Chagger:
I hope this finds you well and healthy...I'm sure [the] celebrations looked a little different this year [but let me] wish you a happy belated birthday.
During this difficult time, we're deeply inspired by your incredible efforts.... Understanding you're aware of the conversations between our Head of Gov't Relations, Sofia Marquez, and your team exploring ways WE can assist in your objectives, I thought to share an update following following our discussions with Minister Ng.
That is April 10. He has already been in contact with them through Sofia Marquez.
Now, Sofia Marquez is an interesting character, because she's listed as the head of government relations. She sets up all the meetings. That's a lobbyist. But we learned that WE never bothered to registered to lobby. They said they didn't do all that much work. Well, the documents show a big difference: that they did a lot of work. Not only were they so busy with the head of government relations, they'd actually posted for a manager of government relations, all while not bothering to register to lobby. The question of whether or not illegal lobbying was done to get this $900-million contract is certainly something that we could look at in our committee report.
From this April 10 message to Minister Chagger, we get this famous April 17 meeting between Minister Chagger, Craig Kielburger and Sofia Marquez. That was the meeting that Minister Chagger pretended never happened. She claimed that she never spoke to them and then, when we confronted her, said that she did speak to them. She claimed that she had never discussed at all anything about the youth entrepreneurial proposal, which did not exist then.
What we see from the documents on April 17—this is how Craig Kielburger describes it—is that WE Charity held a phone call with Minister of Diversity and Youth, Minister Bardish Chagger to discuss an unrelated.... Oh, sorry. This is what he's claiming. There is so much here, Mr. Chair. I won't go all day.
It was at the April 17 meeting that they began these conversations, so from that email on April 17, on Monday morning, April 20, Sofia Marquez writes:
Happy Monday. Thank[s]...for your call....
I wanted to give you a quick note following our meeting with Min[ister] Chagger on...the highlights:
That was Craig Kielburger who was at the meeting.
She continues:
Min. Chagger expressed interest in exploring ways to adapt the entrepreneurship proposal we submitted to Min. Ng and include a service component to it. She suggested that we should consider opening a service-stream for youth who are currentty not well supported through virtual mentorship are looking for microgrants to advance their project.. That effect, Craig reassured the Minister that if given the right policy objectives we could amend the proposal.
—again, this is Sofia Marquez saying what happened at that meeting—
Min. Chagger expressed her willingness, as next steps, to connect WE with her team and identify tangible ways to move this opportunity forward, I told her that I had shared our propasal wlth you, Gina Wilson, Ritu, and Rachel Wernick (over the weekend). I have yet to hear back from her or team members.
Oh, my God.
Now, the Torigian report tells us that it was Rachel Wernick who reached out to the Kielburgers. Remember that famous quote where the Kielburgers said they never should have accepted that call from Canada, but they felt duty bound to receive that call? Well, the call is clear: It came from Sofia Marquez, as the lobbyist for WE, that set up the meeting with Minister Ng, that then set up the meeting with Minister Chagger, and then, according to Sofia Marquez, they reached out to Rachel Wernick on that weekend. The idea that Rachel Wernick came up with the idea on her own simply doesn't add up.
Mr. Chair, why am I putting this into the record? I'm putting this into the record because we have been obstructed for four solid months by the Liberals, who have refused to let us address these documents and have refused to let us question witnesses like Sofia Marquez to find out the nature of that lobbying and whether or not that lobbying was even legal. We are having to put onto the record what actually happened, the truth of what happened, in those documents, because we are facing this major campaign of disinformation and spin that's being paid for by American groups with full-page ads, with op-eds in the Toronto Star, with claims of independent review that simply don't meet the test of evidence. For however long the Liberals want to drag this out, I think it would be worth our committee using this time to put it into the record so that people know what the documents actually say.
Here's another one, just while I'm on it, from Craig Kielburger to Bardish Chagger on April 22:
“We appreciate your thoughtful offer to connect us with relevant members of your ministry,” Kielburger said. “[Over the weekend our] team has...been hard at work to adapt your suggestion of a second stream focused on [the] summer service opportunity.”
Now, this is really interesting, because we have Craig Kielburger saying that it was Minister Chagger'ssuggestion. Minister Chagger told us at committee that she had never spoken to them about this proposal. But on April 22, Craig Kielburger thanks her for her suggestions and that she is going to open the door. So the idea that it was poor Rachel Wernick, a civil servant who took it upon herself, pushed this thing through and got everyone signed up....
This is the myth that's being promoted by the Kielburgers' very large-funded organization right now. It is not backed up by any of the facts. It's not backed up by facts like the claim that they were financially solid. You know, that's not really an issue for us one way or the other. They were certainly financially solid because they had enormous real estate holdings, which we haven't looked at. But the idea that the Kielburgers didn't need to do this, that the WE group was in perfectly good financial order.... This is what's being claimed now, but it certainly doesn't meet the test of when we interviewed Michelle Douglas, the former chair, who was denied access to the financial reports.
Now, it's irrelevant to me whether or not the Kielburger group is financially solid. What matters to me is that they're a charity, and as a charity you have obligations to report. Madam Douglas raises serious questions in her testimony about the fact that the board and the chair were denied access to the financial documents while massive amounts of layoffs and firings were happening.
Why is that relevant? Again, we're dealing with a group that proposes to be a new kind of charity, but a new kind of charity or an old kind of charity has reporting obligations. Those reporting obligations are fundamental to its finances, so when Michelle Douglas told the finance committee that she had to resign because she could not get financial information from a charity that was laying off and firing hundreds of people and that then she, along with much of the board, was fired for asking these questions, that raises a serious flag. It raises a serious flag, because we asked the Kielburger brothers about, according to reports we had, how they had gotten very angry at the board and had hung up on them and had then phoned and said they wanted their resignations. We couldn't get a straight answer to that.
This is about governance. This is about an organization that is duly bound to follow the rules and yet, once again, we see that whether it was getting rid of its board, which is really questionable, or whether or not we can get answers at this parliamentary committee—because the Liberals are obstructing us—that is also very questionable. It's very questionable that it is getting support. I don't know what the financial arrangements with this Stillman Foundation are, but it's putting up people as supposed voices for WE who worked for it, and the fact that in the past we saw hirings of hard-core republican media and disinformation teams, along with the Israeli connection, is all really, really disturbing.
Was any of that germane to the work of the committee when we began? No, our committee focus was simply about why it had such an inside track, but four months of obstruction by the Liberals is making me question what it s about this group. What is it about its connections? How has it been able to insinuate itself so tightly into the power structure of Canada to be able to call into ministers' offices when so many organizations are in free fall? How has it been able to be given this contract and then to have the Liberals cover up for it, to have the Liberals obstruct, and to have the Prime Minister shut down Parliament so that we can't actually get the documents? It raises serious questions.
Mr. Chair, I think I will stop for now but I'm more than willing to continue looking into the questions that we, I think now, need to put on the table regarding how this group operates and what the accountability mechanisms are, given that it is a group that works with children across this country, and given its deep connection to the Prime Minister and his family, and given that my Liberal colleagues are so intent on obstructing our work.
