Thank you, Mr. Chair, and it's good to be able to speak with my colleagues at the ethics committee.
This summer we had, I believe, two meetings on the issue that is before us, the issue of conflict of interest and the awarding of the contracts that led to the WE scandal. At that time in the summer, there was also some investigation at the finance committee.
However, neither committee has been able to finish any of its work. The Prime Minister prorogued Parliament. Work that could have been done by early September was then put off. We are now some 30 hours into a Liberal filibuster. I have never in all my years witnessed a government attempt to stop the work of a committee by just throwing up roadblock after roadblock.
These are important issues and the further we get away from the original subject, the more it becomes a question of people saying, “Isn't it time to move on?” Well, it's time to move on when a parliamentary committee has finished its report to Parliament. That is our obligation. When we do a parliamentary report, we can have a unanimous report where we all agree, or we can have a minority report where one party disagrees with another party on what the evidence meant, but we have an obligation to finish the report.
Therefore, I think it's important to go through some of the reasons why this study is so important for the Canadian people. This is a question about the extraordinary amount of political influence the WE group had to be able to literally call into the finance minister's office and secure very large amounts of money with very little oversight and very little accountability. That is actually a slightly separate program, and I'm going to refer to it later, from the full $912 million program that we are focused on.
The questions that need to be addressed are the following. Did group have the capacity? Was there proper oversight? Were the proper checks and balances put in place? If they weren't, why not? Was it because of this group's incredible skill at embedding themselves within the Liberal power structure? This is not an issue, I think, of the Prime Minister calling his staff and saying, I want the Kielburger brothers to get this deal.
I think what we see here is that the Kielburger brothers were able to play on their close relationship with the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's wife who acted as a goodwill ambassador for them, the Prime Minister's mother who was paid to work at corporate events, and the Prime Minister's brother who was also paid. They created a sense of comfort that certainly clouded the judgment of Minister Bill Morneau, whose financial and political relationships with the Kielburgers we're going to look at much more closely today, and certainly led to his having to step down.
It also brings in other ministers, Minister Chagger, who misrepresented herself at our committee on what she spoke about with them, and Minister Ng and Minister Qualtrough to some extent, all of whom the Kielburgers reached out to very carefully so that questions that should have been asked weren't asked.
At our last committee meeting, I spoke about the surprising news that the Kielburger organization had hired an Israeli disinformation team, Percepto. According a exposé of this group by The Times of Israel on November 1, the group was formed by former Israeli military ops crews and “helped clients bury dubious pasts”. Now the Kielburger brothers say they don't know anything about Percepto, that they've never dealt with it, but they are listed as a client in a Dropbox of Percepto that was found by The Times of Israel investigation, as well as by The Globe and Mail.
You have to ask yourself why a children's charity is hiring an Israeli disinformation team to deal with online information. That raises the question of the $600,000 the WE group paid to U.S. political consulting firms, and particularly one that was very closely tied to the Republican Party, Firehouse Strategies, which was paid $130,000.
Now, Firehouse Strategies, as we now know, came out of the Marco Rubio campaign and were intent on using the tactics that Donald Trump had perfected in being very aggressive with media push-back.
Once again we have a children's charity, which had access to all of our schools and all of our ministers, hiring a Republican disinformation team, and we're asking why. This is also a group that tells us that all the money they raise goes to help children, but $600,000 is being spent in the United States on these political consultants.
The reason I go back to Firehouse Strategies and their connection to the Kielburger brothers is the strategies they offer, which they call “defensive/combative media training.” Again, why would a children's charity need to have combative media outreach?
In a 2019 podcast, Mr. Sullivan, one of the three co-founders who came out of the Marco Rubio campaign, said that their strategy is: “You figure out who the opponent is, and let's go and get 18 bad stories about them". He added that, “Our belief is in modern communications you either throw spears or you catch spears, and catching them is no fun.”
Again, this is a group that is supposed to be a children's charity, but we're dealing now with a political strategy of getting 18 bad stories about their opponents because it's about throwing spears.
My colleagues, I feel that our committee is now catching spears from the Kielburger group, who are very adept, as we know, in media and media manipulation. As our committee is unable to finish our report, they have launched a major publicity campaign. Firehouse Strategies talks about getting 18 articles in. Well, they've certainly gotten op-eds into the Toronto Star, and they've gotten other elements out there.
What's interesting about this latest media blitz, which I feel is really falsely representing the work of our committee, is that their spokesman is Mr. David Stillman. If people hadn't listened to our committee meeting on Monday, they wouldn't know that David Stillman was a former employee of WE, yet he's being presented in the media as this independent voice on charities, good work and good foundations. He was a board member of WE; he was a former member of the charity.
It's this pattern of getting people you know and work with and hire to go out and do your publicity for you. Why is that needed? Either this charity stands on its own two feet and can explain what happened in this scandal, or we're dealing with something that's much murkier.
My Liberal colleagues have done some research and found out that my daughters did some volunteering for them. My daughters were very inspired by the Craig Kielburger book when they were young, and one of my daughters did work overseas. When I first learned about the group, I thought they were doing leadership training, and that was really exciting.
I kind of lost sight of them for a number of years, and I saw them more and more tied into Justin Trudeau speaking at their events. They seemed to be much more tied to the Trudeau family, and I thought that was odd. They moved, it seemed, from doing grassroots organizing meetings and training to these big rallies.
Then I started to learn that they had more and more corporate involvement, which may or may not be a problem. However, the fact that we did not know that the Prime Minister's wife was hired to do those corporate events, I think, is questionable. It's questionable in that, when asked about paying the Prime Minister's family, we were told that they were not getting paid, and that was false.
I refer you to a July 7, 2020 article from the CBC, which said that 150 staff from WE had written about systemic racism in the organization. The story was based on Amanda Maitland, who resigned. She was a young, inspiring woman of colour who was there to inspire young people. I think she would have been a real symbol for the kind of work the WE group did. She talked about how her work was being rewritten by white staff and how her experience was being dramatically changed. This is why I think it's interesting and worth commenting on.
She was quoted as saying:
I began to speak about the culture of fear. I began to share that what is happening in this organization is that employees are having siloed conversations.
She said that when she started to speak up about the culture of fear, a lot of people were nodding their heads. This was at a meeting with staff. She said, “Marc Kielburger immediately...stepped forward and shut me down.”
In that July 7, 2020 article, CBC confirmed that they had spoken to four WE employees who were at that town hall. They confirmed that when Amanda Maitland spoke up, the Kielburgers quickly tried to end the conversation. I quote, “The automatic response was her being shut down by Marc Kielburger, and him being visibly angry.” Other employees spoke of a culture of fear within the organization.
To me this is important because this group has been given quasi-ambassadorial status by the Trudeau government. When the Trudeau government wanted to do something at the UN, WE was involved. When they wanted to do a big show in England, they brought the Prime Minister's wife. We're talking about young volunteers who could have been like my daughters, who were really inspired. Working in an organization where there's talk of a culture of fear, why does that matter? That matters because these were issues and the organization and the culture within the organization that I think should have been fact-checked by the bureaucrats but because the Kielburgers are so closely tied to the Prime Minister's family, no questions were asked about that.
The CBC news article continued:
People were afraid to speak out because they didn't want to lose their jobs. Another former employee of colour on the WE Day team said: “I was so scared to speak up. If you ever said anything that's out of line, or questioned anything, you would end up not being in [my former supervisor's] good books...and you would get kicked off the team or fired.
We could say that maybe something morphed when they went from being this small grassroots organization to this huge conglomerate doing big spectacle shows. Maybe they just expected their young staff to have to pick that up. We're in an age where questions of toxic work environments and intimidation have become very fair play and people need answers to it. What surprised me when I was starting to look into this was that I had many former WE staff who reached out to me, but they were very afraid of using their names. They were very afraid to speak out publicly. I thought it was just a children's charity. They do inspiring stuff with young people. Why were they so afraid?
How far back does this go? We have an email from September 4, 2009, by Dan Mossip Balkwill saying goodbye to all the WE staff. The subject is “An honest goodbye”. I found it very moving because he could have been like one of my daughters. He joined the organization absolutely inspired and wanting to change the world.
In his email, he said:
But the staff who work here, work out of love. It's love damnit, not money, glamour, fame, or fortune, just love. They love what they do, who they do it for, and who they do it with. They signed up to give at least two years of their life to change the world, literally that's what they signed up for.
I think that's a really powerful statement.
He went on to say:
To reduce them to tears, tell them to leave if they don't like it, that they need to suck it up, or that their problems don't compare to children in Africa is atrocious. Telling them to leave if they don't like it shows that you don't value them as a staff.
He talked about the dangers they were put in as young workers, being told that if they did a long trip, staff were not going to get a hotel paid for:
Or at the office when people fall down stairs, that have never had weather-strips put on them, or women walk down dark alleys at midnight after returning a car from a full day of work....
Me to We was supposed to redefine business. Instead it became another private sector company whose number one aim is money, where people and staff come second. I don't want to work at an organization where we're constantly reminded that we are paid low wages to keep admin rates low, so donors will give more money. I don't want to work at an organization where fear is used as a tactic to achieve an end.
That was in 2009, or 11 years ago, that this culture of intimidation was being talked about.
What I find interesting is that when the Kielburger group was challenged, as they have been by these reports, they reached out to David Stillman, a former employee, to exonerate them and to say that all of these things that were being said were false, they did respond to questions about the toxic work environment at WE with the young volunteers and young staff.
In 2018 they hired a New Hampshire-based consultant, David Baum, who describes himself as a “conversation architect”.
Baum's report totally exonerates WE and is very impressive. He says:
In my professional opinion, We and its leadership have handled the constant change, complexity and multitude of demands as well as any non-profit or social purpose organization of its size that I've worked with.
He further says:
A huge part of WE's success comes directly from the founders. Their compelling vision, and ability to leverage it into their people who genuinely believe they are changing the world, is deeply impressive.
That report would very much fit with the kind of image we had of the WE organization, of this inspiring group doing incredible change, and that the two brothers really cared. So with these allegations of toxic treatment of young people, well, how could those be true?
The report was given out to the media to deal with any allegations of bullying and intimidation.
Canadaland, which asked where that report was prepared, was told that it was done “in an independent and unbiased capacity” when Mr. Baum wrote it. However, what we learn is that Mr. David Baum, according to IRS filings, was paid $750,000 for consulting work for WE from 2015 to 2019, so he was being paid by WE an enormous amount of money and yet being presented as an independent voice.
The brothers also wrote an op-ed for Postmedia in 2015 in which they said, about Mr. Baum, “In our lives, that someone is our trusted friend David Baum.” Here is the full quote:
Even the toughest guys I know are relieved to have someone safe to go to for advice and a pep talk. In our lives that someone is our trusted friend David Baum.
Their trusted friend is the one they present to us as having provided this completely independent report on the toxic work environment faced by young people at WE.
I want to add just one more thing on this, because it is just really surprising: David Baum officiated at Craig Kielburger's wedding.
You have serious allegations about a youth charity and abusive work and 150 young staff talking about racism and racialized voices not being heard, and they present to the media a document that completely exonerates them and says how great they are and it's written by the guy who officiated at Craig Kielburger's wedding.
These are questions that need to be asked, because I think if the civil service felt a little more empowered to ask questions of this deal that Madam Chagger and Mr. Morneau were so bullish on, we might not have got as far down the road with this plan.
I refer you again to Michelle Douglas, who testified at the finance committee, because we're talking about governance. No questions were asked about the corporate governance and the capacity of this organization to deliver this massive program.
Michelle Douglas, if you look up her resumé, is a very impressive figure. You would want her on your board. I don't know if any of my colleagues in the Liberal party have ever been involved in charities, but charity boards are very important. They oversee the finances; they have to be able to tell the donors and the CRA and any of their regulators that the charity meets the tests of their finances and legal obligations.
When we had Michelle Douglas come to the finance committee, we asked her what happened in the meeting when Marc Kielburger apparently got angry and hung up on her, and why she left the organization in March.
She said:
Given my passion for the organization, it was a difficult decision for me to tender my resignation. I did not resign as a routine matter or as part of a planned board transition. I resigned because I could not do my job. I could not discharge my governance duties.
She goes onto say that in March, the WE executives were scrambling to contend with the impacts of the pandemic:
They began to lay off large numbers of staff. As the days went by, the number of job losses grew quickly, into the hundreds. The board felt, of course, a duty to protect the organization and to consider the interests of its stakeholders, including its employees, donors, partners, beneficiaries and others. I convened an ad hoc committee of the board to hold daily calls with the executive team for briefings and updates, and we provided key updates, in turn, to the board at large.
One of the key elements that I think is really powerful in Ms. Douglas' statement is that among those stakeholders she was worried about protecting were the employees, those young people. Her previous email talked about their being underpaid and the culture of fear, but she wanted to make sure they were protected, and she said:
It was our view that we could not fire hundreds of people without very strong demonstrable evidence and, even then, that we should explore mitigation measures to save jobs. Instead, the executive team were dismissing employees with great speed and in large numbers.
She continues:
On March 25 Craig Kielburger called me to ask that I resign from the board of directors of WE Charity.
Now, I've never heard of a charity where the founders can call up and tell the board that they're fired for asking financial questions. That's their job. The board was worried about those low paid young people who had given so much time to the organization and it was trying to find a way to mitigate that, but it seems that it was not at all a priority of WE, and the board was fired.
This counts because, again, when we're talking about government programs—especially in the nature of something close to a billion dollars that's going to be handed out—we need to know that the governance structure is sound and that this is an organization that can actually deliver.
If you look into the documents—I don't know if my Liberal colleagues have read the 5,000 pages that we have, the ones that aren't blacked out—you'll see that they raise a number of questions again about why people did not vet their claims. I keep going back to the fact that this was a group very much tied to the Prime Minister, tied to the Prime Minister's mother through payments, tied to the Prime Minister's brother through payments, tied to the Prime Minister's wife through the fact that they had her as their goodwill ambassador, and tied to the key ministers on the file.
In order to be able to deliver this program—it is extraordinary getting 20,000 young people placed within a couple of months very quickly for the whole summer—one of the things that they claimed, and this was in their....
They reached out, and you can see it on slide 13 of the documents that were given to the Finance and ESDC officials: “WE has confirmed a strategic coordination partnership with Imagine Canada to support the recruitment and coordination of non-profit partners.”
Imagine Canada has incredible connections, so if you're the front-line civil servant trying to vet this project, it would make sense that Imagine Canada is signed on—that's a good, good sign. The slide was updated a few days later on May 4 to read:
Support the creation of up to 20,000 Initial Volunteer Opportunities upon launch WE will create volunteer placements for 10,000 students and partner with Imagine Canada an umbrella organization for Canadian charities, to engage 50 national not-forprofit (NFP) organizations to create 10,000 additional opportunities that will be posted within two weeks of launch. These opportunities will be available in all parts of the country, in both urban centres and rural and small communities.
Now we do know that they were having enormous problems. They did not have the support in Quebec they claimed. We do not see any real figures for rural and isolated communities, but nonetheless, because of that Imagine Canada connection, it seemed doable to our hard-working civil servants.
This language was copied and pasted word for word into Minister Chagger's briefing material for her colleagues for the May 5 cabinet COVID committee meeting. This language was also found in the ministerial briefing notes and the implementation documents. In fact, it came up as part of the questions the Treasury Board had for ESDC and Finance on May 8.
The Treasury Board asked, “What are the 50 large nonprofit organizations with which the third-party would be working directly? Do they have wide and deep roots with smaller non profit organizations across Canada?” As part of their answer, ESDC replied:
WE Charities has agreed to work collaboratively with the government of Canada to identify organizations to develop placement opportunities. In addition, they have confirmed a strategic coordination partnership with Imagine Canada to support the recruitment and coordination of non-profit partners.... They will leverage their networks to extensive networks to reach smaller NFPs.
Now, the problem is that they didn't have an agreement with Imagine Canada. Imagine Canada had to clarify that. In fact, they released a statement: “Our CEO, Bruce MacDonald, initially agreed to participate on an Advisory Committee for the project. He withdrew from the Advisory Committee before it ever met.”
Then CEO Bruce MacDonald of Imagine Canada had to elaborate even further when he was questioned: “Was Imagine Canada involved in discussions about the CSSG program?” He said:
WE Charity approached Imagine Canada in May with the news that a new initiative was being developed to support post-secondary students who would be unlikely to find summer employment.... This role of connector and convenor is one that Imagine Canada often plays and I connected WE Charity to several organizations in the sector that could potentially assist with delivering the program.
At this early stage, I was asked to sit on [the] Advisory Committee for the program, and I agreed to do so. [But] this committee never met or convened in any fashion.
He went on to say:
Imagine Canada was also asked to consider playing a role in evaluating the program. Evaluation and research have long been core strengths for Imagine Canada so I agreed to consider this. As discussions about the program developed, however, concerns that it was blurring the distinction between paid work and volunteering began to surface. We relayed these concerns to both WE Charity and government officials, but they were not acted upon. As a result, Imagine Canada decided not to participate and I asked to be removed from the Advisory Committee.
He then said:
...it has been reported that Imagine Canada was among several organizational staff at Employment and Social Development Canada...considered to deliver the CSSG program. At no time were we contacted by anyone at ESDC or anyone else within the federal government to discuss this possibility.
To me, this is very concerning because we have raised concerns that this blurring of supposed volunteering and the payments that were made may actually be illegal under Canadian labour law. Imagine Canada raised these questions. They said they were not willing to participate; and yet Imagine Canada was presented as the partner, and this was not questioned.
What is really concerning is that even in late June, after Imagine Canada walked away from having even the minor role it would have had in CSSG, it remained there in the documents to the federal government. In the briefing note attached to the finance minister's final decision on releasing funds for the.... It is said on page 6 of the June 22 draft for the delivery of the Canada student service grant that “10,000 of these placements will be created by WE directly. The remainder will be created by working in partnership with 50 NFPs and Imagine Canada, an umbrella organization.”
Then, even more concerning, on the eve of the launch of the CSSG on June 25, WE was actively listing Imagine Canada as one of its partners. In an email on June 24, with the subject heading “Re: CSSG Roll out questions”, was the full list of confirmed NFPs. Number one was YMCA Nationwide, and number two was Imagine Canada. That was not true.
When the government seemed so shocked that this plan, this scheme, fell apart so quickly, it's been presented as if this were somehow the result of people being mean to WE, and people not willing to help this great organization. These were complete falsehoods being presented, and nobody was checking. I think this is really concerning.
One of the strange things I find through this whole thing is that even when the Kielburger brothers and the WE group could just give us straight-up, simple answers, there seems to be this pattern of obfuscation, exaggeration and downright, it seems to me, misrepresentation.
I'm hearing from my good friend, Mr. Sorbara, that they would never make any profit. It was impossible to make a profit. They were doing all of this for the Canadian people. It's the Marc Kielburger line that they never would have answered Canada's call if they had known the trouble they would have gotten into.
As we have seen, and I may have to explain this again to my Liberal colleagues, Canada didn't call them. They were calling Canada incessantly through their lobbyist, Sofia Marquez, and through having direct email and contact information right to the finance minister. They were just going right into his office to talk to him. So, the idea that there was no profit....
Then, it became even clearer: there was no administration fee. How do you deliver a program of this size and have no administration fee? There's something about it that makes me think that the Kielburgers wanted us to think that they were so willing to work for the good of Canadian people that they couldn't even take anything, but it just doesn't make sense.
Mr. Fragiskatos, at the finance committee on July 28, said:
I want to ask about the administration fee. How...would it have been had WE administered the Canadian student service grant, and for what purposes? When we say “administration fee”, I'm not sure...most Canadians understand what is meant by that.
Craig Kielburger responded:
I appreciate your asking that question. If I can start by clarifying, in fact [there]...wasn't an administration fee; it was a program implementation fee. What I mean by that is.... Often in the charitable world, when people think admin, they think back office or fundraising. The costs here were simply directly for reimbursements on the delivery of the program.
Wow.
Later in that same meeting Mr. Sean Fraser said he sometimes has trouble hearing the answers. He found one answer, to his colleague Ms. Dzerowicz, and then toMr. Fragiskatos, “quite stunning”. He said, “I want to make sure I have my understanding correct.”
He continued:
Of the $500...million program, there is an “up to” $43-million administration fee, depending on how many students can be placed. I was under the impression that this was going to provide some sort of benefit to the organization for administering this program?
Am I correct in my understanding that every penny of that administration fee, if the program were actually executed properly, would not have gone to the organization but would have been used exclusively for expenses?
Mr. Marc Kielburger responded, “Sir, that's correct. It would have been exclusively for expenses, number one.”
Craig Kielburger added that it was “For program expenses—not even administration”.
Mr. Marc Kielburger said:
Yes.
Number two, it's not an administration fee.... It's...a program fee.
—and here we go—
We were doing this on behalf of the government, helping the government. We were ask to do this by the government. The organization itself would not profit. We were there because we wanted to be of assistance.
Again, this wasn't an administration fee. It was a program fee, and 100% had to be used, of course, for the program.
Now, I think people would have thought less if Mr. Kielburger had just said, of course, there was an administration fee. How do you think they were going to deal with $500 million to $900 million as an organization?
But, no, there was no administration fee. Every single thing was going to help our young people in the middle of a pandemic.
The problem is that if you read the document, “administration fee” is there at every step of the way. They did charge an administration fee. In their revised project proposal on the PowerPoint deck dated May 4, WE breaks down the budget, each into the two proposed cohorts.
These are very detailed and include how many people they will be hiring, how much it will cost, legal fees, technology they will have to pay for, etc., and the last budget category in each cohort is entitled “program administration”, and under that line it says “admin costs for WE Charity 15%”.
For cohort one, that was $2,543,478 and cohort two, that was $1,796,288. That would be an admin fee of $4,339,766 outside of the expenses.
The other thing I found really striking in this is that if you're in a group and you're doing admin fees, and if you have your own rent costs and real estate costs, that's your business. The admin covers the program, because again the Kielburgers said every dollar was going to help young people. However, in this agreement with the federal government, they have their real estate getting paid off. There's a line for rent, which equals $590,000, so that's above and beyond.
Now, we do know that there were a lot of questions about their not being able to make their real estate covenant—and I have the documents here in case my Liberal colleagues didn't read any of the documents from the government—but there's this $590,000 rent fee that's put in on top of the admin fee, which is separate from the program fees. That's a serious number of dineros going to the organization that said they weren't getting anything.
We go through initial processing and administrative capacity, and that's a $12.8-million fee. Under “Grant Disbursement for first 40,000 Placements”, we have $2 million for “setup and disbursement costs for 40,000 grants tied to placements”, and a 15% administration cost. “For the additional vetting of placements and disbursement of grants for up to 60,000 eligible students”, we have $9.13 million for “capacity to assess 'outside' placements, and disbursement costs for 60,000 grants tied to placements outside of those created by WE”, plus another 15% administration cost.
So there you go: 15% administration, and then 15% administration. Why not just tell us you're charging 15% for administration? It might have made them seem a little more believable.
Here's the thing. On June 18, as they were discussing extending the program to October 30 or November 15.... In each category, there's an NGO disbursement cost, program costs and, yes, an administration cost. In this case, that would have been $482,791 or $566,591. Clearly, WE is getting 15% program costs, again money carrying on into the fall.
When my colleague Mr. Sorbara said that there was never going to be any profit, and that this is just the opposition attacking them, my question is, why did the organization not come clean to Parliament? Why, under oath, would they misrepresent the fact that they were getting a 15% admin fee?
Now, I could also go on about the Liberals, who also seem to have this problem. It's a simple thing. What should this program have cost? Mr. Sorbara the other day was again quoting the Kielburger line that the opposition was misrepresenting the numbers, saying it was $900 million, when in fact it was only $543 million, and why was the opposition using these false numbers? Well, it's actually $912 million, and we're going to get to that crucial $12 million. I think my colleagues will find the $12 million very, very interesting.
Where did the opposition come up with this $912-million figure? Well, when the Prime Minister made the announcement on April 22, they distributed documents, and the Canada student service grant was $912 million. On June 25, the Prime Minister finally announced the full details. Media reports, using the April 22 backgrounder, said $912 million, and there were no corrections from the government. The next day, June 26, Minister Chagger's office explained to the media that WE would get only $19.5 million for administering that. No details were given out.
If you remember, this was when we learned that there was going to be a $912-million program to a group that was tied so closely to the Prime Minister that there were lots of questions—major, major questions. The government seemed surprised that people noticed the fact that the Prime Minister's first big speech after becoming Prime Minister was with WE, that his wife was travelling with him and that his mother and brother were involved, so they came out and had to say, no, the only amount of money out of this $912 million to WE is $19.5 million.
Okay. Now, if you're getting confused here, when dealing with the Liberals and dealing with the Kielburger group you sometimes feel like a bumpkin at the country fair trying to keep an eye on the shell game. The Liberals and the Kielburgers are moving those shells all the time, so we're going to walk through this just a little carefully.
On July 16, Minister Chagger appeared at the finance committee. In an opening statement, she said:
The first announcement we made was for 20,000 placements, and $19.5 million was allocated. Of this $19.5 million, $5 million was for not-for-profits for the creation and support they needed, and $300,000 was for accessibility supports.... There were two other categories of funding envisioned in the contribution agreement. There was $10.5 million to be provided to WE Charity to administer the program for smaller, local not-for-profits that would want to participate.... Had that occurred, there could have been another $13.53 million provided to WE for an additional 20,000 placements.... The maximum amount that WE Charity could have received was $43.53 million out of the total budget of $912 million.
So she is still using the $912-million figure, but we moved from $19.5 million to $43.5 million—$43.53 million, just to be correct—that the WE group was going to get. But she's still using the $912-million figure, and this is what she's giving to our committee.
The Clerk of the Privy Council didn't make a correction. Neither did Bill Morneau or any of the department or ESDC officials when they were brought before testimony. The only reason we found out that it wasn't the $912 million was that I asked directly at the finance committee that we get a copy of the contribution agreement. That was on July 27. There, we realized that they had actually signed the deal for $543 million.
My God, the Liberals all jumped up and down and said, “See how the opposition is misrepresenting and blowing this out of proportion?” They said that it wasn't $912 million and it was only $543 million. Why didn't the Liberals just say this in the first place? There was so much hoo-ha-ha over this that we were really having a hard time even finding out what happened to the rest of the money in that.
But let's just continue on this. They told us it was $43.53 million to administer $912 million, but then, when they changed the numbers, it was still the same amount of money, $43.33 million, to administer the $500 million, so that was the maximum WE could receive.
We're told this by Minister Chagger at committee on July 16, when she says, “The maximum amount that WE Charity could have received was $43.53 million out of the...$912 million.” But then we learn, according to documents we obtained, that a “contingency fund of $354.23 million is also available...should it appear that initial funding of $500 million for the grants could be exhausted.” It was still $912 million. They just satisfied $354.23 million ready to go out if it was needed, so we're back to the $900 million-plus.
This is where the WE group moves from beyond $43.53 million. On June 18, ESDC and WE were in discussion to extend the program, and Marc Kielburger wrote:
Hi [Rachel]
Thank you for your time. Please find below the costs for the extension of the program per our conversation...today.
We had our finance team pull the numbers and they are consistent with other aspects of the program....
Then he goes on about the “knock-on effect” and “flow through” costs, and right down there in these documents, lo and behold, WE is going to get another $3.2 million to $3.8 million on top of the $43.53 million they were already getting, and this is in the agreement they made with them. Yet we've been told time and time again that we misrepresented the numbers, that the numbers aren't correct.
I hope people are not getting tired of all the mathematics here. This is important, because this is about the due diligence that anyone else, any other group, would have been subjected to, but this group was not, right down to the fact that they didn't even sign it with WE Charity; they signed it with a holding company, which, when you look at their original structure, seemed only to hold real estate.
Nobody bothered to check that. Nobody bothered to check the fact that when they signed their legal agreements, they said they followed the Lobbying Act, although we know they were doing an amazing amount of lobbying, more than General Motors. Yet they were not registered to lobby, so they may have even been involved in potentially illegal lobbying, but it was signed off and nobody checked.
So what is this $12 million about? There's the $900-million announcement for the Canada student service grant, but there's another $12 million on top. Remember how Minister Chagger talked about the WE social entrepreneurship proposal, the first proposal? That proposal, on April 17, when the WE group got wind of this much bigger possibility, morphed into a new program that became the Canada student service grant.
What happened to that original proposal? That original proposal still got funded. It turns out that the $12 million was given from Minister Ng's office to Minister Morneau's office on April 10. On April 10, Minister Morneau is looking at this $12-million proposal. Now, what's interesting is that when Katie Telford testified, she said that they had looked at that proposal and that PCO was not interested in it. They did not want it to go ahead, and yet it went ahead.
On April 10, here's an email from Craig Kielburger to Bill Morneau directly.
Hi Bill,
I hope this finds you, Nancy, Henry, Clare, Edward, and Grace enjoying some well-deserved downtime over Easter together.
I cannot imagine the pace of information and decision-making over the past few weeks. You once told me that you sought public office to make a difference—and this is certainly the most defining impact that you will ever have for the country.
If I may interrupt for a moment, allow me to brief you on conversations with Minister Ng. She suggested that we submit a proposal to scale our youth entrepreneurship program (originally championed by your office) with the purpose of mitigating economic struggles and preparing for a post-pandemic world.
Okay, so that's April 10. He's talking to Bill Morneau directly.
On April 21, Bill Morneau not only allocates $900 million, but he gives the other $12 million to Employment and Social Development Canada to support that original WE social entrepreneurship initiative. The next day, when the Prime Minister announces the CSSG, we have a $912-million cost. That $12 million on top of the $900 million is this original plan, which on April 10, Craig Kielburger had emailed Bill Morneau personally to ask him to look at, and 11 days later, it's passed.
This, I think, is really crucial. When Bill Morneau was asked to testify, he was asked if he had spoken at all to the Kielburgers. He said,
[On] April 26, I spoke with Craig Kielburger. I know that we would have broadly discussed the impact of...COVID.... He did not raise the Canada student service grant, nor did I.
If you remember, colleagues, Minister Morneau was emphatic that he was just calling through businesses in the area, just to make sure they were okay, and he just happened to be calling Craig Kielburger. He didn't tell us that he had been talking to Craig Kielburger on April 10 about this $12-million program. On April 26, it is just a check-in to make sure that everybody is okay. That's fantastic, and yet we have the WE notes as part of the finance committee undertakings release, in which Craig Kielburger talks about his meeting with finance minister and discussing the WE social entrepreneurship proposal.
Minister Bill Morneau maybe forgot he had a villa in France; the guy forgot he had a bill for $40,000 from the Kielburgers; maybe he forgot that he met and signed off on an agreement to give the Kielburger brothers $12 million, which Katie Telford said the government didn't think was a good idea. Maybe he forgot to tell our committee that they discussed this proposal he had just approved. We could take Minister Morneau at his word, or we could say that maybe Minister Morneau lied to our committee, that he didn't tell the truth.
Why is this important? This is important because on April 10 Kielburger contacted Bill Morneau, and 11 days later the Kielburger group is supposed to be getting $12 million. They are getting it from a minister whose daughter has been hired by the Kielburgers, whose family has been flown around the world by the Kielburger group. And we have reports that WE's youth staff, the staff we talked about, who sometimes were afraid for their jobs, were involved in political events for Bill Morneau, and they walk out with $12 million.
I know my Liberal colleagues will say that $12 million is nitpicking here. What's $12 million? God, the Liberals were willing to blow $900 million on this group.
To put this in context, in the communities I represent, two years ago we had a horrific, complete collapse of infrastructure and housing at Cat Lake First Nation reserve in Treaty 9. The situation was so bad that people were being medevaced out. People died. People died in Cat Lake from the mould in their homes and the condemned nature of...the fact that 75% of the infrastructure of that reserve was so bad that people were being medevaced out and people died. And trying to get this government to put any money in was a battle royale, and at the end of the day the people of Cat Lake got a promise of $10 million.
It took national demonstrations. It took international media. It took people being medevaced out and horrific pictures of children suffering to get $10 million, and yet Craig Kielburger could call the finance minister, ask about the family, see how all the children are doing, and get $12 million turned over to the Kielburger group without any oversight or questions.
That shows the power of this group to evade basic oversight, to evade the Lobbying Act, to call directly in to ministers. Why? It's because of their political connections. That's why this issue is not going to go away. That's why we have to deal with this, my friends. If the Liberals want to continue to protect...and obfuscate and obstruct our work, we, as the opposition, are bound to get to the bottom of this.
I'm calling on my colleagues to stop the procedural games. Let's get down to a vote.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
