That's about what I have left.
When WE was questioned about this recording, WE's lawyer told Canadaland that the employee had been stealing charitable funds from WE and that Mr. Kielburger made the phone call at the request of Kenyan police. When asked by Canadaland to provide documentation supporting this claim, Mr. Kielburger did not.
There was another instance of misused charity funds. The WE organization publicly insisted that they had never paid members of the Trudeau family for speaking at WE Day, but Canadaland discovered this was simply not true. Not only had it paid Margaret and Sacha Trudeau over $300,000, but $64,000 of the payments to Margaret Trudeau came directly from WE Charity.
Canadaland also revealed that a daughter of Finance Minister Bill Morneau spoke without pay at a WE Day event and received an endorsement from Marc Kielburger for her book, and that later another daughter of Minister Morneau went to work for WE Day in the same month that Minister Morneau announced $3 million in government funding for WE.
In conclusion, the information that Canadaland reported and that I just shared did not come easily. The employees who spoke with us did so despite contracts that WE had asked them to sign, which prohibited them from criticizing WE for the rest of their lives, and which claim to hold their heirs liable if they ever do so.
When Canadaland sent the WE organization 11 early questions, they sent us 33 questions back, asking why we were asking questions, what we would be publishing and so on. They later asked us who our sources were. They told us that they wouldn't answer our questions unless we answered theirs, which we refused. Our reporting persisted.
As we continued to investigate, their lawyers hired a private investigation firm to investigate us. Specifically, they investigated the personal life of our reporter Jaren Kerr and my personal life. The information this firm investigated included, for some reason, the name of my then eight-year-old son and speculation about which school my children attended.
My colleagues and I endured these pressures to put all of what I just said onto the public record so that those considering engaging with the WE organization, be they a youth volunteer, a school, a donor or a possible partner, could make informed decisions about how to proceed. In fact, most of the information I just shared has been available on the open Internet for over a year to anyone who cared to run a Google search on the WE organization.