Thank you, sir. A question we have never been asked by any journalist or anyone here today is what was lost when it came to young people in this process.
We had an extraordinary service opportunity lined up with Rotary and others to link young people to seniors to help document their lives to help overcome the reality of dementia, with so many seniors being in social isolation.
We had a beautiful program lined up with hospital networks, where there would have been support for nurses and their kids at home to make sure that they had digital mentors so that the nurses could take care of us and not be afraid.
We had a beautiful partnership lined up with Tim Horton's Foundation camps and others because all of the other camps had stopped over the summer, and young Canadians would have provided digital camp coaching experiences to these youth to help mentor and support them in this process.
All of this good was lost. All of these extraordinary service opportunities were lost. The fallout has been that young people are not earning income to support their tuition. I know it was criticized, but these teachers put up their hand over the summer to support 20,000 youth with direct supervision.
For WE Charity, to your comments, sir, the $5 million that we incurred in expenses is not the real issue here. This false information that's been circulated has been devastating to the charity. The charity got tagged “the WE Charity scandal” on this, when, in fact, the charity didn't make the final decision and wasn't involved in the process of declaring whether there was a conflict. All media have carried this around the world as the WE Charity scandal. It's been devastating to a Canadian charity through this whole process.
Frankly, there are days when we wish we had never answered the phone on April 19 when Rachel Wernick called asking for us to help.
It is incredibly unfortunate that the people who are bearing the worst cost in all of this are young people who don't have their summer placements. Because of the harm caused to WE Charity, for so many of the young people and children in Canada whom we served, we won't be able to provide the same programs in the years ahead.