Great. Thank you, sir.
Thanks for the invitation to appear in front of you today and for giving me the opportunity to make this statement.
I'm not specifically sure why I was asked to appear, but I'll share with you some of my background in the charity sector.
I've worked for 35 years in the sector, starting with an eight-year stint as a counsellor in a shelter for abused women. During the past 25 years, I've worked as a consultant to over 100 charities, advising them on fundraising and governance, impact and relevance, accountability and transparency. For the past 10 years, I've written widely about the charity sector. My 2017 book was called Cap in Hand, and my forthcoming book, Disconnect: Charity's role in the Age of Inequality is due out on November 15. I'm currently the editor of The Charity Report, an independent news source for the charity sector.
I have three main points to cover in my statement specifically related to the government's partnership with WE.
The first is the question of whether WE was the only group with the capacity to execute the CSSG. I believe that this conclusion is not an unreasonable one. The government had already had some success in getting COVID relief delivered through partnerships with charities. In April, it gave $100 million to five national food security charities for emergency food relief. Shortly after, three national charities were tapped to channel $350 million to vulnerable communities through the emergency community support fund.
However, students, as a group, are a difficult cohort to reach. WE had student engagement, youth engagement, as its mission, with connections to 15,000 schools across the country. I believe that, at the time, that would have been seen as a plus as post-secondary students, particularly in racialized neighbourhoods, remain connected with their high schools.
The organization was also able to showcase its reach. Young people filled sports stadiums in 15 cities around the globe for annual WE Days. WE ambassadors were A-listers from the world of entertainment, politics, civil society and the corporate world. They were supported by everybody who mattered. Board members of WE included senior bank executives from Scotiabank and RBC, sophisticated people with long resumés.
Additionally, WE's finances, governance and unique structure were independently and favourably reviewed by two of the most well-known law firms in the country, Torys LLP and Miller Thompson, as well as by former Supreme Court Justice Peter Cory.
All three founders of the organization had been awarded the Order of Canada. Additionally, Craig Kielburger had received 13 honorary degrees and doctorates. Marc Kielburger was selected by the World Economic Forum as one of the 250 global leaders. Roxanne Joyal, a Rhodes scholar, clerked for the Supreme Court of Canada and also received an honorary doctorate.
In 2018, the charity had 380 full-time staff and a budget of about $48 million. To anybody from the outside evaluating WE, its qualifications would appear to have been unique and unassailable. In fact, the organization was able to generate 35,000 applications from across the country in nine days—35,000 young people whose stories have been lost now and whose hopes are on hold.
The second point that I want to make is around the idea that charities don't spend money on speakers or entertainment for fundraising events. Nothing could be further from the truth. While charities try to get speakers and entertainment—or anything they can—donated for an event, entertainment is typically part of an event budget.
In 2002, the Hadassah-WIZO children's charity paid former U.S. president Bill Clinton $100,000 to speak at a sold-out fundraising dinner in Toronto. Also, the late socialite and philanthropist Anna Maria de Souza most certainly paid the 70 Brazilian dancers she flew in from Rio de Janeiro for the iconic Brazilian Ball in Toronto, which at its peak in 2010 raised $7 million in one evening and which, according to Toronto Life magazine, “Everyone who was anyone in the world of politics, business or media attended.”
The reason charities pay for speakers and entertainment is that there's a lot at stake. The days of the lemonade stand are over. Every year in Canada charities raise more than $20 billion from fundraising activities, and they spend several billion dollars in order to accomplish that.
Yet, even with that amount of money, all three levels of government are still the primary source of funds for charity. In 2017, governments supplied 70% of the $280 billion that flowed to the charity sector, which leads me to my third and final point.
The charity sector is the primary means through which government executes health care and social service priorities. The sector employs two million people on a full-time basis and two million people on a part-time basis. Every day, millions of people rely on the services provided by charity, and as a consequence of the COVID pandemic, more people are becoming reliant on charity, not fewer.
In a world full of uncertainty, Canadians are suffering through the worst crisis in modern history. Their lives have been turned upside down. Many don't know how they're going to manage. The anxiety is making some Canadians sick. Others are becoming hopeless about the future. The situation is dire.
At the same time, the people who have been elected to help Canadians, through the good times and the bad, some of whom are now serving as the loyal opposition, have created a crisis of their own by transforming the weaknesses of one charity into a vehicle for an intractable partisan battle that is currently taking up the agenda of three parliamentary committees, including this one.
The charity sector is flawed and needs to work on many problems, such as better governance, inequity, and systemic racism, yet the increasingly partisan behaviour coming out of the House of Commons is like that of a herd of bulls in a china shop, destroying everything in its path as it reaches for the most expensive piece of china on the top shelf, presumably a snap election that could potentially defeat the current government.
You've invited me here to speak to you. My recommendation to you now is that you snap out of it, because the broken glass on the floor of that china shop is the collateral damage being inflicted on the charity sector, its employees, and the growing number of people the sector is trying to serve. As a citizen and someone who has worked all of her professional life to address the needs of the most vulnerable people in society, I cannot overstate how deeply disturbing I find this agenda.
I'm happy to take your questions.
