Finance committee  We research other charities.

Finance committee  It's with very few. It's on an ad hoc basis, with some donors, that we work on wills and estates.

Finance committee  It's not frequent in the charity sector to have these shell organizations with limited liabilities, a single vehicle like that, a single-entity vehicle. Mr. Sorbara would be familiar with this from corporate analysis or real estate holdings or construction. I've never seen it bef

Finance committee  On the related parties' transactions, with WE Charity providing cash to ME to WE, and ME to WE providing back to WE Charity support, which is cash and also donated goods or time, we would like to have greater disclosure about how much of ME to WE's contribution to WE Charity was

Finance committee  Mr. Julian, to your question, with so many allegations swirling around about the numbers, I believe that donors and the corporate sponsors would really get a shot of confidence if an international tier 1 auditing firm came in to do the audit on these. The numbers are presented

Finance committee  Yes, we've looked at WE Charity in the U.K. We did that. We went through that, and in my assessment, WE Charity U.K. looks clean, looks really good. It has a nice strong independent board and a lot of domestic programs. I couldn't see any of the concerns about board turnover, the

Finance committee  That's an excellent point. To WE's comments or explanation for its bank covenants, it mentioned that the bank covenant was a ratio that may have been affected by fiscal 2018 only being the eight months, but that it would not affect the ratio for fiscal 2019—that was 12 months. W

Finance committee  WE typically likes to write a letter from the executive director before issuing its financial statement, so while it had the financial statements—just the financials without the management discussion and analysis ready—it wanted to release them all together, and that might have c

Finance committee  Thank you. I've never seen it before in reading the audited financial statements of over the 1,780 charities. That bank covenant note was new to me. I did additional outside research into that and I disclosed it in the report in August 2019. If I could just take the opportunit

Finance committee  There was no additional information provided in the audited financial statements, but the bank had waived the covenants for the current period.

Finance committee  On that point about social enterprises, as Mr. Julian would be aware from his social enterprise, social enterprises are a sort of new and innovative way for charities to work today. The WE situation is different, not so much because of its relationship with a social enterprise bu

Finance committee  Yes, you have that right. There was so much confusion by Canadians—there has been since we began research coverage—about the relationship between WE Charity and ME to WE. It was just very blurry. Our role was to write the information in common English so that donors could underst

Finance committee  That's an excellent point. That's a point our research team will be going through: Was there anything else we could have reported? Yes, we had the ratings. They looked at, we said, those objective measures like overhead costs and balance sheet items. Those show the three-star r

Finance committee  For WE Charity Foundation, it would take longer than normal. Having analyzed it for many years, we have a model, so it's just an update to the model. I estimate I would have spent—and I would have gone through this one very carefully, as it is more complex—probably two days on it

Finance committee  In reading the information on WE Charity's results reports, I was using the fiscal 2018 annual report for its results. I was informed by WE Charity management that the 2019 annual report was late because of COVID, and I did not do an update on its programs and locations, so, in m