Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the invitation to appear before this committee. By way of context, I'm a journalist and publisher of Canadaland, which is a small independent news organization and podcast network, which is funded directly by Canadians who support our repo

Finance committee  Okay.

Finance committee  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 d

Finance committee  Yes. This information came to our attention via Charity Intelligence, which is an independent charity watchdog. They found that in the last two sets of audited financials from WE. I believe that Charity Intelligence did have some resistance getting one set of financial disclosu

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  I think that it was accessible, certainly through the Charity Intelligence report on WE Charity and possibly in other places as well.

Finance committee  I don't attempt to.

Finance committee  According to WE Charity, this was a billing error. Our documentation shows that if it was a billing error, it was actually a series of many billing errors, because payments were in the realm of $7,500 speaking fees split into two payments. If you think of $64,000 in payments, tha

Finance committee  As Canadaland reported, based on our interview with Kate Bahen of Charity Intelligence, when ME to WE—the company—moves resources to WE Charity, it is as a mixture of money, time and products, and because ME to WE is a privately held company, we don't really have much insight int

Finance committee  Mr. Angus, I'm going to try to limit myself to what we've reported already. As you have pointed out, many different entities hold real estate, both for WE's private companies and for their various charities—holding companies, the Kielburger family themselves and relatives of the

Finance committee  I can speak to that, having interviewed Kate Bahen of Charity Intelligence. She told Canadaland she'd never seen anything like this and she likened the way WE Charity was leveraging itself to somebody with a credit card with a $10,000 limit who was constantly at $9,500. This was

Finance committee  To your first question, I think that's a terrific line of inquiry that we are pursuing as well. It's not something I'd speculate on. To your second question, I know what you know from the terrific Global News report today, which is that, by WE's own description, they set up this

Finance committee  My opinion of how strange that is is not something that I want to offer for the purpose of this committee. I hope you'll appreciate that I prefer to keep my punditry elsewhere and limit myself to my reporting. I think people can come to their own conclusions about whether that is

Finance committee  Again, I'm going to refrain from speculating, Mr. Poilievre. I will note that keeping track of the labyrinthine structure of this organization makes reporting incredibly challenging, not merely because we take accuracy so seriously, but because the WE organization has responded

Finance committee  We are aware of 12 in North America. Some of this is completely doing NGO work and international development. You must set up separate entities in these countries; some of this is really understandable. But in Kenya, I believe, there are four different companies. The same issue o