The contract Ottawa signed with WE Charity allowed the group to receive all of the money to administer the Canada Student Service Grant upfront, with the organization getting $30-million out of a potential $43.5-million before the contract was cancelled.
The contract shows that WE’s arrangement to run the program to pay student volunteers took effect weeks before cabinet approved the program on May 22. The deal, which the government called a contribution agreement, was released through the House of Commons finance committee on Monday.
The government first announced the contract on June 25, but it was cancelled on July 3 amid conflict-of-interest accusations against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The deal called for all the money to be paid to WE by July 2. The charity said Monday it received $30-million on June 30, but will refund all the money. “The details of repayment are presently being worked out with the government,” WE said in a statement.
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On March 25, Craig Kielburger called me to ask that I resign from the board of directors of WE Charity. It was clear that there was a breakdown in trust between the founders and me as the board chair. WE is a founder-led organization and Marc and Craig Kielburger hold significant power in the organization. As I was not going to be able to discharge my oversight duties, I opted to resign immediately. In an accelerated process, the remainder of the board of directors was replaced, but for one Canadian member and two U.S. board members, in early April. I was not on the board at that time, and therefore cannot speak to the circumstances of their replacement.
Four times in a row, Conservative Finance Critic Pierre Poilievre asked the Kielburger bros whether they had their law firm investigated reporters Jesse Brown and Jaren Kerr, who had both done substantial reporting on WE.
It was a simple question, with a simple yes or no answer.
Either they did have their lawyers surveil reporters, or they didn’t.
And yet, each time they were asked, four times in a row, they refused to give a clear answer.
The Kielburger brothers say the WE organization they built up “like a small little house” as teenagers is facing financial ruin because of controversy over a federal government student volunteer program.
A We Charity-run program promising jobless students up to $5000 for volunteerism would have seen “very few” students get $5000, the Commons finance committee was told yesterday. Marc Kielburger, co-founder of the charity, said actual payouts would have been as little as a third the size of what cabinet promised: “Volunteering can be a fantastic way to build skills.”
The NDP sided with the Liberals and voted against a motion that would have required all Liberal cabinet members to “disclose whether they had knowledge of relationships between Trudeau, other top Liberal officials and WE prior to the cabinet’s decision to award the grant program to WE, and disclose whether they, their families, or relatives have any WE connections.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs yesterday faulted staff at Canadian missions overseas for sloppy bookkeeping, awarding contracts to themselves and selling laptops in a garage sale. Ongoing audits of missions follow the 2017 discovery of a fraud ring at the Canadian embassy in Haiti: “The audit found deficiencies.”
The Beijing Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) announced that one COVID-19 patient, a 53-year-old woman, had become infected after having dinner with a friend from Dalian who was an asymptomatic carrier.
The virus has now been confirmed by authorities to have spread from Dalian to nine other cities in four provinces and one directly-governed municipality.
A city of about 6.9 million in northeastern China, Dalian has launched a series of strict rules to prevent the spread of the virus. But locals became disgruntled at authorities’ haphazard implementation and fought with medical staff and each other.
(Sidebar: wow, China really has a handle on this virus it spread across the globe. I'm sure one is relieved to hear that the company associated with the Chinese military is helping Canada to develop a "vaccine" for it.)
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It might have something to do with the fact that Justin has been trying to replace the US with China as a major trading partner (just like North Korea):
Financial deception is part of a Chinese master plan, according to Carson Block, founder and chief investment officer of Muddy Waters Capital. He says China is waging an undeclared economic war against the West.
“This system whereby they protect frauds that list in the United States, and raise capital from U.S. investors, I think is one leg of a capital markets strategy. That is one leg of this undeclared economic war,” Block said. ...
Where Canada is more vulnerable than the United States, Rosen argues, is due to the accounting standards it follows—international ones that use “current value accounting.” This method is more easily abused, as companies can apply overly rosy assumptions, such as the likelihood of revenue collection or price appreciation of an asset—as opposed to recording it at cost, according to the U.S. standard, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
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Canada is not at all interested in protecting anyone from China's influence:
Not only is the group extensively persecuted in China, it is a major target of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Canadian soil as well, and in a myriad of ways, writes journalist Jonathan Manthorpe in his 2019 book “Claws of the Panda.”
“Falun Gong is high on the list of the CCP’s targets in Canada,” the book states.
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Scheer said Canada must stand with Falun Gong practitioners to condemn the “human rights abuses and crimes of such despotic regimes as the one in Beijing.”
“The Chinese Communist Party must stop its illegal widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and torture of Falun Dafa practitioners and other religious minorities,” he said in a statement on July 20.
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Tong Xiaoling, China’s consul-general in Vancouver, told a Chinese-language radio program in Vancouver this week that pro-democracy activists in Canada who criticize the new security law enacted in Hong Kong are trying to foist their views on people who support Beijing’s move. Her interview was broadcast over Monday and Tuesday.
(Sidebar: no, that's called sharing one's opinion. You wouldn't understand because individualism is anathema to you.)
Unable to dance around the issue any longer, the feds promise to have an inquiry into the mass shooting in Nova Scotia:
Bowing to public pressure, the federal and Nova Scotia governments agreed Tuesday to scuttle their plans for a joint review into the April mass shooting that claimed 22 lives and instead establish a more rigorous and transparent public inquiry.
Time and money are expected to be wasted.
Primary schools and daycare centres have not been major sources of coronavirus transmission, according to an analysis of the international evidence released as two of Canada’s largest provinces prepare to unveil their back-to-school plans.
A Canadian review of 33 studies across 16 countries found that young children – particularly those under the age of 10 – are less likely than teenagers and adults to spread coronavirus.
With children, “we don’t see these superspreader events that we see in other congregate settings [involving] adults,” said Sarah Neil-Sztramko, a researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton and one of the authors of the review. “Even in cases where a symptomatic child has gone into a setting and has had close contact with a number of children … they don’t seem to transmit it to the other kids. We see that fairly consistently across the reports that we found.”
When cases of COVID-19 were identified in elementary schools and child-care centres, the virus was most often introduced by and spread among adults, she added.
A pro-life billboard with a picture of a preborn baby was recently vandalized after being displayed at a Catholic church in Lambton, Ontario. A security camera showed a darkly dressed figure douse the larger-than-life billboard with gasoline and then burn it.
The more shocking numbers are those of “perceived burden on family, friends, or caregivers” (34%) and “isolation or loneliness” (13.7%). This suggests that one driving factor behind hundreds of assisted suicides, if not thousands, is the impression that people want them out of the way rather than help support the sick. That’s not just an impression, actually — it’s the reality in Canada’s health-care system.
