Juno News - July 18, 2020


An apology is not enough. We deserve the truth.

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Mark Kielberger Theresa Tam Craig
Will Trudeau testify at committee over the WE scandal？ Being against mandatory masks is not a kooky position

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

134.07

Word count

592

Sentence count

34

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

As the WE scandal continues to unfold, we learn of more liberal connections to this dubious charity. We also learn that WE is not a standalone entity, but is closely associated to WE Asset Holdings, MeToo We Foundation, and Imagine One Day International Holdings.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 As the WE scandal continues to unfold we learn of more liberal connections to
00:00:09.600 this dubious charity. WE was contracted to a Canada Day event on Parliament Hill
00:00:15.720 for 1.18 million which Justin Trudeau's mother was speaking. We do not know for
00:00:22.240 sure she was paid for this particular event but we know that she was paid more
00:00:26.760 than $300,000 to speak at some 25 WE events. This has now prompted four
00:00:34.300 investigations. Two parliamentary committee investigations, finance and
00:00:40.200 government operations and the ethics commissioner investigations into both
00:00:45.120 the prime minister and the finance minister. We also learned courtesy of the
00:00:50.460 rebel news the Canada's chief health officer Dr. Theresa Tam contracted with
00:00:56.940 WE in 2019 for some unspecified services also in some sort of sole-sourced deal.
00:01:04.200 We learned courtesy of the deep digging of the Toronto Sun's Brian Lilly that the WE
00:01:10.140 charity is not a standalone entity. In fact it is closely associated to me to WE
00:01:16.920 Asset Holdings, Me Too We Foundation and Imagine One Day International Holdings.
00:01:22.460 The owners Craig and Mark Kielberger have real estate holdings of more than 43
00:01:28.260 million dollars in downtown Toronto. Lilly referred to all of this as Kielberger
00:01:34.020 Incorporated. This is hardly your run-of-the-mill charity and the prime
00:01:39.300 minister has been closely associated to them since at least 2008. For the liberal
00:01:44.540 government to try to give them a sole source contract for 912 million for some
00:01:51.220 nebulous youth volunteering service is beyond the pale. Of that there was a
00:01:58.220 management fee alone of some 20 million dollars to perform a service that Service
00:02:05.040 Canada has been overseen for a number of years through their summer jobs program.
00:02:10.220 Quite apart from anything else, the math in all of this simply doesn't add up. The
00:02:16.260 program was to announce to provide as much as five thousand dollars to thirty
00:02:20.360 thousand students who had put in a certain number of hours volunteering. So let's do
00:02:25.460 the math. If we assume they all got or they got all thirty thousand students
00:02:31.160 involved and all completed their requisite hours and each earned that five
00:02:35.620 thousand dollars, that translates to a hundred and fifty million. Add in the 20
00:02:41.000 million management fee, that still leaves unexplained the remaining 761,980,000.
00:02:48.620 What was that money supposed to be used for? This all stinks to the high heavens. It
00:02:57.160 stinks even worse when we consider the Kielberger set after the contract was 0.99
00:03:01.960 announced, that the Prime Minister had called them directly to tell them about
00:03:07.240 it. That was quickly walked back when Trudeau said, oh no, it was a cabinet decision.
00:03:13.720 Then we learned that after the contract fell apart, we laid off 450 people ostensibly
00:03:21.460 hired to work on the program. This means that they had spent weeks in a
00:03:25.840 recruiting drive in advance of the contract award. Why would they do that if
00:03:32.560 they had not had a heads up from the PMO? The simple answer is they would not. So
00:03:41.240 the fix was in and the result was preordained by the PMO. Hardly a cabinet
00:03:47.320 decision at all despite what we were told. Canadians have not been told the truth in 1.00
00:03:53.620 any of this and the Prime Minister needs to be held accountable for it. An apology for
00:03:59.380 not recusing himself from the cabinet table is simply not sufficient. It screams
00:04:05.620 out for a full and complete investigation by the RCMP. Remember, we are talking about
00:04:12.280 nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money being steered to liberal friends and
00:04:17.940 insiders. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.