Juno News - July 21, 2020


Who else is involved in the WE Charity scandal？

Topics
Liberal MPs filibustering ethics committee meeting
Mentioned
Probe
The China Virus (Feat. Ezra Levant) The West Wants Out： Part 1

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

213.93

Word count

850

Sentence count

44


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the WE Charity scandal and why we need to get to the bottom of what's going on with it. I also talk about why we should trust our government with our money, and why they need to investigate.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I've worked in the charity and not-for-profit sector for pretty much all of my professional
00:00:11.280 career as an adult. And that's perhaps why the WE scandal bothers me so much. It's because I
00:00:16.320 know what goes on in charities and in not-for-profit organizations. Now, just for clarity, there are
00:00:22.160 three types of corporations you can have in Canada. There is a charity, so these are organizations
00:00:25.840 that give tax receipts. They could be a religious institution, or it could be just a charity that
00:00:29.680 does good charitable works, which is defined by the CRA, and they give tax receipts. So you can
00:00:34.000 deduct them against your income at the end of the year. Then there are not-for-profit corporations,
00:00:38.480 which are kind of like charities where they're ideally supposed to be doing some kind of good
00:00:42.400 works. But the difference is that the corporations itself cannot make a profit in that there are no
00:00:48.000 shareholders that can get dividends or there is no owner's equity that can be taken. There's nothing
00:00:52.320 that can be removed as a profit. Now, there can be salaries, which you might be a employee and be a
00:00:57.840 director in the not-for-profit corporation, but it's not a profit directly as a for-profit corporation.
00:01:03.360 Whereas again, more people are familiar with a for-profit corporation where that you can get
00:01:07.600 dividends, you can get shareholders' equity, you can just take direct profits without having to be
00:01:11.280 an employee of the corporation. You can just make money for being an owner without having anything to
00:01:15.280 do with the day-to-day operations. Now, the issue here with the WE Charity is not just the fact that
00:01:21.440 there are so many shady things, so many things that are allegedly criminal that have been going on.
00:01:26.720 It's the fact that this is a multi-layer problem. You cannot in a charity or not-for-profit, none
00:01:32.000 that I have seen in my over, it's gotta be 10, 15 years of experience, none that I have seen where
00:01:37.760 you can simply sign off on so much money without having multiple, multiple people look at and
00:01:44.160 approve these deals. There are usually audited financial statements at the end of every year.
00:01:48.320 There are usually numerous boards, committees, people that are responsible, people that are
00:01:52.720 literally legally responsible, by the way. I'm not just saying responsible for that. People that are
00:01:56.480 literally legally responsible for what happens to this money and the operations of these organizations.
00:02:02.560 So that is super, super disappointing. But to top it all off, the thing that really,
00:02:07.680 really irks me is this. This is Liberal MPs filibustering an ethics committee meeting that
00:02:13.280 was supposed to investigate what was happening here and really just launch a probe into all that
00:02:18.960 happened with the WE Charity. But instead, Liberal MPs decided to filibuster the meeting, so they just
00:02:23.920 delayed and filibustering is just when you delay, you waste time procedurally, you give speeches to
00:02:28.480 the maximum amount of time, you raise the maximum amount of objections, you're just trying to run out
00:02:32.000 the clock if it were a sports game. So you're just trying to run out the clock and filibuster so that
00:02:35.840 you can never get a final vote. And that's basically what they did. And that's super, super upsetting,
00:02:40.560 because in a democracy, in a Liberal democracy which we live, you would like to think that any alleged
00:02:47.440 criminal behavior or any appearance of criminal behavior is going to be investigated and that such a
00:02:52.000 thing should not even be possible. And yet here we are. And that goes, it doesn't even matter who's
00:02:56.880 in government, by the way. It makes no difference to me whether it's the Liberals or the NDPs or the
00:03:01.200 Conservatives or the People's Party or the Bloc or the Greens. I really, really don't care who's in
00:03:05.760 there. But the fact that this is something that can be done to filibuster and stop something that has
00:03:11.120 all the appearances, all the trappings of something that stinks to high heaven, that is really super
00:03:17.200 disappointing. So I think as Canadians, we all need to be a lot more upset about what's going on,
00:03:21.840 because ultimately, this is not only our public money, but these are the people that we trust to
00:03:26.080 take care of us. This is a time of COVID. This is a time of economic uncertainties. These are the
00:03:30.400 people that we're putting our trust in to make decisions on behalf of Canadians and for the benefit
00:03:35.440 of all Canadians, not for the benefit of their own pocketbook. And that seems to be what has happened
00:03:40.000 here. So let's hope we get an investigation into this. Let's hope we get to the bottom of it,
00:03:43.680 because as Canadians, it's super important that we find out or else we'll lose trust in our
00:03:47.520 government. And that is something that is super hard to get back. So for True North,
00:03:50.960 I am Sam Ashkenazi. Have yourself a great day. And I can't wait to read
00:03:54.400 the We Probe report when it all comes out at the end. Thanks so much.