WE storm tells youth to avoid politics

In its heyday, the WE Charity probably prodded countless young people to pursue lives in global activism.

Thanks to recent events, WE Charity has probably done the opposite for politics.

No matter who ultimately gets the blame for the demise of WE Charity’s Canadian operations, there is nothing in the whole saga that will inspire youthful idealists toward politics.

The founders of the WE Charity, Marc and Craig Kielburger, have paid a steep price for flying too close to political power. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister who saw himself as the champion for young people in politics, has acquired some major brand damage on that score.

Young do-gooders like the Kielburgers used to tell people to think globally, act locally. The WE Charity controversy has effectively lopped off the last part of that slogan. Think globally and steer well clear of the domestic stuff, especially politics.

WE Charity’s downfall is actually two stories in one, neatly summed up in the third paragraph of the charity’s statement on its demise.

“COVID-19 disrupted every aspect of our work. The fallout from the Canada Student Service Grant has placed us, as a charity, in the middle of political battles and misinformation that we are ill-equipped to fight.”

That, in a nutshell, sums up how WE Charity is a dual casualty of 2020: globally and locally damaged.

Global citizenship has taken a huge hit during this pandemic. Borders are closed, travel is ill-advised and charity truly begins at home, where this virus is robbing people of their livelihoods, their social lives and local businesses.

In that context alone, WE Charity was vulnerable — it is an organization that relies on people feeling comfortable enough at home to think of others in greater need, farther away. A pandemic, unfortunately, tends to turn everyone into isolationists.

So WE Charity’s entire raison d’tre was in peril even before it got entangled in the domestic pandemic-relief program, enlisted by the government to administer aid to students affected by the economic lockdown. What happened afterward gives a whole new meaning to the warning: don’t try this at home.

From the moment that WE Charity was designated as a most-favoured charity for COVID relief, the organization learned the fundamental lesson of modern politics: it’s not your enemies who get you into trouble; it’s your friends. Or in Trudeau’s case, his family. The charity’s cosy relationship with the Trudeau family speaking circuit — the prime minister’s mother, brother and wife — was a fatal liability for the WE Charity organization and the Trudeau government.

WE Charity’s statement cast the charity as a victim of “political battles and misinformation:” the controversy as a collision between the idealism of global philanthropy and the cynicism of domestic politics.

The victims, of course, are all those students who never did get the jobs and pandemic relief that WE Charity was supposed to administer and all the employees of WE Charity who will soon be looking for other work in the midst of massive economic downturn.

Several years ago, I was interviewing an MP who got into partisan politics when she was a student, then spent many years after university in the field of international aid. She said she had noticed how students nowadays are more likely to skip that whole step of political clubs in university and choose specific causes, often global ones, as an outlet for their idealism.

Trudeau, campaigning for the Liberal leadership, went to colleges and universities all over Canada too, telling young people that it was his mission to reconnect youthful activism to the cause of politics. When he first came to power, he retained responsibility for youth issues in his cabinet, though he eventually handed it off. (It now belongs to Bardish Chagger, minister of diversity, youth and inclusion, and one of the cabinet members at the heart of the WE Charity investigation.)

Up until the WE Charity controversy blew onto the scene this year, COVID-19 had been proving to be an unexpected ally in the cause of reconnecting people — young and old — to politics and government.

Suddenly, government mattered in people’s lives; political games were being set aside.

The uproar over WE Charity revived politics as usual, though, and re-toxified the conversation on social media. Any young person looking to get involved in Canadian politics, scrolling through the posts on Twitter or watching the partisan back-andforth in traditional media, will quickly learn that enemies are everywhere and friends are just trouble — the opposite of optimism.

The WE Charity hasn’t totally given up on its causes; its final statement closed with reassurances of its ongoing commitment to “global citizens and shameless idealists.”

It didn’t urge any of its fans and followers to go into politics.