WE organization cancels all events

OTTAWA — The WE organization is cancelling its flagship “WE Day” events for the foreseeable future and is launching a major restructuring following weeks of controversy surrounding its ties to the Trudeau government.

“After much reflection and with great care and concern for all our stakeholders, we have made some important decisions to refocus on our mission, simplify our program offering, and undertake a series of governance and structural changes,” the organization said via a press release.

Among the many changes, the organization says it is cancelling all future WE Day events, its stadium-sized rallies geared towards Canadian youth. WE will “return to its roots” by prioritizing its international development work and making its school learning programs digital-only, says the statement.

But WE will also launch a broad review to simplify its corporate structure and create more separation between its not-for-profit branch, WE Charity, and its for-profit enterprise, ME to WE.

WE Charity has a somewhat non-traditional governance structure for a charity in that part of its funding comes from the profit-making entity under the WE movement umbrella — ME to WE.

Since 2004, ME to WE says it has contributed approximately $20 million to WE Charity, but the nature of ME to WE’s operations and exactly how much revenue it generates remains opaque, simply because ME to WE is a private company and not obligated to disclose its financials to the public.

The most obvious overlap between the two organizations is that they share the same chief financial officer, Victor Li.

“We recognize that 25 years of rapid expansion and ground-breaking social entrepreneurship has resulted in an organizational structure that is more complicated than it needs to be. We are proud of the social impact WE has enabled, but we realize that its structure needs to be easier to understand and more transparent for all our stakeholders.”

The organization has hired Korn Ferry, a management consulting company, to conduct a full review of the organizations corporate structure; committed to hiring a chief risk and compliance officer that will be independent from management, and contracted two other firms to conduct a full workplace review.

Finally, WE says it has hired former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario David Onley as executive advisor to oversee the implementation of the review’s recommendations.

“The purpose of the review is to streamline the WE organizational structure, including evaluating the future of ME to WE, with the goal of a clearer separation of the social enterprise from the charitable entities,” WE’s statement reads.

The WE organization — which has close ties to Justin Trudeau and his family — has been embroiled in multiple controversies over the last few weeks.