Straight line from Aga Khan to WE

the We Charity fiasco is a quintessential trudeau-liberal mess, involving the same mingling of personal relationships and government contracts as the aga Khan’s island fiasco. the only major difference is that, unlike the trudeaus’ Bahamian vacation, We Charity’s $19.5-million contract to administer more than $900 million in summer jobs programming has been withdrawn by mutual consent. still, Craig and marc Kielburger’s We brand is so similar to that of the liberal Party of Canada under Justin trudeau, it seems almost inevitable in hindsight that they would have wound up embroiled in the same controversy.

We Day events involve packing thousands of hypedup adolescents into arenas on school days, where they shriek adulation at various celebrities in the name of inspiring themselves to change the world for the better.

No doubt a few of them go on to do just that. A few more will go on work trips to impoverished countries — the cost of which could do (at a guess) 100 times more good in the form of a cash donation — and return “humbled” and with improved resumés. The rest will at least have avoided an afternoon’s education, and We day’s corporate sponsors — among them RBC, KPMG, Telus, unilever, Ford and The Keg — will leave valuable brand impressions on a demographic soon to be in the market for cars, mortgages, mid-range steak dinners and management consultants.

In the early days, at least, Trudeau’s Liberals had similar world-changing branding. Canada, back, would rise like a phoenix. All Indigenous people would have clean drinking water, every recommendation of the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be implemented, gay men would be able to donate blood, Canadians in blue helmets would roam the earth, placating warring factions through sheer force of Canadian-ness.

I’m oddly fascinated by the We day phenomenon: I’ve watched clips online over the years, and once covered an absolutely surreal day of events in Toronto involving Trudeau, Prince Harry, the Invictus Games, Marc Kielburger, sledge hockey and an arena full of screaming middle-schoolers. every time I got precisely the same unsettling, vaguely cult-like vibe I got watching those early days of Trudeaumania II. Like, are you people actually listening to what he’s saying? Seriously? For God’s sake, settle down. It’s how I felt when I watched half the Ottawa press corps collapse in a swoon when Trudeau won a charity boxing match. It’s how I felt when I saw two forty-something women almost burst in ecstasy during a stage-managed mob scene in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, after managing to shake his hand.

To be fair to the screaming kids at We days … they’re kids. The adults who saw Trudeau as an agent of epochal change, I’m afraid, have no such excuses. And with this We debacle, neither does Trudeau.

Sophie Grégoire-trudeau is an official “ambassador of We well-being,” as well as a “mentor, booster and champion” of the We organization. She and Trudeau himself have attended several We events to rapturous receptions. Any normal human being could have told the prime minister that awarding a giant contract to such an organization would set off alarm bells. And no normal human being would be anything but further perplexed by the PMO’S efforts at damage control: first insisting only the We Charity was capable of administering the program, then shortly thereafter cancelling the contract and handing it to the civil service. While admitting no impropriety, Trudeau then suggested We would have done a better job. That’s just utterly bizarre.

It was 4½ years ago that an office full of handsomely remunerated political geniuses failed to prevent the prime minister of Canada from vacationing, in secret and without consulting the ethics commissioner, on the private Bahamian island of a man whose charitable foundation receives hundreds of millions of dollars from Canadian taxpayers. It was a trip any normal human being would perceive as a conflict of interest and, thanks to the helicopter flight involved, was in clear violation of federal conflict-of-interest law.

Four-and-a-half years later, the same office failed to flag or successfully prevent the farming out of nearly $1 billion of work to an organization that had eagerly showcased and promoted the Trudeau brand to arenas full of enraptured future voters. And when it inevitably blew up in the Liberals’ faces, they couldn’t even muster the foresight to abandon ship until they were soaking wet.

It’s no surprise to see Liberals conflating their own interests with the national interest. That’s what Liberals do, in the same way that birds fly and fish swim. But history’s successful Liberals seemed to have a much firmer grasp on just how far that principle could be pushed before voters cried foul. And they were considerably better at mopping up messes when they accidentally created them. It won’t ever be too late for Trudeau to hire some reality-based advisers, until it is.