Finally we might get answers
SPARE US YOUR PLATITUDES AND FINALLY TAKE SOME ACTION. — MARSHALL
It’s good to see that some outside testimony from a former donor, and a significant one, to WE Charity, Reed Cowan, has reignited public attention to the eerie connections between the Kielburger WE apparatus, the federal Liberal government, and the Trudeau family — wife, brother, mother and the prime minister himself.
Cowan’s testimony will produce a moral stomach cramp in any normal person, how he was misled, appalled by the “duplicity” of WE. He testified he spent years raising funds for WE Charity’s schools in honour of his four-year-old son, Wesley, who died in an accident in 2006.
The charity promised that schools would be built and named for his son, he testified. But WE — here’s a new verb for our times — “replaqued” it.
It was “repurposed” for a fresh donor. So much for a tribute to the memory of a young son.
Politics in the time of COVID is a much enfeebled practice. The priority alarm being a pandemic, while other matters, which in less charged times would own all the headlines and be pursued by the relentless tigers of investigative journalism get little more than a day or two’s glance.
We charity and the Kielburgers’ murky relationships to the federal government, and the Trudeau family, had its spike, for a couple of days, but then — with Parliament in partial paralysis, its committees summarily suspended or filibustered, any genuine review of Kielburger, We and Liberal
politics, and patronage foundered.
It was, by any serious measurement, a most curious tale. how two brothers, craig and Marc, whose style had an unsettling resemblance to the Sunday morning fundamentalist preachers of early days — that combination of unctuousness, over-energetic stage presence, an oratory of simplistic uplift, and a heavy reliance on the most vague of slogans, get selected to distribute — originally — nearly a billion dollars of the canadian taxpayers money to young people?
Was there no one in all of canada, besides these two mages of money raising, thought capable of giving out government money to large groups of people?
how indeed did this dubious charity earn so much patronage from the Prime Minister of canada, and every significant member of his family? Trudeau’s frequent and early presence at their
“revival” meetings was in itself a curiosity.
how was it not seen, once Trudeau was prime minister that any patronage, by way of personal presence, was an extravagant endorsement of We and its brother leaders? That it gave We and the Kielburgers a stamp of the highest progressivism, and with Trudeau and his mother on the stage, a gleam of most exalted right thinking. Trudeau’s presence was a secular canonization. It put We into woke sainthood.
At another level how did it not occur to almost anybody that a charity which proselytized schoolchildren, and called in celebrity icons, such as Ariana Grande, to butter their message was running a shallow and cynical game. We normally protect the very young from exposure to those who are trying to enlist them, especially enlist them by spectacle of high-powered, glossy platform presentations, peppered with the pop celebrity heroes or heroines of the moment.
So then in the midst of the COVID crisis there is a huge deflection from all standard government practice. There is a billion dollar fund to be administered to young people. The story goes: the civil service throws up its hands at this “challenge.” This is beyond us, they say. We’re only professionals in distributing huge funds to all canadians. But this fund daunts us. We see no way of being able to handle it. We can almost hear them asking: Is there any miracle group out there that could take this task from our professional, experienced hands?
“Why, yes says some unknown voice from some unknown corner. It is the Kielburger brothers. We must go to them. They will save us.”
you know the result. The story broke. It appalled every normal person. It was clearly a conflict of interest. But once again, the interrupted Parliament and the atmospherics of COVID, plus a stonewalling government got it off the front pages, and interest in such things declined.
Now, however the personal testimony of reed cowan has given a fresh dimension to the story, and greatly reawakened the issues surrounding We and its many corporate arms. We will probably get what should have been available from the first — a real and thorough investigation of how all this came to be.
it was, by any serious measurement, a most curious tale.