Can someone please give me a quick synopsis about this? I’ve been distracted by Covid-related news and this WE thing seemed to appear out of nowhere over the last couple of weeks.
Thank-you very much
Not sure how much background you have on it, but the synopsis is lots of money involved, organization with multiple previous ties to Trudeau and Liberals, Trudeau family members paid by the organization for speaking engagements, etc. Typical federal politics pork barrel stuff, most Canadians not impressed and we are all wondering why these clowns keep pulling this crap.
In case you haven’t tried CBC yet :
Https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/justin-trudeau-we-charity-margaret-trudeau-alexandre-1.5645781
There’s a government fund set up to pay young people to volunteer with charities.
The government is farming out the job of distributing the money to a third party. They arbitrarily picked the charity “WE” to do the distribution.
Trudeau and his family have done a lot of speeches for “WE”. Trudeau says it’s OK because he has never gotten paid for his speeches, but his mother and brother have both been paid for their speaking duties.
Now he’s stuck trying to explain why this is not conflict of interest, like the time he spent his vacation hanging out on an island at the expense of the Aga Khan.
FluffyBob & Hogarth,
Thanks for that - greatly appreciated! I’ve been so grossly distracted/fascinated/horrified by the Trump-covid show that I completely missed that one.
Even if one generously assumes he, and his family have long been involved with this charity because it’s awesome and he has confidence in them, you’d think the appearance of impropriety would have made him shy away from them for such a big contract.
Plus they were the only ones considered and his cabinet minister has family involved with them too.
That’s pretty bad politics regardless.
The first mistake was saying only the one charity had the ability to handle the contract. This raised questions in the charity sector.
Initially, there were concerns about paying volunteers $10/h. This is less than minimum wage, but not strictly volunteering. So is it a job?
Trudeau was not paid. But payments to his family were significant. Morneau, previously raising eyebrows with possible pension conflict, also did not publicly state involvement nor recuse himself from the decision.
It is unlikely to lead to many consequences. But I wish the Liberals would use a little more common sense.