Rex Murphy: Who cancelled the WE contract — and why?

We just need WE co-founders Craig and Marc Kielburger to come out on a stage and say, "Here’s what happened. Here are the facts. This is the contract," argues Rex Murphy. IAN KUCERAK/POSTMEDIA

We Charity (stylized as WE Charity), formerly known as Free the Children, is an international youth charity and empowerment development movement founded in 1995 by human rights defenders Marc and Craig Kielburger. It should be noted that the organization implements development programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, focusing on education, water, health, food, and economic opportunities. In addition, it also runs domestic youth programs in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, promoting service learning and active citizenship.

Now, what has been news is the fact of the cancellation of the WE contract. In relation to this, the question of who has canceled the contract and why? This being so, it has been indicated that the government’s easy description of the inexplicable collapse of the WE agreement pointed out that it was a “mutually agreed decision”. However, this is clearly not reassuring, as the choice to enter the agreement a few weeks earlier was also a mutually agreed decision. How could it be otherwise? Mutual agreement is the definition of an agreement. Concerning this, it has been said that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also apparently thought there was some explanatory power in saying the deal was “unfortunate”.

Questions

Undoubtedly, “unfortunate” is not the right word in such a situation, and it takes a much stronger word to describe spending more than $ 1 billion on a charity and throwing it away like a hot potato a few weeks later. This was a massive venture that involved almost $ 1 billion of public money. Surely both parties did their due diligence to ensure that WE Charity had the ability to administer the program.

Still, in the face of this situation, various questions arise such as what did one or both parties discover, just a little later, that disqualified Marc and Craig Kielburger, who co-founded WE, from the original agreement, or caused the government to withdraw? In addition, did the Kielburger brothers find any weaknesses, any flaws, in their ability to manage the program after they agreed to do so? Did they discover that they couldn’t do what they thought only they could do? Or perhaps, did the Prime Minister learn that the organization that he, his wife and mother have sponsored for years, and which he vigorously claimed was the “only” charity in all of Canada that could run this program, in fact, could not manage it?

Either way, it was a huge leap to be firmly certain of something one week and to have that certainty evaporated the next week. Certainly, whatever the reason for it surely had to be something really big. As the institutions do not lightly abandon multimillion-dollar agreements. This particular contract involved nothing less than a partnership with the Government of Canada, an endorsement of the highest caliber and status.

Source: Rex Murphy | National Post