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For months, I've been following @canadaland's deep dive into We Charity and its bewildering array of both for-profit and charitable subsidiaries and affiliated companies. The picture just keeps getting uglier and weirder, and it reached a kind of pinnacle for me today.
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Some background: We began life as "Free the Children," an anti-child-labour campaign started by a pair of Canadian brothers, Marc and Craig Kielburger, who were children themselves at the time.
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In the years since, We has become a Canadian institution, with "We Days" mega-events attended by top performers and politicians, as well as in-school events coast to coast. Millions of Canadian kids have raised money for We.
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But We is a complex and opaque and difficult-to-understand organisation. Some reporting would have made it easier to understand what the org was up to.
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But between seeking editorial censure of journalists for mild criticism, and a reputation for replying to routine journalistic queries with threats from some of Canada's most aggressive libel lawyers, critical investigative coverage was thin on the groups.
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Canadaland's investigations began with tips that the organization's various arms had "partnered" with companies that were credibly accused of participating in the kind of child labor practices that they were formed to start.
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But it quickly turned into a story about the story itself, as Canadaland, and its founder, @jessebrown, were subjected to bizarre, international dirty-tricks campaigns, including smearjobs in obscure, small-town, far-right news sites.
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Brown discovered he'd been targeted by private investigators who went so far as to dig into his young children's lives.
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Brown and Canadaland couldn't affirmatively link the dirty tricks to We, though the timing, context and content made everything very suspicious - and meanwhile, Wikipedians put warnings on We's articles after they detected paid reputation-washers editing them.
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To Brown and Canadaland's credit, they didn't let up, and chased a steady stream of tips about labour conditions at We, corruption in We's overseas projects in Kenya, and irregularities in the We's charitably raised funds, contributed by Canada's schoolkids
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They discovered that performers at We's "We Days" - including members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's family - were paid for participating, out of those charitable funds (We says they should have been paid by its for-profit arm).
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This coverage begat revelations of subsidised junkets for top level government officials, published shortly after the Canadian government offered We a 9-figure no-bid contract to create a summer volunteer program for Canadian kids.
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All of this against a steady background drumbeat of legal threats, more dirty tricks, and smears - some, shamefully, from Canadian journalists.
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Last month, We's founders testified before Parliament, as the political dimensions of the scandals threatened the stability of Trudeau's fragile coalition government.
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All of this has called a once-unimpeachable Canadian institution into question - from the way its funds are dispersed (only a minority of We's charitable funds go to overseas program activity), the way it smears its critics, to the complexity of its financial structures.
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Which brings me to the latest Canadaland episode, in which Brown discusses the revelation that one of We's US companies contracted with Firehouse Strategies, a GOP dirty tricks company that grew out of the 2016 Rubio presential campaign.
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By Firehouse's own account, the company gave up on substantive debate after Trump and devoted themselves to dirty tricks and smears, targeting nonprofits seeking to retaliate against their critics.
https://www.canadalandshow.com/we-charity-usa-spent-money-on-kielburger-friend-republican-strategists/
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https://www.canadalandshow.com/we-charity-usa-spent-money-on-kielburger-friend-republican-strategists/
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Meanwhile, other Canadian news outlets discovered job-board listings for clickworkers to help engage in deceptive "search-engine optimization" techniques to bury criticism of We.
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Having been on the receiving end of legal intimidation from wealthy, powerful, politically connected Canadians, I know just how much of a risk Brown took with this, and how harrowing it must have been.
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He and Canadaland should be commended for shining light where it was obviously badly needed. The kind of harassment and dirty tricks he's faced are not the actions of anyone who has any business being involved with the moral education of our children.
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Image: We, Firehouse Strategies (modified)
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ETA: In tweet #6, above, I mistyped:
"the kind of child labor practices that they were formed to start."
should read:
"the kind of child labor practices that they were formed to fight at the start." https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1290325245346209808
"the kind of child labor practices that they were formed to start."
should read:
"the kind of child labor practices that they were formed to fight at the start." https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1290325245346209808
