When you're done looking at all the Morneau resignation memes, Google any charity name and the word “scandal”
Do it I dare you. Unless you Googled “Kids Help Phone” (they’re clean as far as I can tell) whatever you just stumbled on was probably pretty terrible.
It's been several weeks, and WE Charity scandal has been on the collective mind of Canadians. Maybe you’ve been arguing with an actual sock on Twitter, or still trying to purge the weapons-grade cringe Craig Keilburger Cribs episode out of your brain, or maybe you’re furious that JTru is caught up in another scandal.
Personally, I can’t get over the migraine-inducing irony of Justin “Drinking water for Indigenous communities clearly isn’t a priority” Trudeau Giving $1,000,000,000 to a charity that holds an annual “WE Walk for Water” fundraiser.
Here’s a controversial opinion that rattles through my brain every time I dodge a street fundraiser: I’m not giving money to fund anything the government should pay for. Hand-jobs for the homeless, sure. Tattoo cover-ups for Chilliwack for teen moms, sign me up. I will give $25 a month to any foundation that will maroon Rex Murphy on a desert island without any Internet. But I swear to fucking god if you come at me asking for help funding child cancer units, I will flip my god-damned lid.
It’s not that I hate kids with cancer, it’s that I already give money to that. It comes off my paycheque every week In the form of tax dollars. Every time you donate to something that should be covered by the government, the government funds it slightly less.
Let’s set aside the glaring corruption for a second. The WE scandal is an on-the-nose example of the government literally farming out the shit they should have done themselves. They could have just given students CERB, but instead, they tried to save a couple of bucks, scratch a couple of absurdly wealthy backs and force students to “Volunteer” for poverty wages. That’s what this is all about, the administrators of this program take your money, skim a ton off the top and maybe somebody will mentor troubled youth.
But like, that hypothetical youth doesn't need a (let’s be honest, white) suburban college student making $4 an hour telling them to stay positive. They need our ever-shrinking social safety net, something that Bill Morneau was never going to expand. *Cough Cough... Pharmacare*
JT may have thrown Bill Morneau under the bus, but WE probably haven’t heard the last this...