Opinion
Red Deer – Lacombe MP Blaine Calkins calls on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign

What We Know About Trudeau’s Latest Ethics Scandal
BLAINE CALKINS
Over the past several weeks Canadians have been shocked at the details coming to light regarding Justin Trudeau’s WE Scandal. Justin Trudeau and the Kielburgers have been happy to benefit from each other for years. While they are quick to downplay their relationship, the facts tell a different story. According to WE Charity, Justin Trudeau and his family have participated in over 50 WE Events where they have been able to share their political message with young Canadians.
In 2017 WE created a campaign style ad featuring Justin Trudeau for Canada 150 and even pressured employees to go to a political event for the Minister of Finance in his Toronto riding. The Kielburger brothers have donated to the Liberal Party in the past, and under the Trudeau government WE has received upwards of $5.5 million in government funding.
This reciprocal relationship is concerning all on its own, before even considering the current scandal regarding the Canada Student Service Grant, Justin Trudeau and WE. The twists and turns in the story can be difficult to track, but it is clear that Justin Trudeau and former Finance Minister Bill Morneau have once again failed to live up to their legal obligations laid out in Canada’s conflict of interest laws. Here is what we know so far.
In April, WE sent an unsolicited proposal for a youth entrepreneurship program to Minister Chagger and Minister Ng. Ten days later WE received a call from Rachel Wernick, a senior bureaucrat with Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) about the yet to be announced Canada Student Service Grant (CSSG). When the program was announced to the public a few days later WE co-founder Craig Kielburger sent Ms. Wernick a proposal to administer the grant that same day.
According to the Kielburgers someone at the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) contacted them the next day about delivering the program, which they later recanted claiming it was a public servant who contacted them. Ms. Wernick is credited as being the public servant who recommended that WE was the only organization that could deliver the program.
On June 25th WE Charity was announced as the partner for the $900 million CSSG program, and Canadians were told they would receive $19.5 million to administer it. When asked, Trudeau suggested there was no conflict of interest because he and his wife had never been paid by the organization. A few days later Conservatives asked the Auditor General to probe the deal since parliamentary oversight was hindered by the program being outsourced, and due to concern over the well documented relationship between Trudeau and the Kielburgers.
By July 3rd Mark and Craig Kielburger announced that WE would be giving up the contract to administer the CSSG. On the same day, the Ethics Commissioner confirmed that he would be starting an investigation into Justin Trudeau for the third time. Less than a week later WE confirmed that the Prime Minister’s Mother, Margaret Trudeau had been paid $312,000 for 28 appearances since 2016 and that his brother, Alexandre Trudeau, was paid $40,000 for 8 events in 2017-2018. They also acknowledged that the Prime Minister’s wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau had received $1,400 for an appearance in 2012.
We later found out that on top of those fees WE Charity also paid an additional $212,846 in expenses between the three members of the Trudeau family. This brings the total remuneration to over $566,000. This revelation, in part, led to the Conservatives writing to the Commissioner of the RCMP to request that they look into this matter as it pertains to potential criminal code violations.
The Prime Minister isn’t the only one with an apparent conflict of interest in this matter, with former Minister Morneau also having close family ties with WE. Like the Prime Minister, he did not recuse himself despite the fact that his one daughter works for WE and another has been a speaker in the past and received a book endorsement. This led to the Ethics Commissioner launching an investigation into former Minister Morneau as well.
At an appearance before the Finance Committee former Minister Morneau would later go on to acknowledge that he and his wife had recently made two large donations, roughly $50,0000 each, and that he had also just written a cheque for over $41,000 to reimburse WE for expenses he and his family incurred on two vacations to Africa and South America, where they visited WE projects. WE later confirmed that the complementary trip was offered to former Minister Morneau and his family because of their history of significant donations to similar programs. These revelations led to the Conservative caucus calling for the now former Minister to resign.
The Finance Committee and the Ethics Committee began to look into this latest scandal, and the testimony and information they have received has painted a confusing and troubling picture. They uncovered a number of very concerning details before the Prime Minister prorogued Parliament in order to shut down the committees.
· WE stood to collect $45.53 million in fees, over double what was initially stated.
· The program, originally announced at over $900 million, was actually contracted out at $544 million instead. Why the discrepancy?
· The Clerk of the Privy Council stated that there were no red flags when considering WE, but that the Public Service didn’t probe the organizations finances. This is quite odd.
· The President of the Public Service Alliance disputed that only WE could have delivered the CSSG, stating that to say the Public Service was unable to was insulting. He pointed to the various government grant programs, Canada Summer Jobs and the Canada Service Corps as comparable programs. The theory that only WE could handle the program was further dismantled when it turned out that they had to subcontract part of the program because they weren’t able to deliver it in French.
· The contract for the CSSG wasn’t actually with WE Charity, but with WE Charity Foundation, a shell foundation that had no previous experience in delivering these types of programs.
· The former Chair of the Board at WE Charity testified that she had been forced to resign by Craig Kielburger for requesting financial documents from WE Executives to justify the layoff of hundreds of employees.
· The Kielburger brothers testified, claiming that they were running the program as a favour to Canada, and that their organization was to be reimbursed for expenses, but not make money off of the program. In a leaked document, a draft budget dated May 4th outlined some expenses including for staff salary. This included 175 program managers at $30,0000 each for 4.5 months work, ten supervisors at $45,000 each for 5.5months work, five group leaders at $70,000 each for 6 months work, and two project leaders for $125,000 for eight months work.
· WE Charity started to incur eligible expenses on May 5th, despite Cabinet not approving the program until May 22nd. This was being done with the full knowledge of ESDC, and allegedly at the financial liability of WE.
· Trudeau testified that he only found out about WE’s involvement on May 8th, shortly before it was set to be discussed at Cabinet. He claims that he removed it from the agenda and asked the public service to complete additional due diligence given his family connection to WE. He did not contact the Ethics Commissioner despite the concerns. This additional due diligence did not unearth any of the problems disclosed by the former Chair of the Board. It is noteworthy that no Minister, prior to the Prime Minister making his claim, had a story that would corroborate this feeble explanation.
The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff confirmed that a handful of employees in PMO were aware of WE’s involvement and had interactions with the organization in the lead up to the approval. This included an interaction on May 5th, the day WE started incurring eligible expenses. So far, every time someone has come forward to try and explain away the Liberal’s latest mess, Canadians are left with more questions than when they started. Canadians deserve answers, and my Conservative colleagues and I are committed to finding them using every tool at our disposal.
While the studies at committee may have been temporarily halted by Trudeau’s prorogation Conservatives will continue to investigate this matter, and pursue every whiff of corruption like when we called on the Elections Commissioner to look into the political benefits that the Liberals have been given by WE. While the Prime Minister may be attempting to prevent Canadians from knowing the truth, Members of the Finance committee received thousands of heavily redacted documents from the Liberal government on the same day that Trudeau prorogued Parliament. They paint a very different picture of how WE came to be selected for this program than the one that the Liberals have offered up.
These documents suggest that the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth told WE to develop a proposal for a summer service opportunity before the CSSG was even announced. They go on to claim that the former Minister of Finance was “besties” with WE and that senior members of the Prime Minister’s office were involved in the development of the program and were having conversations with WE from an early stage. You can see these documents for yourself at wedocuments.ca.
The timeline of Mr. Trudeau’s version of events simply doesn’t add up. The CSSG was announced on April 22nd. A member of PMO spoke with WE about their proposal on May 5th, the same day they started to charge expenses for administering the program, but Cabinet wouldn’t approve the program for two and a half weeks.
Why was a charity that had to recently lay off hundreds of employees due to financial hardship related to COVID-19 so willing to accept the liability of starting the program without approval? Why were they so sure they would be approved? Why were they told they could start charging expenses before approval?
To answer that, you only need to look at the cozy relationship between Justin Trudeau, former Minister of Finance, Bill Morneau, the Liberal Party and WE. Now that the former Minister Bill Morneau has resigned and more than 5000 pages of documents have been released for review, Canadians are hungrier for that truth than ever before. The Liberals are banking on Canadians forgetting about this scandal during their prorogation and hoping that they can change the channel later this month with a new Throne Speech, but it isn’t going to work. Despite prorogation and all of the confusion and misdirection, one thing is absolutely clear – Justin Trudeau must resign for his part in this scandal.
2025 Federal Election
Pierre Poilievre Declares War on Red Tape and Liberal Decay in Osoyoos

Dan Knight
Conservative leader unveils aggressive plan to slash bureaucracy, repeal anti-energy laws, and put “Canada First” after a decade of Liberal stagnation and American dependence.
There was a moment in Osoyoos, British Columbia, this week when you could feel the tectonic plates of Canadian politics shift. Pierre Poilievre didn’t just give a campaign speech—he delivered a declaration of war. Not against a rival party, not against a foreign power, but against the bloated, self-sustaining bureaucracy that has buried this country in red tape, crushed small business, and handed our economic sovereignty to Washington.
And he did it with names, numbers, and fire.
Standing beside Conservative candidates Helena Konanz and Dan Albas—real people with skin in the game—Poilievre laid out the most aggressive anti-regulation, pro-prosperity plan Canada has seen in a generation. This wasn’t “efficiency.” It wasn’t “modernization.” It was a full-scale rollback of the federal state.
A 25% cut to red tape within two years.
A “two-for-one” regulation kill rule: for every new rule, two must die.
A dollar-value offset: $1 of new administrative cost must be matched by $2 in cuts.
And for once, someone’s watching the swamp: the Auditor General will audit compliance.
No tricks. No loopholes. No gluing rulebooks together to fake progress like the Liberals did. Real cuts, enforced in public, with consequences.
Now compare that to what the Liberals have done. Under Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney, the number of federal rules has exploded—149,000 and counting. That’s 20,000 more than a decade ago, with $51 billion in annual compliance costs for small businesses. It’s not just inefficiency. It’s economic sabotage.
And who benefits from that sabotage? The United States. Poilievre didn’t dance around it—he hit it head-on. President Trump has said he prefers the Liberals in power. Why? Because they’re weak. Because they keep Canadian oil in the ground and Canadian dollars flowing south.
“Trump supports the Liberals because he wants Canada to stay weak,” Poilievre said. “I want the opposite. I want to bring it home.”
The press tried to corner him—tried to paint him as “too Trump-like.” The irony, of course, is that Trump has openly rejected him, because unlike Trudeau and Carney, Poilievre is not for sale.
And then came the attacks on Aaron Gunn. The media paraded misinformation accusations that Gunn denied the impact of residential schools. Poilievre didn’t flinch. He called it out for what it was: misinformation. He defended his candidate. He stood for truth, not Twitter mobs. And he flipped the narrative: if you want prosperity and dignity for First Nations, give them control over resources, revenue, and jobs—not slogans.
Then came the issue of interprovincial trade, where Poilievre again showed he’s living in the real world. Local wineries in the Okanagan are shipping their product to the U.S. because it’s easier than selling across provincial lines. Under the Liberals, it’s harder to trade within Canada than with foreign nations. That’s not a federation—that’s a farce. Poilievre promised to tear down the internal barriers the Laurentian elite have protected for decades.
The CBC? He torched it. Not with culture war talking points, but with precision. It’s become an overfunded, Toronto-centric mouthpiece for the Liberal Party, sucking up $1.5 billion a year to produce less local coverage than ever. Mark Carney just promised another $150 million with no plan to pay for it. Poilievre called it what it is: “a morbidly obese Liberal government—on steroids.”
And he’s right. Carney hasn’t named a single Liberal expenditure he’d reverse. Not one. He’s offering the same broken promises, wrapped in fancier language, from the same corrupt team.
Poilievre, on the other hand, laid out a detailed plan to:
- Eliminate the GST on new homes and Canadian-made cars.
- Cut income taxes by 15%.
- Abolish the capital gains tax on money reinvested in Canada.
- Fast-track LNG projects on the West Coast.
- Repeal every anti-energy, anti-growth law passed by Trudeau’s swamp.
He didn’t ask for permission. He promised results. He’s not trying to manage the decline. He’s here to stop it.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been watching these press conferences like a normal person, which means with my jaw somewhere on the floor. On one side, you’ve got Pierre Poilievre, actually talking about numbers, policies, things that, you know—exist in the real world. On the other side? You’ve got Mark Carney, Trudeau’s old economic braintrust, grinning like a Bond villain, promising to “invest” another $150 million into the CBC—because apparently, $1.5 billion a year isn’t enough to produce wall-to-wall Liberal talking points and a half-hour panel on white fragility.
Carney calls it “public broadcasting.”
Let’s call it what it is: state propaganda—funded by you, weaponized against you.
And this is the guy who’s being sold to Canadians as the adult in the room? The savior? Mark Carney—the guy who’s spent the last decade not in Canada, but lecturing Canadians from London, New York, and climate finance panels in Geneva? He’s not some neutral economist. He’s a gold-plated Davos swamp rat who literally helped engineer the economic disaster we’re now living through—and now he wants to be rewarded with the keys to the kingdom?
This man flew in from Glasgow—no joke—where he was pushing his net-zero snake oil to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats who couldn’t find Fort McMurray on a map if their Tesla battery depended on it. And what’s he proposing now? Keep Bill C-69, the law that strangled Canadian energy, killed pipeline after pipeline, and handed America control over our oil wealth. Keep the law that says: If you want to build anything in this country, you better ask permission from 14 departments and Greta Thunberg’s cousin first.
Oh, and while he’s at it, don’t expect a single dollar of waste to be cut. Not one. Carney hasn’t named a single Liberal program he’d reduce. Not the CBC. Not the bloated bureaucracy. Not even the social engineering schemes buried deep in your child’s classroom.
So let’s spell it out: Mark Carney is Trudeau without the TikTok. Same worldview. Same smugness. Same ideology. Except now he’s dressed it up in Oxford accents and finance jargon and thinks you’re too dumb to notice.
He talks about “fighting climate change,” but never mentions the carbon imports from China. He talks about “building the future,” while propping up the same agencies that couldn’t build a bus stop on time. He talks about “standing up to Trump,” while literally keeping in place the laws that give Trump control over our energy, our jobs, our investment.
And we’re supposed to believe he’s the serious one?
No. What he is—is the avatar of managed decline. The velvet glove of the same iron fist that’s been throttling Canadian prosperity for ten years. Poilievre sees it, and he’s naming it. That’s why the media hate him. That’s why the Liberals fear him. And that’s why Donald Trump doesn’t want him elected—because he won’t roll over like Carney will.
So again—this is not a normal election. It’s not Liberal vs. Conservative. It’s not progressive vs. populist. It’s elite decay vs. national revival.
Poilievre doesn’t want to “manage” this slow-motion collapse. He wants to rip the duct tape off the pipes, shut down the bureaucracy, and start building again. He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t host a panel. He promised results.
And when he says “Canada First,” it’s not some borrowed slogan. It’s a warning to the swamp: Your time is up.
Carney is decline dressed as competence.
Poilievre is the first sign of life this country has had in a decade.
So yeah, Pierre Poilievre chose defiance.
Now it’s your turn.
Alberta
Is Canada’s Federation Fair?

David Clinton
Contrasting the principle of equalization with the execution
Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).
So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light.
You’ll need to search long and hard to find a Canadian unwilling to help those less fortunate. And, so long as we identify as members of one nation¹, that feeling stretches from coast to coast.
So the basic principle of Canada’s equalization payments – where poorer provinces receive billions of dollars in special federal payments – is easy to understand. But as you can imagine, it’s not easy to apply the principle in a way that’s fair, and the current methodology has arguably lead to a very strange set of incentives.
According to Department of Finance Canada, eligibility for payments is determined based on your province’s fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is a measure of the taxes (income, business, property, and consumption) that a province could raise (based on national average rates) along with revenues from natural resources. The idea, I suppose, is that you’re creating a realistic proxy for a province’s higher personal earnings and consumption and, with greater natural resources revenues, a reduced need to increase income tax rates.
But the devil is in the details, and I think there are some questions worth asking:
- Whichever way you measure fiscal capacity there’ll be both winners and losers, so who gets to decide?
- Should a province that effectively funds more than its “share” get proportionately greater representation for national policy² – or at least not see its policy preferences consistently overruled by its beneficiary provinces?
The problem, of course, is that the decisions that defined equalization were – because of long-standing political conditions – dominated by the region that ended up receiving the most. Had the formula been the best one possible, there would have been little room to complain. But was it?
For example, attaching so much weight to natural resource revenues is just one of many possible approaches – and far from the most obvious. Consider how the profits from natural resources already mostly show up in higher income and corporate tax revenues (including income tax paid by provincial government workers employed by energy-related ministries)?
And who said that such calculations had to be population-based, which clearly benefits Quebec (nine million residents vs around $5 billion in resource income) over Newfoundland (545,000 people vs $1.6 billion) or Alberta (4.2 million people vs $19 billion). While Alberta’s average market income is 20 percent or so higher than Quebec’s, Quebec’s is quite a bit higher than Newfoundland’s. So why should Newfoundland receive only minimal equalization payments?
To illustrate all that, here’s the most recent payment breakdown when measured per-capita:
![]() |
For clarification, the latest per-capita payments to poorer provinces ranged from $3,936 to PEI, $1,553 to Quebec, and $36 to Ontario. Only Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC received nothing.
And here’s how the total equalization payments (in millions of dollars) have played out over the past decade:
Is energy wealth the right differentiating factor because it’s there through simple dumb luck, morally compelling the fortunate provinces to share their fortune? That would be a really difficult argument to make. For one thing because Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).
So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light. Perhaps that stand is correct or perhaps it isn’t. But it’s a stand they probably couldn’t have afforded to take had the equalization calculation been different.
Of course, no formula could possibly please everyone, but punishing the losers with ongoing attacks on the very source of their contributions is guaranteed to inspire resentment. And that could lead to very dark places.
Note: I know this post sounds like it came from a grumpy Albertan. But I assure you that I’ve never even visited the province, instead spending most of my life in Ontario.
Which has admittedly been challenging since the former primer minister infamously described us as a post-national state without an identity.
This isn’t nearly as crazy as it sounds. After all, there are already formal mechanisms through which Indigenous communities get more than a one-person-one-vote voice.
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