MacBAIN: Trudeau owes us

Toronto author Robert MacBain, a former consultant to the Department of Indian Affairs, has been involved with the Indigenous file for more than 60 yearsGiven the amount of misinformation that has been disseminated in our classrooms across Canada and in parts of America by the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund, Canadian taxpayers should demand a refund of the $5 million PM Justin Trudeau gave them six years ago.Despite the fact that most of what is written and shown in the DWF’s primary publication, Secret Path, has no basis in fact, Budget 2018-2019 awarded them $5 million “to continue the conversation that began with Chanie [Charlie] Wenjack’s residential school story.” That is an exorbitant and unprecedented amount of money for a government to give to a fledgling organization with no track record of success — no strings attached — especially considering the story it propagates is an almost total fabrication.Nothing in the budget document said what criteria the government used in awarding $5 million to DWF. Nor was there anything about how DWF — which was less than two years old and didn’t even have charitable status at the time — would be required to account for the money.According to the DWF website, it didn’t receive official status as a charitable organization until after the $5 million was announced.A statement on its website later said: “In March of 2018, the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund (DWF) received its official status as a charitable organization. (Prior to this we operated as a project of Tides Canada.)”Tides Canada — the Canadian arm of a $multi-million organization whose primary objective is to shut down Canada’s oil sands projects — posted an item on its website on July 11, 2017, that said: “Meet the Downie Wenjack Fund one of our newest projects on the shared platform. Mike and Gord Downie, alongside the Wenjack family, launched the Fund to continue the conversation that began with Chanie Wenjack’s residential school story.”As I wrote in an op-ed that was published by the Western Standard on February 21, 2024, Tides Canada provided DWF with $499,997 during its first two years of operation.That would have been considered to be a good investment for an organization that encouraged and financed indigenous protest marches and blockades. Propagating a false story about a 12-year-old indigenous boy dying after “escaping” from an Indian residential school would have been good for the cause.I also wrote that, according to its 2022/2023 annual report, DWF had revenues of $3,852,506 — down from $5,448,673 in 2021/2022 — and net assets of more than $13 million.A report prepared by Charity Intelligence Canada said that less than $135,000 of DWF’s revenue in 2022 came from government sources. The rest came from individual and corporate donors, including banks, major retailers, universities, performing arts centres and others.And all of this is based on an almost total fabrication the dissemination of which was aided and abetted by a $5 million grant from the Trudeau government.As I stated in a memo to DWF chief executive officer Sarah Midanik on October 22, 2024 — with copies to several journalists — an email I had received from her organization that morning “provides further evidence of the misinformation your organization has been disseminating since October, 2016.”I drew her attention to the altogether too many factual errors in Secret Path — including the fact that they changed a Protestant Indian Residential School where children said they felt loved and cared for into a Catholic horror chamber complete with a pedophile priest.I also said: “Children reading Secret Path have no way of knowing that [most of the information is false]. Thousands of parents are unaware of the extent to which their children are being misinformed.”In writing about my memo to Ms. Midanik in a column that was published by the National Post on October 26, 2024, Conrad Black described the propaganda published by DWF as “illustrative of the sort of semi-formalized misinformation and cant and emotionalism that obstructs serious discussion of these [indigenous] matters.” Not surprisingly, Ms. Midanik has neither replied to, nor acknowledged receipt of, my memo of October 22, 2024.Total silence from an organization whose success owes a considerable amount to the $5 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money that Trudeau’s government awarded them in 2018.It is clear, given the amount of misinformation DWF has spread in our classrooms — and a significant number of classrooms in the United States — that that money should not have been awarded in the first place.There is an onus on the opposition parties to raise this issue in Parliament and take steps to ensure that the $5 million is returned to the treasury and put to proper use.Given that DWF is reported to have reserves of more than $13 million, they’d still have $8 million in the bank.Meanwhile, misinformation in our more than 65,000 classrooms across Canada and in parts of America continues unabated.Toronto author Robert MacBain, a former consultant to the Department of Indian Affairs, has been involved with the indigenous file for more than 60 years. His website is: www.RobertMacBainBooks.ca

MacBAIN: Trudeau owes us

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