Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will testify Thursday about his government’s now-cancelled decision to award WE Charity — which has ties to the Trudeau family — a contract to manage a $900-million student grant program.
Trudeau is scheduled to appear before the House of Commons finance committee to explain his role in the decision. The committee will also hear from his chief of staff, Katie Telford.
The Liberal government has been under fire from opposition parties since it was announced last month that WE Charity would run the program. How did we get to this point? Here’s a breakdown of the controversy.
What was the agreement between the federal government and WE Charity?
On June 25, the federal government announced that WE Charity would administer the Canada student service grant (CSSG), a $912-million program previously promised by Trudeau as part of $9 billion in COVID-19 financial aid for post-secondary students.
The program was to be a way of giving students who couldn’t find summer jobs a chance to earn some money while volunteering in “national service” activities related to fighting the pandemic.
WATCH | Trudeau apologizes for handling of WE Charity government contract:
Power & Politics speaks to Minister of Youth Bardish Chagger about the latest details of the government’s controversial agreement with the WE Charity to run a student volunteer program. Also on the show, Raptors’ head coach Nick Nurse on his efforts to encourage Americans expats to vote in the upcoming U.S. election. 1:47:23
WE Charity would have been responsible for connecting tens of thousands of students with volunteer opportunities and issuing grants based on their volunteer work.
How does the Canada student service grant work?
The CSSGconnects post-secondary students and recent graduates with volunteering opportunities in exchange for between $1,000 and $5,000, depending on the number of hours worked.
For every 100 hours worked, a student is eligible for $1,000, which means someone must volunteer 500 hours to receive the full grant.
The program opened June 25 and runs until Oct. 31. Only students and recent graduates 30 years of age and younger can enrol, and they must register no later than Aug. 21 to be eligible to receive the grant.
WE Charity was started by human rights advocates Marc and Craig Kielburger in 1995. It is the non-profit arm of WE, which operates educational and social justice programs in Canada and internationally. Me to We is the organization’s for-profit social enterprise.
The contract awarded to WE Charity to run the program was set up as a contribution agreement between WE Charity and the government and not through a competitive process.
Watch | Documents reveal new details of the WE Charity agreement:
The Conservatives are calling for a second ethics investigation into Finance Minister Bill Morneau over the $41,000 in travel he received from the WE organization in 2017. 1:46
Youth Minister Bardish Chagger has said that Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) recommended a third party administer the grant “given the scope and scale of the program” and the “urgent need to deliver this new program,” and that ESDC’s recommendation was the third party be WE Charity.
In testimony to the House of Commons finance committee on July 16, Gina Wilson, Chagger’s senior associate deputy minister, said that in a partnership agreement like the one it had with the charity, the government sets performance measures and audits the results but “does not direct or dictate how the recipient will carry out the project.”
What was the value of the contract?
According to the text of the agreement signed June 23 between Chagger’s office and the WE Charity Foundation, $43.53 million would have been allocated to the WE Charity Foundation for administering the CSSG.
Up to $8.75 million of that $43.53 million was eligible to be shared among the partnering charities and non-profit organizations that supervised the volunteers.
Why are Trudeau and his government being criticized for the contract?
Shortly after the Liberal government announced it was awarding the sole-source contract to WE Charity, it came under fire from opposition parties over the Trudeau family’s close relationship with the organization.
Neither Trudeau nor Finance Minister Bill Morneau — who also has family ties to WE — recused himself from cabinet discussions on awarding the contract. Opposition politicians have accused the Liberal government of playing favourites and choosing to reward the organization.
WE Charity co-founders Craig, left, and Marc Kielburger, far right, introduce Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, at WE Day celebrations in Ottawa in 2015. Trudeau is scheduled to appear Thursday at a House of Commons finance committee. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
How is the Trudeau family associated with WE Charity?
Trudeau and his mother, Margaret, have appeared at a number of WE Day events, while Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, hosts a podcast for the group called WE Well-being.
Initially, WE Charity said members of the Trudeau family were not paid for appearing at WE events, although Grégoire Trudeau had been reimbursed for travel expenses.
Why is Finance Minister Bill Morneau also facing criticism?
Like Trudeau, Morneau is under scrutiny for not recusing himself from cabinet talks about awarding WE Charity the contract. Morneau’s daughter, Grace, works at WE in the travel department. His other daughter, Clare, has spoken at WE Day events.
Morneau faced further criticism after he revealed to the House of Commons finance committee on July 22 that WE Charity covered $41,000 in travel costs for him and his family in 2017 for trips to Ecuador and Kenya to view the organization’s humanitarian work.
Morneau said he didn’t realize he hadn’t personally repaid WE for the travel, and that he repaid the costs that morning.
Watch | Conservatives want 2nd ethics probe of Morneau’s WE ties:
Craig and Marc Kielburger appeared before the Commons finance committee Tuesday. 0:38
How did the federal ethics commissioner get involved?
The federal ethics commissioner is investigating the WE contract after Conservative and NDP MPs contacted the office raising concerns about the relationship between the charity and the prime minister’s family.
Commissioner Mario Dion said he will be investigating Trudeau under subsection 6(1) of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Act, which prohibits public office holders from making decisions that further their own private interests or the interests of another person.
Trudeau also is being investigated under sections 7 and 21 of the act, which deal with giving someone preferential treatment and failing to recuse oneself from any matter that would present a conflict of interest.
How has the Liberal government responded to the criticism?
Trudeau initially defended the partnership, saying WE was the only group with a countrywide network capable of operating a program on this scale for young people. Other charitable organizations have questioned that assertion.
On July 3, citing the ongoing controversy, WE and the Liberals announced a parting of ways and the federal government took control of the program.
On July 13, Trudeau apologized for not recusing himself from discussions about WE because of his family’s longtime involvement with the organization. Morneau also issued an apology.
Where does WE Charity stand after the contract’s cancellation?
WE Charity announced on July 11 it had laid off hundreds of contract workers who were brought in to administer the CSSG. According to the Toronto Star, which first reported the story, the charity laid off 450 workers, while giving 15 others full-time positions.
On July 15, WE Charity issued a statement saying that it had decided to “refocus on [its] mission” by concentrating on international aid. It said it would cancel WE Day events going forward, “reflecting the realities of COVID-19,” and launch an organizational review to “streamline the WE organizational structure.”
Watch | ‘There are days when we just wish we hadn’t answered the phone on April 19’: Craig Kielburger:
Craig and Marc Kielburger, founders of the WE Charity, spoke to MPs on the Commons Finance committee Tuesday. 12:00
On Tuesday, WE co-founder Craig Kielburger testified to the House of Commons finance committee that the charity agreed to administer the student grant program because it wanted to make a difference — not because it wanted to make a profit off the deal. He refuted rumours that WE Charity was in financial trouble when it agreed to take on the program.
What is happening with the Canada student service grant now?
After the contract with WE Charity was cancelled, Trudeau said the federal government will simply distribute the grants itself, but that young people might not have the same opportunities as when WE was involved. “Certainly there are certain things that we will not be able to do as government delivers this program directly,” he said.
In an interview on Monday with CBC’s Power & Politics, Chagger, the youth minister, said the government has not ruled out scrapping the program entirely.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
