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1/ Seems to me oppo parties & journos today should be focusing on the following kinds of questions: when the student summer grant program was announced in April, was it understood at that point that admin would be contracted out? If not, when was decision taken & by whom?
2/ Was the contract with WE Charity awarded - as it seems - without tender? If so, who made this decision and on what grounds? What assurances did WE give the government about its ability to execute this contract? Were any other organizations invited to provide similar info?
3/ What is the value of the WE contract and what -if any - incentive mechanisms exist within it? What obligations does WE have to provide services in both official languages (check out their French website: it is a whole lot smaller than their English one)?
4/ I'm sure there are other questions, but those are the ones I would start with.

And I will just leave you with what I said about about this initiative when it was announced two months ago:
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Alex Usher
@AlexUsherHESA
1/ Have been reading about tech clusters (in the broadest sense of technology, not just IT), and a couple of notions come to mind. Main one: seems like the rate of cluster formation has slowed down enormously over past 2 decades and I can't think of a good reason why.
2/ Think about it: from 70s to 90s you had clusters popping up all over the place in out-of-the-way areas, both in US and Europe (Nice, Austin, K-W, etc). I can't think of one which has really developed since 2000. Dynamic since then has been to reinforce existing clusters.
3/ Or worse, relocate parts of clusters to places where costs are stupidly high (eg Toronto) which makes zero economic sense. No one seems to be starting new industries in out of the way places anymore and this must contribute to general lack of economic growth/dynamism
Read 10 tweets
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Alex Usher
@AlexUsherHESA
No, no, no, no, no Dear God no.
Not the Sophie connection, that's neither here not there - many Canadian celebrities have been bullied at some point into working with WE. But administering something like this is way out of WE's wheelhouse - and apparently without a tender? Super-sketchy.
You have to remember the deeply strange way WE is organized: part charity (WE Charity), part for-profit (ME to WE). The dividing line is deliberately opaque (if founders get paid through the for-profit, their salaries don't show up on the charity's CRA submissions)
Read 8 tweets
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Alex Usher
@AlexUsherHESA
Even apart from the absurd price tag, this is not good. A few years ago I was asked by a major financial institution to review McKinsey's work for a particular Asian government and where it was not incoherent it bordered on outright charlatanry. cbc.ca/news/canada/ed…
(I did not bid on this contract: was pretty clear from outset they wanted to go the Big 5 route, quite apart from the fact they were irritated with me for comments related to PBF. But I read the RFP and there is no way in hell you need more than $1 million to do what was in it.)
Put it this way: if you are going to spend a lot of money on a project which among other things is going to tackle issues of cost-efficiency (which is totally legit), maybe don't pick the Rolls-Royce consultant to do it.
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