Canadaland Editor and Publisher Jesse Brown has issued an apology to the mother of WE Charity co-founders Marc and Craig Kielburger as part of a defamation suit settlement.
In addition to the apology, made in open court, Brown and Canadaland will pay a total of $885,000 in damages and costs to Theresa Kielburger, 82. The retraction will also have a permanent presence on the Canadaland website and appear on every social media and podcast platform where the episode in question was published. An audio retraction will also be inserted into the original podcast episode.
The lawsuit centred around a claim in Canadaland’s 2021 podcast series, The White Saviors, that Mrs. Kielburger, a retired Toronto school teacher, had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in charitable donations and deposited them into a family bank account. The Kielburgers had previously sued and settled with Saturday Night magazine over the same claim published in 1996, part of the basis of Canadaland’s reportage.
Canadaland failed to contact Mrs. Kielburger prior to publishing, stating in their defence that she was not part of the original claim. A judge found that “a broadcaster’s duty of fairness extends to any and all targets of their broadcast, not only to those who had previously sued them.”
“It was a foundational allegation on which Canadaland built its broader thesis that the Kielburger family had personally and improperly benefited from WE Charity. That claim is now formally retracted,” WE Charity stated in a Tuesday morning press release. “The court found that Mr. Brown was in possession of the very documents that disproved it and never mentioned them. He never contacted Mrs. Kielburger before publication.”
“Canadaland brands itself as Canada’s media accountability outlet, whose stated purpose is to hold other journalists to higher standards,” the release continued. “The court’s findings describe an outlet that republished a known false claim, ignored documents in its own possession that disproved it, and never asked its subject to respond. These are the very failures Canadaland claims to exist to call out in others.”
In his apology, Brown said Canadaland was wrong to have published the allegation.
“On August 20, 2021, Canadaland published The Children’s Crusade, the first episode of a podcast series entitled The White Saviors. In that episode we stated that Theresa Kielburger had placed hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations to a children’s charity in a family bank account. This was unfounded. We were wrong to have published it. Canadaland wholly retracts its statement about Ms. Kielburger. We apologize unreservedly to her for the harm caused by our publication of it. Canadaland has agreed to pay substantial damages to Ms. Kielburger.”
“The WE Charity Scandal was never about anything Theresa Kielburger did,” Brown told Broadcast Dialogue, in an email. “It was about what Craig and Marc did, and what Justin Trudeau did. That’s why Marc and Craig apologized to their donors and why Justin Trudeau apologized to all Canadians. Theresa Kielburger had nothing to apologize for, and that’s why I apologized to her today.”
