and individuals wrote letters and emails discouraging them from reporting the story in the months leading up to its publication. The messages largely came from educators and charities, and included a full-page advertisement printed in several newspapers in September that argued that the news report was not in the public interest. On 8 February 2022, WE Charity filed a lawsuit against the CBC in the District of Columbia District Court, alleging defamation stemming from a November 2021 piece which claimed that WE Charity had misled donors who helped build schools in Kenya. WE Charity is represented in the case by New York-based law firm Boies Schiller Flexner. History WE Charity (formerly Free the Children) was founded in 1995 by Craig Kielburger when he was 12 years old. Kielburger was reading through the Toronto Star before school one day when he came across an article about the murder of a 12-year-old Pakistani boy named Iqbal Masih, a former child factory worker in Pakistan's carpet trade who had spoken out against child labour and received death threats for his activism. According to Masih's account, he was sold by his parents to a factory at the age of 4 and worked there until he was 10, much of the time shackled to a loom. After the murder of Masih led to an international outcry, Pakistani police said that the killing was not connected to his anti-child labour activism. One of the Free the Children's first actions was to collect 3,000 signatures on a petition to the prime minister of India, calling for the release of imprisoned child labour activist Kailash Satyarthi. The petition was sent in a shoe box wrapped in brown paper. Satyarthi was eventually released. After he was freed, Satyarthi said, "It was one of the most powerful actions taken on my behalf, and for me, definitely the most memorable." Shortly afterward, Kielburger spoke at the convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour, where union representatives pledged $150,000 for a rehabilitation centre in India. The Bal Ashram centre was built by Satyarthi. In December 1995, Kielburger embarked on an eight-week tour of South Asia to meet child labourers and hear their stories first-hand. It was on that trip that Kielburger had a meeting with then-Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, in which Kielburger convinced Chrétien to take a public stand against child slavery. In 1999, he wrote Free the Children, a book