Ezra Levant exposes Justin Trudeau’s $2.14 billion TeleSat loan as a politically timed vote-buying scheme in Quebec’s La Salle-Verdun by-election, avoiding competition with Elon Musk’s cheaper, operational Starlink despite its proven reliability—like Levant’s $200 Maui rental post-wildfires. TeleSat, majority U.S.-owned and SpaceX-dependent, faces job cuts (700 to 500) and past funding mismanagement, while Trudeau dismisses Musk as "polyev nonsense," despite his Canadian ties. Levant links this to Trudeau’s free speech concerns, like Musk defying Brazil’s Twitter ban while keeping Starlink operational for critical services. The episode reveals how Canada’s internet expansion prioritizes graft over efficiency, mirroring past failures like Bombardier, questioning whether taxpayers will see returns—or just more wasted billions. [Automatically generated summary]
Just an astonishing move by Justin Trudeau's cabinet deciding to go with the highest bidder on internet services rather than lowest bidder so they can give make work fake work jobs to Montreal and bash Elon Musk at the same time.
I'll explain what I'm talking about.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Especially today, I want to show you some amazing video from the first privately funded spacewalk.
Did you know that over the last few days, Elon Musk had four private sector astronauts in space and they did a spacewalk?
And it's not a government program.
It's not NASA.
They were doing a spacewalk and it is awesome to behold.
I want to show you those video clips.
So go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, why did Trudeau choose the highest bidder for his new rural internet scheme?
It's September 16th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Hey, remember about a year ago when the Maui wildfires wiped out so much of the western side of that island, including the internet?
And I went to Maui with a Starlink satellite internet system that I had rented in Vancouver for just a couple hundred bucks.
And it was so small and light, I could fit it in the overhead compartment of the plane.
And I took it to Maui and I wasn't sure if it would work.
And it worked.
It gave us internet in this area that had been knocked out.
And we shared that internet access with a variety of people.
And other people were bringing those Starlink systems too.
Very cheap.
It was so cheap.
The guy I rented it from in Vancouver said he wasn't sure if it would work in the middle of the Pacific.
He didn't know if it was registered or locked in.
And I thought for 200 bucks, which is what I think I paid to rent it for a week or two, I thought, I'll risk it.
And it absolutely worked.
It worked great, high speed.
It was idiot-proof.
Like I could set it up with no problem.
And it was sort of a miracle.
We forget how plugged in we are until we don't have internet.
And that was my first experience with Starlink because I live in a big city, but I know other people who live in the country spoiler by them too.
And of course, the founder of Starlink, because of its relationship with the rocket ship company SpaceX, is Elon Musk.
And I got a question for you.
If we're trying to bring internet to Canada's vast north, do you think we should use Starlink?
Do you think we should use SpaceX?
Cheap, proven to work, working right now?
Or do you think Justin Trudeau, I'm laughing even before I tell you the punchline, do you think Justin Trudeau can take taxpayers' money to try to invent a competitor system that is cheaper and better by handing out billions of dollars to his friends in Quebec?
What do you think we should do?
I'll come back to that later.
I just want to talk a little bit more about Starlink because I'm sort of excited by them.
I just saw a couple days ago, United Airlines, which is one of the largest American airlines, has announced they're going to put Starlink in its entire fleet of a thousand planes.
And they're going to have high-speed internet for free in a thousand of their planes.
And I just want to show you a little bit about what United says that'll look like because if it is indeed high speed, imagine streaming video calls or whatever from the plane.
Take a look.
That's Elon Musk.
You and I think of Elon Musk perhaps as the Twitter guy, and it's true because we're Twitter-centric, but I tell you, a lot more people are probably being touched by him through his global, cheap, reliable internet.
And of course, the rocket ship company that puts all those satellites into space, that's how Starlink works.
Just this week, like just a couple days ago, they had a private space flight to the International Space Station.
Did you know that's happening?
I find that sort of incredible.
SpaceX launches four private citizens, including two Saudis, on commercial flight to the space station.
That was last year.
So he's been doing private space flights for more than a year.
But what happened just this past week, pardon me, is a four-person private mission to do a spacewalk.
And at 40, 1,400 miles from Earth, it was the farthest anyone had been away from the planet in nearly 50 years.
Imagine that, a private spacewalk.
So you're not just going up and down for a few minutes.
You're going up there, you're in orbit, you undo the hatch and you go out.
And it's just astonishing.
And this is the free market.
Take a look at them opening the hatch.
Would you be a little scared they did it?
There is our first view of the forward hatch, wide open space.
And then take a look at them actually doing the spacewalk, emerging from this private rocket ship and doing a spacewalk.
Copy review, test matrix one, watching from the nose cone.
Up, down, left, and right are three.
Pitch and roll are three.
Yaw is a two.
And you know, because you've got the design mind of Elon Musk and he does things aesthetically, the rocket ships are pretty, the Teslas are pretty.
He made some pretty cool space suits, too.
Would you agree with me?
Those are his private sector space suits.
I don't know.
It's sort of amazing.
It's serious stuff, though.
It's fun to talk about and it's a little bit inspirational.
But here is a chart of all the companies and governments in the world putting stuff into space.
And SpaceX puts more than 90% of everything the Earth sends into space.
That company does.
But if you look, you'll see who's next and who's next behind that.
If not for SpaceX, which is by far number one, number two, as you can see in the chart, would be China.
If you take Elon Musk out of the picture, China is winning the space race.
And then after China would be Russia.
And then after Russia would be Japan.
And then after Japan would be India.
And only then do you have something called the United Launch Alliance.
That's Boeing's mess.
As you know, Boeing can't get their spaceship up to rescue the two astronauts from the space station.
And then they magnified, if you understand that chart there, you can see even bad guys like Iran on there and an Iranian terrorist group is on there.
So like I say, you and I might think of Elon Musk as the Twitter guy, as the freedom of speech guy, maybe as the Tesla guy.
And those are all important things.
But he's actually the leading astronaut executive of our age.
And if you had any doubts about that, they just did a spacewalk with private sector everything and NASA can't get off the ground.
You know, I saw a TV show on Apple TV and I was on a plane and I had nothing to do.
So I watched it and I was hooked in the first minute because they sort of did a trick on you.
And it's not really a spoiler.
It's the premise for the whole show.
Let me show you the trailer for a TV series on Apple TV called For All Mankind.
And it's about, you know, going to the moon.
Can you watch this trailer?
I'm going to play 50 seconds of it, but really pay attention to the last five seconds because that totally got me.
Take a look at this.
I believe that this nation should commit itself to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
After thousands of years gazing up in the heavens and dreaming of this day, a man is about to set foot on the moat across the world.
People wait with bated breath.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a live signal.
There he is.
The shock across the nation at this event is just indescribable.
The Soviet cosmonaut has become the first to set foot on the moon.
Now, I watched too much of this series because I was on the plane a lot.
Actually, I think I just watched like four episodes back to back now that I think about it.
The theory, the premise behind the show is that in the great space race, the Soviet Union gets to the moon just before America does.
And you know, if a few things had gone a different direction, they just might have.
Remember, they had Sputnik and they had Yuri Gargarin before NASA had its effort.
And what's interesting is based on the premise that the Soviets get to the moon first, everything else that follows America's playing catch up.
And I have to say, even though it was sort of dull and slow moving in parts, this TV series for all mankind, they were absolutely realistic in this way.
The whole American project was dominated by bureaucracy and politics.
And they had a huge emphasis, I'm talking about in the show, of gender and race and DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And I thought, that is so spot on.
And compare that to the reality of Elon Musk running circles around not just NASA, but the Chinese and the Russian and the Indian and the Japanese space programs.
Why Justin Trudeau Says No00:10:27
The difference between a can-do engineer in the private sector versus these government bureaucracies is astonishing.
If you want to see the anti-Musk, watch that Apple TV show.
You're wondering, what am I doing talking about Musk so much?
Well, back to the news of the day.
Remember I mentioned Canada's getting some internet for our north?
Here's the global news headline.
The Canadian government announced a loan of $2.14 billion to help a Quebec company.
Really?
Is it a Quebec company?
I'll come back to that.
Build a broadband satellite network that will connect more remote communities to the internet.
And of course, that announcement was over the weekend.
It was timed, as you may know, for today's by-election.
Do you know there are two by-elections today?
One of them in Montreal in the district of La Salomard-Verdun, which used to be Paul Martin's riding way back in the day.
And it was where David LeMetti, the crooked justice minister, was from before he sort of skulked out of parliament.
Anyways, so this announcement was made on the weekend to try and buy some votes with $2 billion.
And Michael Barrett, an MP for the Conservatives, well, he used Twitter the way it ought to be done.
He said, hey, Elon Musk, how much would it cost to provide Starlink to every Canadian household that doesn't have high speed?
If this $2.14 billion plan is the panacea of expanding access, competition, and service, where is the interest from private investors and banks?
That's always a good argument, which is if this is such a good idea, why don't other people think it's such a good idea besides Trudeau throwing his money around?
And would you believe it, Elon Musk, perhaps the busiest man in the world?
If he's not building cars, he's building spaceships.
He's not building spaceships.
He's building internet.
He's got another company called the Boring Company that builds tunnels.
He's got another company called Neuralink.
Believe it or not, he responded and he said, less than half that amount.
But it's not just that.
It's less than half that amount.
And it's ready now.
And it's proven to work now.
It's not some loan to some friends of Trudeau to buy some election votes and maybe in the future it'll work.
It's ready now.
I know that because I took a little Starlink from Vancouver to Maui and I used it and it was amazing and it was 200 bucks.
Anyways, Barrett, the MP, wrote back to Elon Musk saying, sounded like common sense.
Yeah.
Like I say, and it works and it's ready, so it's not speculative.
But of course, what Michael Barrett and what Elon Musk don't understand, or maybe they actually understand it perfectly, is that spending more from a government point of view is the point of things.
It's not a problem.
It's why they do things.
Again, that's the difference between how Elon Musk operates his companies versus how NASA in that TV show I was referring to.
I mean, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, you'll recall, he fired 80% of the staff, the folks who just did DEI stuff and all the soft stuff that they weren't engineers.
They didn't actually run the company.
They were like barnacles on the shift.
He fired them all and focused on engineering.
And what you have to understand is that when you buy something through the government, those barnacles, those extra jobs, those perks, those soft things, that's what it's all about.
It's a feature, not a bug.
It's how politics works.
If you are spending twice as much money as you need to to get something done, you and I as taxpayers would say, oh my God, that's insane.
But from a politician's point of view, you're thinking, I am the sugar daddy bringing home billions of dollars to my district, and I want to brag.
I want that number to be bigger.
Can we get it even bigger?
Can we get it even bigger?
how politics is done, especially in Montreal.
You'll have to remember SNC Lavalin, Trudeau's favorite company that he interfered with.
They were, not only did they want huge contracts, they were corrupt and bribed their way to get them.
Remember?
That's that whole Jolie Wilson-Raybold thing.
Trudeau was trying to get her to call off a prosecution of their corruption.
This is the ArriveCan app.
The ArriveCan app could have been made for 50 grand.
We know that because some guy sort of made a replica of it over one weekend.
But the reason it cost more than $60 million was the whole point of it.
ArriveCan was not about doing anything.
It was about a way to shovel money to liberal insiders.
Our friend Andy Lee points out that this is just the latest payment to the Canadian alternative to Starlink called TeleSat.
Three years ago, they got a billion and a half dollars.
I guess they burned through it and they need more.
Now, François-Philippe Champagne, who is the minister in charge of this, he saw this kerfuffle.
And of course, they hate Elon Musk because he's for freedom.
And Francois-Philippe Champagne, the Trudeau cabinet minister, said, typical polyev nonsense.
They'd prefer giving money to foreign billionaires instead of supporting our industry and our workers.
This loan will help build a world-class Canadian-made satellite network and supports thousands of jobs in Quebec.
Now, that's common sense.
Well, first of all, Elon Musk is actually a Canadian citizen.
I don't know if you know that.
He immigrated to Canada.
His mom's Canadian.
He went to school here.
He got his Canadian citizenship.
But second of all, obviously, Trudeau gives billions of dollars to mega corporations all the time.
He gives billions of dollars to electric vehicle companies, tens of billions of dollars.
And he's giving billions of dollars here to TeleSat, which is a multi-billion dollar company.
So they are still, they're proposing to give more billions of dollars.
But what's even crazier about it is to create a replica of Starlink.
I went online and I checked and TeleSat, that's the Canadian company that Trudeau and François-Philippe Champagne are giving to.
It may say it's Canadian, but it's actually foreign-owned in the majority.
I understand 86% of the shares are owned by foreigners.
So yeah, it's Canadian, about as Canadian as Tim Hortons.
If you check on that, you'll see Tim Hortons is owned by a U.S.-Brazilian conglomerate.
But like I say, the waste is the point.
And you can see that there in the tweet.
That tweet is saying, hey, by-election voters in Montreal, we are making stupid decisions so we can give you money.
But there's another point here.
Why would Trudeau and François-Philippe Champagne and the entire establishment, the bureaucracy, all the consultants, all the lobbyists, why would they prefer to spend double on something that's not proven as opposed to buying something off the shelf that works?
Or just saying, hey, people in rural or northern parts, why don't you buy your own internet?
And if you want to help, give them a tax credit for it or a tax refund.
Instead of the government coming in and doing it, how about letting ordinary people make their own choices?
And if you want to subsidize those individual choices, fine.
Why does the government need to throw around billions of dollars?
And why are they so averse to Elon Musk?
Not only do they say we're not going to use Elon Musk's cheaper proven system, but he's just some foreign billionaire.
We hate him.
Why would they say that?
Well, I think I know why.
You might recall that exactly a week ago, or a week and a day ago, I was in Brazil.
I had never been in South America before, but I went to Brazil for about 36 hours because I went to one of the largest free speech rallies in world history.
200,000 people had lined the streets of Sao Paulo in support of the opposition leader there.
His name is Yair Bolsonaro, because the incumbent regime, the president of Brazil, Lula is his name, and his right-hand man, a judge named Alexander de Mauraes, they had banned opposition critics and opposition leaders and opposition journalists one after the other and banned them from Twitter and banned them on the internet.
And when Twitter said, hey, you're not following the law, Lula and DeMares banned Twitter itself completely from the internet in Brazil.
You cannot use Twitter.
20 million plus users in Brazil had their accounts just turned off because too many of them were seeing things that the government didn't want them to see.
Now, Elon Musk defied this, and so the government started seizing assets of Starlink in Brazil.
But Elon Musk did an astonishing thing.
He left the internet satellites on anyways.
So he wasn't being paid.
He couldn't do business.
He couldn't collect the $100 a month or whatever he was getting, but he kept the internet on.
He made a tweet about it saying he has to take care of hospitals and schools and places in the wilderness, and it would be irresponsible to cut them off.
I actually believe him that he cares about those customers, but I also believe him that he cares about free speech.
So now do you see why Justin Trudeau and François-Philippe Champagne, a close ally of China too, now do you see why they would never, ever let Elon Musk have anything to do with the internet in Canada?
Because maybe, just maybe, under Bill C-63, Justin Trudeau's pending censorship bill called the Online Harms Act, maybe, just maybe one day he'll do a Lula.
He'll do a Brazil.
He'll try to shut down Twitter in the name of disinformation.
Wouldn't surprise me a stitch.
Now, if he's working with some liberal client like Telesat that has received billions of dollars, of course they'll turn off the switch for Trudeau.
It's the least they can do.
In fact, getting paid to turn off a system, that's perfect liberal math.
But if Elon Musk himself were told to turn off the internet, you know he would defy them.
Why Telesat Receives Billions?00:15:37
That's why they're giving the money to Telesat.
Stay with us.
More on the story next.
It's so clubby in Montreal between the Liberal Party and the corporations.
We saw that during the fiasco when SNC Lavalan was being prosecuted for corruption.
And by the way, they didn't deny it anymore.
They had admitted it.
They just wanted a plea deal, whereas Jodi Wilson-Raybold was taking advice from the public prosecutions directorate to go ahead with the trial.
Trudeau intervened, and in the end, he fired Jodi Wilson-Raybold because she wouldn't go easy on his crooked corporate buddies.
No one is denying that SNC Lavalin were breaking the law.
What's so astonishing is that Trudeau was defending them anyways.
And here we are a few years later, and it feels like the exact same thing.
A preference to give billions of dollars to Quebec insiders instead of a more reasonable, less slush fundy alternative.
And John is now to talk about this murky company, TeleSat, is our friend Andy Lee, who is very good at digging around.
Andy, great to see you again.
Good to see you too.
It's good to be back.
Yeah, so TeleSat, big news.
We've been hearing a lot about, you know, we're supposed to be getting high-speed internet to rural communities for a long time now.
And so TeleSat was one of those companies that was supposed to be providing this.
And so we've been funding the company heavily.
I didn't go all the way back, but in the last couple of years alone, you know, in 2021, we had a grant that was given that actually is not really out there yet.
It was for $600 million.
So over half a billion dollars was given to them in a grant.
They had a grant in 2018 for $85 million.
And then in 2021, we had the $1.44 billion that was given to them.
And now we're looking at $2.54 billion.
And that's on top of government contracts.
And again, I haven't added them all up.
I stopped at about $400 million for the last couple of years.
So they're also getting regular income through federal contracts as well.
And so what have we gotten for that?
We got a promise that we were supposed to have a, you know, a satellite low orbit, you know, internet by 2024.
And where is it?
I tell you, I was adding up some of those numbers you said, the 600 million here, 1.4 billion there.
I mean, you're into the billions of dollars.
And I mean, I don't know enough about TeleSat, but it seems to me that Elon Musk is the first and the best and the cheapest.
And the like Starlink, there's just no way a late to the game Canadian competitor is going to beat Starlink for quality, cheapness, and it's ready to go right now.
I don't even understand.
Like, are they basically trying to build a Canadian competitor to Starlink?
Is that what's going on here, Andy?
Well, I think that was initially, like judging by their press releases, yeah, that's what they were looking at to compete with, right?
But obviously they failed to do so despite all this funding.
So Starlink has kind of become the gold standard for satellite communications.
So, you know, at this point, we're throwing a lot of money at something trying to reinvent the wheel and it's going to cost us.
And the ironic thing is that, you know, we don't even have our own launch capabilities for these satellites.
Telesat actually inked a deal in September of last year with SpaceX to launch their own satellite systems.
So I think they've secured 14 launches and they can launch 18 satellites, I believe, per launch.
So, you know, again, it's kind of like, what are we getting for value for our money?
And it's sort of like, okay, well, we want to invest in Canadian companies.
But at the same time, is it worth it for somebody who's already sort of laid this ground, right?
What's the value for our money?
And are we going to be getting better service?
And are we going to be getting it for as good of a price, which is, you know, it's considerable when you look at Elon Musk as saying, well, I'll do this for less than half.
And the company itself isn't worth that much, right?
We're putting billions of dollars into it.
I mean, its market cap, I think, is under $600 million.
They're saying that, you know, their sort of net worth maybe last year from their financials was about $1.2 billion.
So maybe the companies might be worth $2 billion, but we're sinking two or three times into that to make it feasible.
And again, we haven't got a product yet.
So it's like deliverology, right?
We're not quite sure.
Oh my gosh.
And why are we not holding these people to account when they're not meeting their deadlines, especially when we're talking about this amount of cash?
And, you know, obviously the CEO has got some deep ties to, say, our brand new Trudeau appointed financial special economic advancer, Mark Carney.
And it wasn't just that one meeting last or this year.
Sorry, they were at a charity get together in 2024.
I also went back and found them at another charity get together in 2023.
And then before that, you know, there was talk of Dan Goldberg, who's the CEO, was in for the London Marathon.
He met up with Carney there and there's a big blurb talking about their friendship and things like that and how he Carney, you know, really reinforces Dan's company and things like that.
So, you know, it's kind of like we have such a productivity problem in Canada bringing, you know, things to market in a reasonable time.
So, and, you know, that was the big thing about Felix Champagne was like, well, you know, you're picking a foreign company.
And of course, you went and a lot of people went and found the financials.
And this isn't, you know, I mean, Starlink's probably more Canadian than TeleSat is, right?
I mean, at least Starlock is owned by a Canadian citizen, whereas TeleSat, we know, is mostly owned by United States, you know, fund managers and things like that.
I think that somebody pointed out it's like 0.69% Canadian-owned, which is not how it was sold.
We were told in the press releases that this is a Canadian controlled company.
If we've got 0.69% of it, that's not a Canadian-controlled company at all.
It's very much an American company.
Yeah, it was sold.
It was sold to a U.S. defense contractor a few years back.
I mean, I really don't have a strong opinion about where it should be.
I mean, if the idea is to get internet, buy it from the cheapest, best provider.
The fact that TeleSat has to piggyback onto SpaceX's rockets makes me chuckle because even that is buttering Elon Musk's bread.
But the denunciation of Musk as a foreign billionaire and the admission that this is just to slosh money around Montreal.
Now it makes sense, these photos with Mark Carney.
I think you were telling me before that Catherine McKenna, the disgraced former cabinet minister was like, of course.
And of course, there's commissions for everybody in law.
I mean, what would the lobbyist get who arranged this deal?
100 million bucks?
I don't know.
I mean, there's so much scamming that we've, I mean, this is the arrive can of satellite internet.
If you want to, like, I was telling the anecdote a minute ago, when I went to Maui for the wildfires, I brought a Starlink with me.
I think it cost me 200 bucks to rent it.
It couldn't have been easier.
Imagine instead of saying, no, the government has a program.
You have to like no real person would prefer a government program if you're trying to get it done.
But if you're trying to butter everyone's bread, of course you go the Trudeau way.
I don't know.
This is just new levels of corruption to me, Andy.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, they're always finding new ways to pay themselves creatively.
You know, and we're being told, well, it's okay.
Part of it's a loan.
And that is true.
Part of it's a loan.
And part of the 2021 one was a loan as well.
That $1.44 billion.
Half of that was a loan.
And, you know, we get paid out at like 4.5%.
But again, that money could be better spent, reinvested somewhere else.
So let's not pretend like, you know, we're getting good value.
are we sure we got the money back?
I mean, I exactly.
And we've got generous loan forgiveness in our country, right?
We're always writing this stuff up because we're saying, well, we need this.
It's vital infrastructure or whatever.
So, you know, we'll just take, you know, whatever you owe us and we'll, we'll cross it off the balance sheet.
So there's that.
Then, but the tragedy of this is that you know, we're supposed to get paid out.
So, this is supposed to be an investment for us.
We're supposed to get paid out in dividends.
So, we actually want this company to do well because we get paid back for it if it does.
So, if it fails, it's not a good thing, right?
It's nothing to cheer about.
So, it's really kind of like a lose-lose situation.
Yeah, we could get Starlink for cheaper, but again, we've all invested in that and we're supposed to be getting paid back for that investment as the company succeeds.
And on that note, you know, I have serious questions as to their promissory points in here.
There was a press release that was given out-I'm not sure if it was 2019 or 2000.
Yeah, no, sorry, it was the 2021 press release.
And so, in that press release, it said that Telesat was going to, with this $1.44 billion, maintain 700 jobs.
So, that's fine.
But fast forward to 2024, and their new press release that was put out says that they have 500 employees.
So, we're already missing 200 employees between 2021 and 2023.
And the company is not growing, it's getting smaller if their own press releases are to be believed.
And so, now we're supposed to be told that if you inject another $2.5 billion into it, we're going to create 2,000 more jobs.
Well, where did those 200 jobs go between 2021 and 2024?
What happened to them?
I mean, we should be seeing growth for investment.
I'm okay with doing subsidies and investing, but again, we need deliverable products, right?
We need accountability, we need something that works, we need something that's efficient, and we need a result, right?
And hopefully, a marketable problem.
And that just didn't happen.
And again, when and even their government contracts are bizarre when you look at them, like these are contracts that are starting off for $700,000 with the government, and then all of a sudden it's a $6 million contract.
Well, that's quite an amendment, right?
We're talking about usually their original, and this is what we've seen broadly across the you know, across the scope in contracting, is that we're putting out these kind of low-ball contracts and then getting squeezed through it down the road where we're seeing the final results costing two, three, four, five, 10 times the original amount, which is bonkers.
I mean, no one has ever heard the name of the president of Telesat because he's not a great space executive.
Everyone knows Elon Musk because he's putting a rocket ship into space every twice a week.
Um, I know you're using language of investment and dividend, and because that's how the government phrases it because they don't want to say the truth, but it's, I think it's capitalism in drag.
If Telesat was such a good investment, there are trillions of dollars in the global stock markets that are all hunting for the great deals, for the great opportunities, and no one would invest in them.
So, it's by definition, if they need government money, no one in the private sector likes them.
I find this depressing.
It's like that old company Bombardier, where every year they would get hundreds of millions of dollars.
We're long past the hundreds of millions, Mark.
We're well into the billions.
I just think it's sort of funny in a sad way to see them all disparaging Elon Musk, the great industrialist of our age.
And I didn't know it until you told me here that even though they're disparaging Elon Musk, it's his rocket ships that they're using to put their satellites up there.
What an incredible story.
And I don't think this is going to save the liberal candidate tonight in the riding of La Salle em Arm Verdun, where they're having a by-election.
I think that's what its purpose was.
I don't think it's going to work.
I think the liberals are going to lose again, but Trudeau is going to hold his iron grip on power.
Last word to you, Andy.
Yeah, well, I mean, corporate welfare is alive and well.
If you know the right people in Canada, it's not going to go out of style anytime soon, unfortunately.
And yeah, but I mean, the real losers are, of course, the people who don't have internet, because I do believe the internet should be somewhat of a human right in a G7 country such as ourselves.
I think that it's a really, really important tool for everybody to have.
And again, this isn't the only investment that we're making into it.
Like, you have to understand this: the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is a whole other Ponzi scheme.
You know, they've invested billions of dollars into bringing high-speed internet to rural communities, right?
And that's still a work in progress.
So, you know, it's just throwing a whole bunch of good money after bad when, again, this groundwork has been laid.
I mean, my thing, I reached out to Elon Musk and I said, since you're launching those satellites, why don't you just buy TeleSat?
Why not?
Well, you can afford it.
It's much less than Twitter.
Yeah, that's right.
We could actually have a profitable Canadian company maybe that's successful.
You have to fire 80% of the staff.
I think that's his way.
Fire the 80% that don't do anything.
And this is a crazy story, but it tells us so much about our own country, how we despise those who actually build, how we pretend that sloshing around government largesse is the free market.
And there's sort of a there's there's a nudge and a wink that they're saying, hey, Montreal, we're ringing out taxpayers for you in the name of the internet, but everyone knows it's just graft and grift.
Andy, great to see you again.
Thanks for your time.
Good to see you too.
Take care and we'll see how it develops.
Telesat's investors are fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, most of them are companies, but there's one individual in there.
And so I'm digging into his tech filings.
Well, we'll have to hear more from you and we'll have to follow you on Twitter.
You're doing great investigative journalism as you always do.
Take care, my friend.
Take care.
Cheers.
Well, there you have it.
Stay with us.
more after these words.
You know, the other day Elon Musk was talking about how government just can't do anything anymore.
And he referenced the high-speed train project in California, which has been talked about for literally decades.
Government Failure Debate00:02:19
And they've built like one mile of it from nowhere to nowhere.
And that's how it is when a government builds something, especially something complex.
The moon shot where America and NASA actually landed someone on the moon maybe was the one example to the contrary where they actually managed to do it.
But they don't seem to be able to do that particular task anymore or much else.
And what I learned from Andy that makes me chuckle is that even this Telesat scheme at twice the price still relies on SpaceX rockets because no one's sending things into space anymore other than Chinese and Russians.
Let me read some of your mail.
Frank says Trump is a genius.
He has the pet owner's vote.
He's talking about Trump's reference in the debate against Kamala Harris of the allegation that they're eating dogs and cats and other pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Now, we sent David Menzies down there for a couple of days last week.
And as you saw, he's doing some really great videos, but we actually could not corroborate any of the pet eating.
And we didn't go down, we went down there curious and thought it was plausible.
But after poking around for a couple of days and talking to everyone we could find, we didn't come up with any evidence that we came up with tragic evidence that terrible Haitian drivers are, in one case, killed somebody.
And we learned a lot.
But anyway, let me refer you to the truthaboutspringfield.com to see all our videos.
But yeah, that meme of eating cats and dogs was just classic Trump meme.
CJP says they technically fact-checked Kamala during the debate.
It was a blink and you'll miss it type thing.
And even then, it was only things on her record and not the crap she was saying about Trump.
You're referring to the U.S. debate.
I was in transit then, but my friends Sheila Ghanrid and Avi Amini, and I think David might have been on it too, did a live stream for the U.S. presidential debate, which is pretty fun.
Lawrence Vaynaut says, if things escalate with Russia, I think the U.S. election should be postponed.
Look at what's happening in Ukraine.
Postponing the American elections, I don't think that even happened in World War II or Vietnam.
Emergency Elections00:02:25
I think that would be a terrible idea.
Postponing the election is so abnormal.
And to justify it with an emergency, well, then there'll be emergency every week, won't there?
And there'll be a climate emergency, just like they used the COVID emergency to have mail-in ballots.
I think almost every emergency imaginable can be overcome in the voting with an election.
Or you can vote despite it.
I can't even think.
Maybe during the plague, the Black Death in England, they might have postponed a vote or two, but actually they just moved Parliament of females down the highway.
And I think maybe they suspended Parliament for a few weeks.
And I think about that sometimes, and I think about the Amish.
As you know, about a month or so, I visited an Amish community in Ontario that has been fined almost $400,000 for not downloading the AradCan app on their smartphones.
Of course, the joke being Amish don't have phones.
They don't download any apps.
They don't use electricity.
They don't even drive.
They have horses and buggies, literally.
Imagine telling someone like that to download the ArriveCan app.
They wouldn't even understand the words you're saying.
Anyhow, just astonishing.
And what I learned by visiting the Amish is that the mania never took hold of their community.
Because if you're Amish, you see things, you hear things, you read paper, you talk and you meet, but you're not on your social media.
You're not watching CNN or CBC.
You're not hearing the propaganda.
I suppose if you're getting print newspapers, but I don't think they're very worldly.
And so if you didn't have social media in your life, if you didn't have TV, you probably wouldn't have noticed COVID at all.
Maybe you would have had more people getting the flu.
But I put it to you that the number one way that we knew we were in a pandemic was because the media kept telling us so.
Our eyes themselves didn't see it, which is why they had to force masks on everyone to keep people worried because otherwise you wouldn't be worried.
If you led a normal life, I'm not saying the Amish live a normal life, but they didn't live the hyper-stimulated narrative curated life that we lead, you wouldn't have got the mania, let alone the COVID.