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April 30, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:53
Thought Bites: Corruption and Catastrophe in Canada!
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Did a show a little while ago on SNC-Lavalin and Justin Trudeau and the sort of allegations of corruption as to how SNC-Lavalin avoided being prosecuted for corruption that was astounding and astonishing in its length and breadth and depth, particularly in Libya.
So now, and I'll link to that below, but now something's come up here.
I just read this this morning.
Names of SNC employees, executives behind.
Thousands of dollars in illegal Liberal Party donations revealed.
Former Attorney General of Quebec denies involvement in scheme that broke Canadian election law.
So here it says, a confidential document sent to the Liberal Party of Canada in 2016 And obtained by CBC Radio Canada reveals how top officials at the embattled engineering firm S&C Lavalin were named in a scheme to illegally influence Canadian elections.
So, just for those of you who don't know, I'm sure you do.
But it's not legal for corporations to donate to political parties because they have, of course, corporations have a lot of money and they don't want to have an obvious quid pro quo where corporations donate to political parties then political parties take their meetings and nudge legislation in the directions that corporations want and so on.
So corporations are not allowed to donate to political parties.
Individuals Can.
So I just wanted that sort of the background.
So the list of names, this is article, the list of names compiled in 2016 by federal investigators probing political party donations and leaked to blah blah blah raises new questions about an agreement by the Commissioner of Canada Elections not to prosecute the company.
The federal liberals were sent the list in a letter marked confidential from the Commissioner of Canada Elections, the investigative branch of Elections Canada, on August 5th, 2016, but for nearly three years, neither Elections Canada nor the Liberal Party shared that information publicly.
Now that seems pretty bad to me.
Of course, you have Elections Canada designed to try to ensure compliance with laws regarding donations in Canada and if there has been corruption, as this seems to be the case, if there has been corruption in donations then you really can't have a fair election if voters don't know about that, right?
So voters are funding, are forced to fund, right?
Taxpayers fund Elections Canada if Elections Canada is covering up essential information that voters need to know about illegal campaign contributions, then how are they also not interfering in Canadian elections?
The article goes on to say, the investigation reveals that over a period of more than five years, between 2004-2009, 18 former SNC-Lavalin employees, directors, and some spouses contributed nearly $110,000 to the federal Liberals, including to four party leadership campaigns and four writing associations in Quebec.
Now this is the kicker, right?
According to the letter, the investigation found that SNC-Lavalin reimbursed all of those individual donations, a practice forbidden under the Canada Elections Act, right?
So of course, right?
If you have... I think you can donate up to $2,500, right?
So...
If you have a thousand employees and you say to them, I will reimburse your donations if you donate to this particular political party, then that is essentially, of course, the corporation donating to the political party just using sock puppets or hand puppets of individual.
Corporations, right?
And yeah, so since 2004, corporations have not been allowed to make donations to federal political parties to prevent corporate influence over election campaigns.
Now, that's all cover, right?
I mean, the real deals happen under the table.
The real deals happen on a handshake in smoky back rooms with everyone's phone battery taken out and hung behind the toilet, Godfather style.
And so this is pretty important, right?
So this is Jeff Ayotte, a defense lawyer with expertise in Canadian election law, says, money is an enormous advantage in an election campaign.
Which is also kind of sad, right?
I mean, it's not ideas, it's not arguments, it's not compelling speeches, it's, you know, do you have the cash to spread your message around?
So it's pretty nasty stuff.
Now there was a much smaller amount of donations to the Conservative Party received just over $8,100 as well.
Now the Liberal Party repeatedly refused to provide the names of those involved and asked by reporters for them.
The Conservative Party immediately provided its list of SNC-Lavalin names.
Now that's important, right?
This is just the
blur and confuse and gaslight and avoid and defer and all of this kind of stuff uh where so you know the liberal party didn't provide it and the conservative party immediately did both parties reimbursed the money to the receiver general in august of 2016 now further down here and i'm not going to read the whole thing you can of course look for it yourself but uh there is um uh indications that right so here we go
We were given a bonus right?
So two non-executive SNC-Lavalin employees agreed to speak with blah blah blah about the scheme, said they were definitely told their political donations would be reimbursed in the form of bonuses from SNC-Lavalin.
So this guy, he was an engineer, he said he was specifically asked to donate to the Liberal Party.
We were given a bonus that was double the amount donated.
He explained that the size of the bonus was intended to compensate him for the taxes he would have to pay on the bonus, right?
Well, I don't know what this guy was making.
Is he in a 50% tax bracket?
I don't know.
But that's quite a different situation rather than just reimbursing.
So if this guy is correct, and S&C Lavalin gave twice the donation amount to employees then seems to me that they were paying people to donate to the Liberal Party.
Now that seems extraordinarily corrupt.
The fact that The regulatory body sat on this information for quite some time on who exactly was involved.
It's pretty significant.
And that's one thing that's going on at the moment.
And here's the thing, right?
So in the choice between, say, conservatives And liberals.
I'm not a conservative.
I'm certainly not a liberal.
But just from the sort of outside eye, in the choice between conservatives and liberals, conservatives generally come out of the Western tradition of universal ethics, particularly Christianity.
They have the Ten Commandments.
They have what would Jesus do?
They have a moral center and foundation.
that drives their decision-making and of course it's imperfect.
Human beings are in a fallen state and we're all susceptible to corruption but there is this ideal, this goal of universal ethics.
Now when you start talking about the left, when you start talking about liberals, the NDP or the Democrats in the United States or the Labour Party in the UK and so on, Well, of course, we're talking about liberals here in Canada.
What is their moral center?
What is their moral foundation?
What are their absolute moral standards?
Well, they have a lot of relativistic-y stuff.
You know, diversity is a strength, and multiculturalism is a value, and we look out for the little guy, and like all these things that don't have any particularly strict moral rules about them.
And of course if you are religious a lot of times of course you will fear God's wrath, God's punishment, hell itself, so there's a negative or a disincentive or a punishment for doing something wrong.
Your conscience in the form of God will always catch you when you're doing wrong and if you deviate there are negative consequences.
But of course if you're a secularist, if you're on the left, which is generally the case, what are the negative consequences of failing to adhere to very foggy, subjectivist moral standards.
Well, you're in a Darwinian, Ornician, will-to-power universe, so what are the negative consequences?
Why wouldn't you do what you can get away with?
See, in the Christian tradition you can't get away with anything because you have a conscience that is independent of your biology, it's independent from whatever Darwinian resources you manage to scrabble together through lies, sophistry and coercion.
You have a conscience that is independent of material success and you have a God who knows everything and watches everything so you can't get away with anything.
You can get away with things from the law, but you can't get away with things from the conscience, right?
Raskolnikov style.
So these kinds of things where the conservatives say, oh yeah, no, here's, you know, here's the information.
The liberals are like, eh, you know, we're not going to get back to you on that.
It's like, because the conservatives have a moral standard and an all-knowing, all-powerful deity who watches every move, and there are negative consequences for failing to adhere to clear and objective If you're in the will-to-power universe, then you've entered into the realm of purely Darwinian manipulative sophistry, where you say whatever you can to get away with whatever you can.
And so this is the big difference that is occurring in the West at the moment, that there are people who have a strong conscience, an adherence to universal moral standards, and a deep understanding of human frailty, and therefore an unwillingness to grant power.
to the state because power corrupts and so on, whereas there's another group that are sort of post-Christian, they're post-morality, and they are into materialistic gains, particularly the addiction to power that characterizes all biped, fur-based hominids and ape-descended or ape-parallel species like ours.
We have an addiction to power over others.
It's a physical addiction.
And so for them, for sort of the post-Christians, the post-moral people, it's whatever you can get away with.
If you get away with it, you're totally in the clear and this is why you see a lot of this avoidance and fogging and lack of ability to stand up and say I did wrong and I'm human, I succumbed to temptation, I did wrong and I need to do better and here's the restitution and here's the punishment that I'm willing to take.
So it is a very very different kind of mindset, and you'll see this showing up in particular, you know, as we sort of get closer to the elections in Canada this fall.
Now, there's a fellow, I don't know him from Adam and so on, but this is sort of important as well, right?
So, I'll link to the Twitter.
He doesn't know me, he doesn't know me, but he says, this is alarming.
Canada headed for recession.
February, gross domestic product is down 0.1%.
Last four months total, Total zero percent gross domestic product.
Now, gross domestic product is a pretty loosey-goosey way of measuring economic productivity, but it's not the end of the world as far as a rough gauge.
Now, the U.S.
gross domestic product is up 3.2 percent, so they are really booming.
Remember, was it Obama who said, well, we've just got to get used to 2 percent or less?
So it's unprecedented for Canada to be zero percent growth with one lower interest rate than the U.S., two U.S.
booming, and that's of course Canada's biggest buyer, and that the Canadian dollar is at 74 cents, and therefore there's cheaper exports.
going on and so he says justin trudeau trudeau is inept now i mean there's certainly truth to that i mean why on earth would you think that a guy who never had to have a real job who inherited millions of dollars you know good looks from his potential father and a politically recognizable name and never i mean justin trudeau's never run a business he's never become an entrepreneur he
Worked, you know as a teacher and and and so on as a drama school teacher and drama teacher Sorry, so it's not that he's inept in particular like if I suddenly leapt onto the stage as a ballet dancer I mean nobody would say I was inept because I wouldn't even be in the category of Competence right?
It would just be like here's him lurching around the stage complaining about his hamstrings.
It's not that he's inept He's like not even in the sphere of of competence.
I mean, he doesn't know anything about the economy.
He's never had to rely on his labor and wits for his income and so it's yeah it's not that he's inept he's just not even in the realm of competence so and and also of course if you are on the left then the free market is your enemy right so so whatever you can do to hobble the free market is good for you because they are The free market, capitalism is free trade.
This is your enemy, right?
So whatever you can do to harm the market is good, right?
If you harm the market, then there's fewer people who are working and paying taxes and more people who become dependent on the government, which is your stable voting base and so on.
So that is sort of the reality.
So he goes on to say, here's the answer.
Canada should be at 3% GDP growth if the USA is at 3.2%.
Growth, given factors stated and one above, right?
So the reason that Canada is... is his fake feminist attack on oil and pipelines, which is 10% of our economy.
So this is the stuff that's coming out of Ottawa.
about how terrible Alberta is and how terrible producing oil and shipping it through pipelines and so on is which is you know again ten percent of the economy.
Now the reason of course that Ottawa is attacking Alberta is Alberta is pretty based, it's pretty righteous, it's Christian, it's conservative, it's family-oriented, there's a lot to admire, an enormous amount to admire about Alberta, and it's a funny thing.
I said this in a show the other day.
I haven't released it yet, but I just want to sort of touch on this idea here.
You know, things that I cursed when I was younger in some ways have proven to be an enormous boon to me.
So after high school, I mean, I was broke.
I'd been supporting myself since I was 15 years old.
So I wanted to go to university.
Back when university was still vaguely productive and I went to go work up in northern Ontario, northern, where was I up in?
Northern Ontario, northern Manitoba and a little bit in Quebec and I was gold panning and I was prospecting and it was hard physical labor and it was dangerous work because you were like a An airplane flight, like the planes used to come and land either on the water, if they were seaplane, or I can't remember, they're called ice planes, where they come and land on the snow in their skis.
So if you got injured in this dangerous work, where you're humping around drill bits and massive drills on snowshoes, in snowmobiles, in the middle of nowhere, if you get injured, you're likely going to die.
Or there's going to be horrible results, because you're a couple of days from a hospital at least.
So...
One thing I've noticed is that people who tend to have done dangerous physical labor tend to be not subjectivists, not relativists, not foggy postmodernists, no such thing as truth.
Because when you have to deal with messy and dangerous and objective reality, you gain a respect for reality.
You can't wish things, you can't will things, you have to work and you have to be damn cautious and damn careful.
with your work.
So I did that, I think almost for a year and a half before I went to university, I did it for another summer.
So, you know, close to two years of hard, dangerous, physical labor, which had a huge amount in terms of conditioning me.
Like you see a bunch of people there with the champagne socialists they call, they can talk about subjective reality.
And it's like, well, it's because I just I just know for a fact they've never worked a dangerous job with their hands where there's big risk.
I mean, just know that, right?
So the people in Alberta, I mean, again, not all, but a lot of people in Alberta, they do this hard, difficult, dangerous work of getting oil out of the ground and shipping it to people so that homes can be heated and groceries can be delivered and ambulances can run and all of that.
And if you look at the people in Ottawa, they've They've just never done that working class stuff.
And you know, don't get me wrong about working class.
I don't mean poor.
I made fairly decent money as a gold panner and prospector and driller.
And you make great money out in Alberta if you're allowed to.
But there's like the hard working class who tend to respect reality, objectivity, facts, truth, reason and evidence.
And then there's this effect intellectual class that has never worked with their hands, don't understand objective reality, don't really live with any dangerous consequences, and so can have all of these weird abstract theories that you can't afford to have if you're doing dangerous jobs with your hands.
So anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
So because Alberta is Christian and is objective and believes in universal morality and so on.
It's kind of the enemy, right?
So they have to cripple Alberta in order to maintain their power base, right?
So this is just kind of important and it's kind of like a civil war, I think, in a political sense that's going on in Canada.
So this tweeter goes on to say, American oil production is now greater than the Saudi oil production and Trump, Trudeau therefore gave American prosperity to Trump.
and that's that's very very important right uh... so this attack upon the resource sector in canada and the manufacturing sector in canada which also occurred under the leftists uh... in in america under obama and so on has been catastrophic for the canadian economy and it's really really uh... tough uh... I've got friends whose businesses is in significant jeopardy because uh... the economy is not doing well and it's it's heartbreaking really heartbreaking So he's got a link here.
Growth in real domestic product slowed to 0.1% in the fourth quarter, the slowest pace since the second quarter of 2016.
Real gross national income fell by 1%, largely owing to lower export prices of crude oil and crude bitumen.
Final domestic demand was down 0.4% as investment continued to fall.
annual growth was 1.8% for 2018 following anyway so this is another thing too is this is carbon tax has gone in which is crushing Canadian real spending income right the disposable income and even non disposable income sometimes is being crushed by this new carbon tax and of course if you're the government and you get to pay a bunch of academics to come up with
climate change and then as a result of spending other people's money to promote climate change concerns you end up being able to tax in the, I don't know, billions and billions and billions of dollars.
But it's funny because the people say, well private companies you see will lie for profit but people never think of that in terms of government.
Just look at the cost-benefit analysis, look at the return on investment of spending other people's money so that you can raise taxes by billions and billions of dollars and of course raising taxes particularly on oil and gas and so on Well, it harms Alberta as well.
Alberta producing this kind of stuff, it's going to lower demand, right?
So this guy says last six months equals zero percent growth.
Worse to come.
China is stopping canola, pork and peas based on Trudeau's obstruction of justice.
The Saudis have stopped most trade because of Trudeau's insulting tweets or tweet.
And the USA has made Mexico It's biggest trading partner, as opposed to looking north, right?
So true focus is on these white supremacist boogeymen and global warming and so on.
And it's pretty harsh.
So if you look at, this is a chart here, Canada's economy contracted in February.
Look at the monthly change in Canada's real gross domestic product.
So seasonally adjusted.
February down 0.1%.
And this is, of course, at a time when hundreds of thousands of immigrants are pouring into Canada, so the idea that the economy is going down when more people are coming in is pretty terrible.
So, it is, you know, I mean, I guess... What can I say?
One of the things that happens is that A lot of government education and government-sponsored education like occurs in particularly arts degrees and universities is around sort of keeping basic reality at bay to the point where any truth that escapes the general fog of subjectivism appears like some weird predator, like some bizarre Joe Biden-shaped clown lurking at the foot of your children's bed.
People freak out when they get a basic truth, like when you say taxation is forced, when you say the government is an agency of coercion.
Just talk about basic sort of facts, which is exactly what was said by George Washington.
It's even been said by Barack Obama that the government is an agency of force.
People are just, these facts, these basic, simple, empirical, real facts, they're kept at bay from the population to the point where, when a fact emerges, it's incomprehensible to people.
It's like you've suddenly broken into fluent Klingon and yodeling some Chinese opera at them.
They simply, like, it does not compute, it does not fit.
And this, quote, education, which is really indoctrination, based on the denial of reality, is what we have to contend with those of us who are bringing basic truth to the world that we speak an essential language of reason and evidence that people are not versed in and are in fact programmed to oppose so this is where Canada is going and where the big choice is going to be if you look at the 2007-2008 recession
Stephen Harper's government for all of its flaws and problems did navigate Canada through that without joining the US in a crippling recession and given that Canada appears to be heading for a recession at the moment and don't give me this just pure business cycle stuff I mean the business cycle is important and I accept the Austrian economic school argument for the business cycle which I've talked about before on the show It's not just a mere business cycle.
Ideology matters.
Belief matters.
Will you allow the government to get out of the way and allow people to trade and the economy to grow?
Or do you impose ideology on voluntary human productivity and drag all economic productivity into the gutter?
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