Business
Taxpayers spent $15 million on Fauci’s private security, chauffeur after he left government

From LifeSiteNews
By Matt Lamb
“Our country is $33 trillion in debt. Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for Dr. Fauci’s security detail, especially when Fauci was one of the highest-paid federal employees in the U.S”
American taxpayers spent at least $15 million on security and a private driver for Dr. Anthony Fauci after he left his government job.
Open the Books obtained “memorandum of understanding” covering January 4, 2023 through September 20, 2024 along with independent journalist Jordan Schachtel.
The government watchdog group said it is seeking information on if the contract is still in force. Fauci retired at the end of 2022.
The highest-paid federal employee, Fauci left the government after decades of work. For almost two years, if not longer, taxpayers spent money so he could have a private driver. This despite the fact that Fauci has an estimated net worth of $11 million and continues to profit off his experience in the government, including writing a book and speaking at events.
The exact specifics of the agreement are new. However, Republicans have previously criticized the special arrangement, after it came to light last year that Fauci continued to receive perks despite ostensibly retiring.
“When I discovered that Dr. Fauci still had a taxpayer-funded driver and personal guards after he stepped down, I felt that it was another example of Washington bureaucrats putting themselves above the American people,” Congressman Dale Strong said last year. He introduced legislation to end the special agreement.
“Our country is $33 trillion in debt. Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for Dr. Fauci’s security detail, especially when Fauci was one of the highest-paid federal employees in the U.S,” Strong said.
The special deal comes after Fauci botched the handling of COVID-19, including by downplaying concerns it leaked from a lab in China. He also made misleading statements about the National Institutes of Health and its connection to a controversial lab in Wuhan, China.
He also made incorrect, and incredibly damaging, statements to the American public about the need for widespread lockdowns and other social restrictions and claimed that the COVID shots were both “safe” and “effective” against the spread of the virus. Faced with criticism, Fauci claimed that the attacks on him were really assaults on “science.”
As Open the Books reminds readers:
But his detractors recall a government official who led the fight to implement years-long draconian restrictions upon the American people, which devastated the fabric of U.S. society, greatly harmed the economy and caused all kinds of additional negative repercussions – including widespread learning loss among America’s youth. Fauci was never shy to advocate for lockdowns, social distancing, school closures, business closures, mask mandates, and vaccine passports from his powerful federal perch during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Senator Rand Paul, a frequent critic of Fauci, criticized Fauci’s taxpayer-funded arrangement.
“No more $ for the guy who funded dangerous research in Wuhan.,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Open the Books spokesman Christopher Neefus said the NIH has a “pattern of obfuscation when it comes to the NIH’s financial arrangements.”
“Whether it’s Dr. Fauci’s contract and full compensation, or the NIH’s multibillion-dollar royalty complex, we’ve been working for years to get full transparency,” Neefus told National Review.
Fauci’s support for the shot included going door-to-door with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to browbeat residents into taking the jabs.
A PBS profile showed Bowser, who broke her own forced masking rules, going door-to-door with a crowd of people inquiring about their personal choices concerning shots.
“They need a push, a push, and a drag,” Mayor Bowser says in one clip, to Fauci’s approval, as LifeSiteNews previously reported.
Fauci, who retired at the end of December 2022, can be seen on the documentary criticizing Republican states and the people in those states in particular who declined to take the abortion-tainted jab.
“[Red states] are going to keep the outbreak smoldering in the country [because they won’t get jabbed],” he tells Bowser, who is part of the canvassing crowd. The video is from June 2021. “It’s so crazy. They’re not doing it because they say they don’t want to. They’re Republicans. They don’t like being told what to do. We need to break that.”
2025 Federal Election
Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

Dan McTeague
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”
The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!
Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.
But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”
Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.
No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.
Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.
Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.
But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.
Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.
Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.
The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.
EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.
Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.
And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.
So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”
A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.
These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.
But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
2025 Federal Election
Three cheers for Poilievre’s alcohol tax cut

By Franco Terrazzano
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation applauds Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre’s commitment to end and reverse the alcohol escalator tax.
“Poilievre just promised major alcohol tax cuts and taxpayers will cheers to that,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Poilievre’s tax cut will save Canadians money every time they have a cold one with a buddy or enjoy a glass of Pinot with their better half and it will give Canadians brewers, distillers and wineries a fighting chance against tariffs.”
Today, federal alcohol taxes increased by two per cent, costing taxpayers about $40 million this year, according to Beer Canada.
Poilievre announced a Conservative government “will axe the escalator tax on wine, beer and spirits back to 2017 levels, ending the automatic annual tax increases.”
The alcohol escalator tax has automatically increased excise taxes on beer, wine and spirits every year, without a vote in Parliament, since 2017. The alcohol escalator tax has cost taxpayers more than $900 million since being imposed, according to Beer Canada.
Taxes from multiple levels of government account for about half of the price of alcohol.
Meanwhile, tariffs are hitting the industry hard. Brewers have described the tariffs as “Armageddon for craft brewing.”
“Automatic tax hikes are undemocratic, uncompetitive and unaffordable and they need to stop,” Terrazzano said. “If politicians think Canadians aren’t paying enough tax, they should at least have the spine to vote on the tax increase.
“Poilievre is right to end the escalator tax and all party leaders should commit to making life more affordable for Canadian consumers and businesses by ending the undemocratic alcohol tax hikes.”
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