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National

The political welfare straw man

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6 minute read

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Author: Jay Goldberg

After taking office, Ford started decreasing political welfare payments. But once the pandemic hit, Ford cranked the payments up to all-time highs, blaming the pandemic for making it more difficult for political parties to fundraise.

For Ontario’s political parties, the jig may finally be up.

Premier Doug Ford is just six months away from scrapping Ontario’s political welfare system. Political welfare has been a golden goose for the province’s political bigwigs and a nightmare for everyday taxpayers.

The program will soon be relegated to the ash heap of history, so long as Ford doesn’t go wobbly.

How did we get here?

Nearly a decade ago, former premier Kathleen Wynne banned corporate and union donations to political parties in Ontario. But at the same time, she created a taxpayer-funded political welfare scheme. As a result, political parties get a set amount of money from taxpayers four times a year for every vote they received in the previous election – no strings attached.

In trying to sell this political welfare cash cow to Ontario taxpayers, Wynne presented the situation as a trade-off: to ban corporate and union donations to political parties, the so-called per-vote subsidy was needed.

“Democracy is not free,” argued one of Wynne’s ministers when the Liberals introduced the program.

Before Ford got to Queen’s Park, he knew all of that was hogwash.

“I do not believe the government should be taking money from hard-working taxpayers and giving it to political parties,” said Ford in 2018.

Political parties, Ford argued, should survive by raising money from everyday taxpayers. There was no need for corporate and union donations or taxpayer handouts.

Sadly, Ford lost his way.

After taking office, Ford started decreasing political welfare payments. But once the pandemic hit, Ford cranked the payments up to all-time highs, blaming the pandemic for making it more difficult for political parties to fundraise.

Of course, Ford didn’t let logic or facts get in the way. The truth is Ontario’s political parties raised millions during the pandemic and didn’t need taxpayer handouts.

But now it appears Ford is finally seeing the light: Wynne’s political welfare regime is set to expire at the end of 2024.

Let there be no mistake: there is no valid argument in favour of keeping this taxpayer atrocity.

Ontario’s political parties will not go broke when the taxpayer taps turn off next year. In fact, they’re currently swimming in buckets of cash.

The province’s four major political parties – the Progressive Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Greens – raised more than $14 million collectively in 2023, and currently have the same amount of money in the bank.

The PCs, Liberals and NDP all have at least $2.3 million in their bank accounts. Even the Green Party, which holds just one seat at Queen’s Park, is sitting on more than $500,000 in cash.

Clearly, Ontario’s political parties won’t go broke if they get off the taxpayer dole.

Even if Ontario’s political parties weren’t sitting on a massive war chest, the reality is they would adapt quickly to a new system reliant on small-dollar donations.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper ended the federal version of Wynne’s political welfare scheme over a decade ago. And corporate and union donations have been banned federally for two decades. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hasn’t so much as tweaked those changes.

Since Harper put an end to federal political welfare, Canada’s political parties have flourished.

They’ve all gotten better at appealing to everyday Canadians to make small-dollar donations and they’re raised more money since the per-vote subsidy was scrapped than they did before.

That’s exactly what will happen when Ford kiboshes Ontario’s version of the per-vote subsidy at the end of the year. And that’s how it should be.

If political parties want to raise cash, they should do so by winning over taxpayers, not raiding their wallets.

The deadline is looming, but the fight here in Ontario is far from over.

Ford extended the life of the political welfare regime before and he could do it again.

That means taxpayers must stay vigilant.

If Ford sticks to his word, Ontario taxpayers will have one less monkey on their backs come 2025.

Let’s make sure that comes to pass.

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Business

Carney’s carbon madness

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CAE Logo Dan McTeague

Well, we are in quite the pickle.

In nine plus years as prime minister, Justin Trudeau has waged a multi-front war on the consumption and production of hydrocarbon energy, and, with that, on our economy, our quality of life, and our cost of living.

Trudeau zealously pursued and implemented anti-energy policies, most infamously the consumer Carbon Tax, but let’s not forget his so-called ”Clean Fuel” regulations; his Industrial Carbon Tax; his proposed emissions caps; his Electric Vehicle subsidies and mandates; Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental positives of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard; and various other pieces of legislation which make the construction of new pipelines nearly impossible and significantly reduces our ability to sell our oil and gas overseas.

Every one of these policies can be traced back to the pernicious Net Zero ideology which informs them, and in which Trudeau and his bosom buddies — Gerald Butts, Steven Guilbeault, Mark Carney, etc — remain true believers.

And yet, despite those policies contributing to his party’s collapsing poll numbers and Trudeau’s unceremonious ouster, the Liberals are on the verge of naming as his replacement Mark Carney, one of the very Trudeau consiglieri who got us into this mess in the first place!

Now, Carney is currently doing everything in his power to downplay and dance around those aspects of his career which voters might find objectionable. He’s making quite a habit of it, in fact. And on the energy file, he’s being especially misleading, walking back his long-time support of the Carbon Tax — he’s said it has “served a purpose up until now” — and claiming that he intends to repeal it, while finding other ways to “make polluters pay.

This is nonsense. In fact, Carney is a Carbon Tax superfan, and, if you listen to him closely, his actual critique of the Trudeau tax isn’t that it has made it more expensive to heat our homes, gas up our cars, and pay for our groceries (which it has.) It’s that it is too visible to voters. His vow to “make polluters pay” means, in fact, that he intends to “beef up” Trudeau’s less discussed Industrial Carbon Tax, targeting businesses, which will ultimately pass the cost down to consumers.

He’s even discussed enacting a Carbon tariff, which would apply to trade with countries which don’t adopt the onerous Net Zero policies which he wants to force on Canada.

That’s just who Mark Carney is.

And, unfortunately, Donald Trump’s tariff threats have provoked a “rally round the flag” sentiment, enabling the Liberals to close the polling gap with the Conservatives, with some polls currently showing them neck-and-neck. Which is to say, there is a possibility that, whenever we get around to having an election, anti-American animus could keep the Liberals in power, and propel Carney to the top job in our government.

This is, in a word, madness.

Let us not forget that it was the Liberals’ policies — especially their assault on our “golden goose,” the natural resource sector — which left us in such a precarious fiscal state that Trudeau felt the need to fly to Mar-a-Lago and tell the newly elected president that a tariff would “kill” our economy. That’s what provoked Trump’s “51st state” crack in the first place.

Access to U.S. markets will always be important for Canadian prosperity — they, by leaps and bounds, are our largest trading partner, after all — but without the Net Zero nonsense, we could have been an energy superpower, providing an alternative source of oil and natural gas for those countries leary about relying for energy on less-environmentally conscious, human-rights-abusing petrostates. We could have filled the void created by Russia, when they made themselves a pariah state in Europe by invading Ukraine.

In short, we might have been set up to negotiate with the Trump Administration from a position of strength. Instead, we’re proposing to double-down on Net Zero, pledging allegiance to a program which will make us less competitive and more likely to be steamrolled by major powers, including the U.S. but also (and less frequently mentioned) China.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! And all in the name of nationalism.

Here’s hoping we wise up and change course while there’s still time. Because, in the words of America’s greatest philosopher, Yogi Berra, “It’s getting late early.”

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

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National

Mark Carney, Justin Trudeau both deeply tied to WEF, Communist China: report

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

‘For Canadian voters, understanding the intricate plutocratic web surrounding Trudeau and Carney is not an academic exercise—it offers a glimpse into the forces lining up to shape the nation’s climate, trade, and social policies,’ wrote investigate reporter Sam Cooper.

A new exposé by investigative journalist Sam Cooper claims there is compelling evidence that the Liberal Party’s top leadership candidate Mark Carney is strongly influenced by an “elite network” of foreign actors including those with ties to communist China and the World Economic Forum.

According to a recent article published by Cooper on his The Bureau Substack titled, “The Carney-Trudeau Nexus: How Financial Elites from Davos to Beijing Are Shaping Canada’s Next Federal Election,” Carney, similar to Trudeau, is involved in “a constellation of global influencers deeply tied” to both the WEF and Communist China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). 

“At its core, this network of remarkable figures—whose stated goals center on consolidating financial power across borders to coordinate carbon-reduction policies and progressive social outcomes—includes not just Carney and Trudeau but also former Canadian ambassador to China Dominic Barton, Trudeau campaign backers Mark Wiseman and Gerald Butts, and AIIB’s Jin Liqun, reportedly a senior Chinese Communist Party operative,” Cooper relayed in his report.

“For Canadian voters, understanding the intricate plutocratic web surrounding Trudeau and Carney is not an academic exercise—it offers a glimpse into the forces lining up to shape the nation’s climate, trade, and social policies,” the journalist asserted. 

Cooper observed that the WEF “has become a lightning rod for both criticism and political polarization,” with opponents accusing it of “fostering undemocratic policymaking, while defenders dismiss such concerns as conspiracy theories.” 

He noted that “an objective, network-based analysis of its ties to Beijing’s financial arms and the key figures in Carney’s orbit suggests a well-defined pattern of shared interests.” 

Cooper said that “[t]hese interests are likely to drive Canadian governance under Carney—unless he makes the illogical decision to sever ties with the power networks and public-private partnerships that have defined his ascent.” 

In the report, Cooper stated that it is an “undebatable fact” that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his potential replacement Mark Carney are part of a tangled web with the WEF and Communist China.  

He noted that both Trudeau and Carney are “so thoroughly woven together through global forums like the WEF that they are indistinguishable.” 

Carney’s connections with China are decades old. While serving at the Bank of England, Carney struck a deal with the People’s Bank of China that allowed all banks in England to approve of the Chinese Renminbi currency.

“Helping the internationalization of the Renminbi is a global good, consistent with London’s historic role,” noted Carney in a speech he gave about the move at the time. 

Despite the similarities between Carney and Trudeau, which extends beyond their globalists ties to issues such as abortion and the LGBT agenda, the former remains a frontrunner to take over for Trudeau as Liberal leader in a bid by the party to quell the fallout in popularity it has experienced in recent years.

The Liberal Party of Canada will choose its next leader, who will automatically become prime minister, on March 9.

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