Posts link to Epoch Times source. Immediately claims “I post credible sources!” You are good for a laugh, Scotty.

Everyone knows what your account is.

Yeah, we don’t want to financially punish someone for taking up public office, but we definitely need a better mechanism for preventing conflict of interests, especially in cases where someone is stepping into office from such a significant private sector life. That’s what I was getting at elsewhere in this discussion with my other comment about creating special funds for this purpose

That’s a bit silly. Assuming his portfolio was well designed before it went into a trust, the asset manager is not going to entirely rebalance the portfolio. It would actually be irresponsible gor them to do so because of the size of costs it would incur to him via forcing realized taxable gains. Also, things like stock options aren’t tradable assets in the same way as simple equities. It’s true he won’t know exactly the composition of his portfolio now, but he’ll have a decent idea of it, and when he has to pay taxes on any asset sales he’ll have an idea of movesthat were made. He’s the opposite of a financial neophyte. And, wrt the ethics screen, it’s really silly to think it’s actually going to prevent him making decisions that would affect Brookfield or businesses owned by Brookfield. Brookfield is just too big with fingers in too many pies not to be affected by economic and trade policy.

You don’t have to assume any negative intent or abuse to recognize that the blind trust and the ethics screen are not sufficient.

Scotty only posts to drive specific narratives while lashing out in accusatory ways against anyone who disagrees with them and claims everyone who does is a propagandist.

Then he posts links to bullshit sources like the Epoch Times.

It’s vile, but I also can’t help laughing at how obvious and dumb it is.

Wow! 19 meters is huge! That’s a true kraken.

There’s more than one way to read “I expect to see guillotines before accountability.”

It would be interesting to explore something like requiring a PM to liquidate assets they hold beyond things like a primary residence but making it free of any capital gains tax, then have a separate fund that tracks a basket of assets designed to be representative of the wealth and wellbeing of Canadians broadly but having an adjustable RoR based on broad measures of wellbeing. Could even make that available to all MPs and requiring ten years before divestment or something.

Totally just spitballing, but interesting to think of different ways of aligning incentives.

Carney also has a conflict of interest screen designed to prevent him from being involved in any decisions that could affect Brookfield Asset Management, Brookfield Corporation and Stripe.

Didn’t previously know about this, but how is that even supposed to be possible? Brookfield is massive. The idea that someone could lead foreign policy on trade and economics for Canada without affecting Brookfield just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way to make important decisions and act as a leader on these types of topics without having an impact on Brookfield.

Lol, Scotty Sockpuppet clocking in to start his shift! No real knowledge and has been absolutely cooked numerous times in the past but keeps showing up cause it’s his job.

Pretty sure I know what I’m talking about better than you do, and I’m doing it without resorting to some pretty unsavoury tropes. That’s bad faith.

Not only do they not keep their word, they use fake negotiations as a deceptive tactic and then kill the opposing negotiators. Not that I expect them to do that to Canada, but there’s no such thing as good faith negotiations from them.

The melamine scandal was almost 20 years ago and China has made dramatic progress on food safety since then. They updated their food inspection laws 10 years ago to among the strictest in the world. And, the pressure to improve was internal, not external. If you think 40 million Canadians matter anything like as much to their government as 1.4 billion Chinese, and that we’re going to be the ones applying pressure to them, you’re in a fantasy world. China is on its own development path, and its economy is almost 15× the size of ours.

Yes, we need to gate access to our market according to our standards, and we need to actually enforce those standards at the gate, but that’s an us thing. If we’re failing to do that it’s a problem we need to fix, not something we need to tell China to fix. We are responsible for our own gate.

The Kingston farms, which you don’t seem to even understand what actually happened there, are actually an example of that. It was not a case of a Chinese supplier buying a Canadian farm to access Canada’s supply. They built the whole thing from the ground up. It’s one of the biggest instances of FDI in Canadian agricultural history because they didn’t just acquire distribution. Canada Royal Milk is a subsidiary of a Chinese company, built by that Chinese company and reaching Canadian standards inside Canada. It’s sold in China as a Canadian import to differentiate from other brands, but it’s from a source built and owned by a Chinese company. It’s also sold in Canada after fully passing CFIA standards.

The plant was actually big in the news because it had issues with standards early on and the Canadian regulatory enforcement wasn’t doing its job decently until both the plant and the regulators got called out by CBC. But, after being shamed into actual enforcement it has been fine and is apparently at Canadian standards. They are now our biggest domestic producer of infant formula sold here in Canada , passing Canadian standards, by a Chinese-built, owned and operated company.

In fact, we probably should be asking if they came here because Canada has developed a reputation for being soft on actual enforcement. China’s new laws included criminal liability for corporate corner-cutting, but Canada has developed a reputation for paper-thin oversight and no teeth. Just look at what’s going on in our grocery stores now with all kinds of violations that get little financial slaps on the wrist that companies are happy to accept as cost of doing business.

It’s not 2008 anymore, and the world isn’t what it was in the 19th or 20th centuries either. You should catch up with 2026 and ditch the xenophobic tropes and paternalism. We have our own shit to take care of, like making sure our regulators are capable, funded and have teeth, and that our media like the CBC are well-funded.

This post is dripping with paternalism. China has been lifting itself. The milk powder issue was taken very seriously in China and China has already been making dramatic strides in safety regulation and standards. China is a massive country and most of it is still developing, so of course there are issues, but it’s hardly a matter of Canada having to lift China up, and saying China lacks institutional and cultural capacity to operate at Canada’s level is kind of ironic when a big part of the problem for Canada is putting nice laws on paper and then having terrible enforcement, not to mention also having corruption. If Canada has clear regulations and adequate inspection and enforcement, Canada can keep out things that are an issue. An inadequate amount of inspection and enforcement is a Canadian problem. We do it all the time in many areas, writing nice rules and then sitting on our hands about them whereas in terms of pace of change and directional travel China is moving much more quickly on the regulations and enforcement despite starting from further behind and with a much more complex market to regulate. We need to be doing better on our side.

The episode was embodied by a photo taken at one of the events in a private home, depicting smiling donors hovering around the then-prime minister as he learned how to make Chinese dumplings.

Oh no! Not dumplings!

A US attack was war gamed by CAF back in January and the conclusion was that Canada’s defense would have to be asymmetric because we wouldn’t have a chance at anything else.

Good article and an important conversation. Would anyone really be shocked by a Liberal government engaged in cronyism, conflict of interest, and ethics scandals? And the way our public has been frightened into accepting massive increases in military spending while civil servants needed for scrutiny and oversight are being thinned is a perfect recipe for corruption.

It’s not over 'til it’s over. We’re not out of the woods yet.

This. Canadians are being walked down the garden path with patriotic rhetoric and fear to motivate us, but it’s not leading where we’re being promised. People will wake up in ten years and realize we’re deeper than ever in the US security architecture and with more foreign ownership in critical industries.

Our AI minister really isn’t focused on regulation. He’s in the role to be very focused on business, entrepreneurship and investment, none of which are keen on a heavy regulatory hand. The government is doing some decent stuff on the focus they’ve chosen, but it’s not a focus aimed toward safety, and they don’t want to scare off investment, talent, or big corporates, so I don’t expect much in terms of real accountability.

Concentrated capital rules the world, and it’s only getting more concentrated.