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National

Trudeau Must Resign From Board Overseeing Leadership Race and Call for Investigation Into Foreign Interference

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The Bureau

Calls for Trudeau’s Recusal From LPC Board, Citing Bias Toward Mark Carney

By Elbert K. Paul, CPA – CA

I am a registered Liberal and former director and chair of the audit committee of the Federal Liberal Agency of Canada “(FLAC)” and have served seven leaders of the Liberal Party of Canada “(LPC)”, including four Prime Ministers. I am a former partner of a major national accounting firm.

With the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the LPC has the urgent challenge to respond creatively. That should involve an invigorated and new vision of the profound needs of Canadians and the world. We are reminded of the ancient saying:

“Where there is no vision, the people perish…”

The purpose of this Op Ed is twofold – to demonstrate that:

Firstly, although the Prime Minister has resigned, Registered Liberals should demand that, effective immediately, he recuse himself from the LPC board overseeing the leadership process.

Secondly, Registered Liberals should demand an investigation into foreign interference in the LPC leadership process.

As reported in The Bureau on January 7, 2025, “Trudeau Clinging Like A ‘Low-Key Autocrat,’” Jeremy Nuttall correctly asserts:

“This isn’t normal. Not even close. Even the most eccentric of Prime Ministers in any other commonwealth country would likely be licking their wounds in Ibiza by now, watching the chaos unfold from a safe distance. Not this Prime Minister… the only bar lower at this point would be if Trudeau goes back on his promise to resign. I’ll really believe he’s gone when he’s gone.”

And Bloomberg‘s December 20, 2024 report raises legitimate concerns over a conflict of interest and apprehension of bias that exists with the Prime Minister and Mark Carney. Specifically, it reported that Trudeau informed Chrystia Freeland on December 13, 2024, that she would soon be out as finance minister. She was deeply upset and felt betrayed. Mark Carney was taking over, Trudeau
told her.

This action toward Chrystia Freeland suggests that the Prime Minister may favour Mark Carney. The Prime Minister is not only the LPC leader, he is also on the board of the LPC. The LPC board will be making key decisions regarding the process for selection of a new leader. To date, the leading candidates are Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland. As a result of his conduct, the Prime Minister is in a conflict of interest and there is an apprehension of bias in favour of Mark Carney.

It is compellingly rational to demand that, effective immediately, the Prime Minister recuse himself from the Liberal Party of Canada board overseeing the Liberal Party of Canada leadership process.

I recommend in my second objective that Registered Liberals should demand an investigation into possible foreign interference in the LPC leadership process.

On the current LPC website it states that the party looks forward to running a secure, fair, and national race that will elect the next Leader of the party.

As reported by the CBC on January 10, 2025, in response to concerns about foreign interference, the Liberal leadership contest now requires voters to be Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Liberal Party national campaign co-chair Terry Duguid tells Power & Politics that the party will verify the status of registered voters.

However, my Op Ed dated March 11, 2024, based on The Bureau’s reporting, demonstrates that the Liberal government, led by the dishonorable leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has failed to address the following vital and relevant issues:

a. Expedite Revisions to Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist
Financing Act S.C. 2000, c. 17 r.
b. Immediately respond to the B.C. Cullen Commission Report,
c. Improve the capacity of The Office of the Superintendent of Financial
Institutions
d. Implement immediately a foreign registry like that of the U.S. and Great
Britain.

Also, as reported in my March 2024, Op Ed in The Bureau, an investigation should be initiated to address contributions totaling $65,000 to the Prime Minister’s Papineau Federal Liberal Association. These contributions involve possible contravention of Section 363(1) of the Election Act, being ineligible
contributions from a foreign person or entity. This reporting is detailed in Wilful Blindness Third Edition by Sam Cooper—essential reading for insights into malign foreign powers infiltrating Canada’s political systems, eroding democracy, and threatening prosperity.

To address the profound concern of Registered Liberals and the Canadian public on the issue of foreign interference I make the following recommendation to be implemented immediately:

Federal Liberal Agency of Canada, as chief agent of the Liberal Party of Canada “(LPC)” and independent from the LPC Board, should engage Price Waterhouse Coopers “(PWC)”, being the LPC external auditors, to investigate foreign interference in the current LPC leadership election process. The purpose of this
investigation is to demonstrate the efficacy and legitimacy of the LPC leadership process in addressing potential foreign interference to Registered Liberals and the Canadian public.

There is a precedent for this proposed action. I, in my capacity of chair of the FLAC audit committee, along with others, on March 25, 2013, engaged PWC to perform certain procedures to ensure the efficacy and effectiveness of the voting system. PWC reported the results of their investigation to the LPC National Meeting.

Conclusion

The Canadian liberal democracy is a safeguard against autocracy and includes many benefits, including individual rights, universal suffrage and participation, separation of powers, peaceful conflict resolution, economic opportunity and equality, government transparency and accountability, rule of law and judicial
independence, and self-critique.

We are profoundly blessed in Canada with abundant natural resources and a gifted ethnic mosaic from around the world. However, there are malign foreign powers infiltrating our political systems and eroding the extraordinary benefits of Canadian liberal democracy. We are reminded of our call to vigilance in our National Anthem:

O Canada!

Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all of us command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

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Energy

LATE TO THE PARTY: Liberal Resource Minister Minister Suddenly Discovers Canada Needs East-West Pipeline

Published on

From Energy Now

By Jim Warren

On Thursday, February 6 federal energy and natural resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told reporters about a brilliant idea he’d come up with. He said Canada should think about building an east-west oil pipeline. He claimed doing so could provide Ontario, Quebec and parts further east greater security of supply.

Furthermore, such a pipeline would eliminate the need to buy tanker loads of oil from places like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. And what’s more it could provide us with the opportunity to export Canadian oil to countries other than the US.

Talk about being late to the party. It’s as though the Energy East project never made it onto the national agenda.

Wilkinson told reporters how a pipeline like Enbridge’s Line 5 is vulnerable to shut down by US authorities. Line 5 carries oil from the prairies through the northern US Midwest before delivering it to the refinery and petrochemicals facilities at Sarnia, Ontario.

This is not breaking news. The Liberals have been well aware of the threat for years. Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer waged a well-publicized multi-year campaign to have Line 5 shut down.

According to a CBC report, Wilkinson said, “successive Canadian governments never really gave it much thought that a lot of the energy the country needs to power its economy flows through the U.S.”

That’s a stretch. He apparently doesn’t consider the governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan to be Canadian governments. The real problem is Ottawa wasn’t listening when premiers Notley, Kenney, Smith, Wall and Moe explained the value of an all-Canadian Energy East pipeline. They also had plenty to say about the cancellation of Energy East in 2017 and the role Ottawa played by creating the regulatory approval quagmire that helped kill it.

No less puzzling is that Wilkinson imagines such a pipeline could ever be built under the BANANAs (build absolutely nothing, anywhere, near anything) regulatory barriers implemented by the Liberals which make it next to impossible for anyone to build a new pipeline. When Jason Kenney referred to Bill C-69 as The No More Pipelines Bill he wasn’t just whistling Dixie.

The only major export pipeline to be built in the wake of C-69, was the Trans Mountain expansion (TMX). And it was only completed because the owner, the Government of Canada, was prepared to incur the staggering costs of navigating its own pipeline approval regulations. A pipeline originally budgeted to cost $6.8 billion wound up costing an additional $54 billion. Sane investors simply aren’t prepared to accept that level of unreasonable cost and uncertainty.

A first step in getting new pipelines built would be eliminating Bill C-69 along with Bill C-48, the West coast tanker ban. Wilkinson didn’t touch on those points when telling reporters about his bold new idea.

One has to wonder, after11 years of anti-oil and anti-pipeline policy making, if Wilkinson really means what he’s saying. Has he truly experienced a road to Damascus level conversion due to the threat of US tariffs?

Another plausible explanation for Wilkinson’s call for the resurrection of Energy East is that he’s seen the polling numbers. An Angus Reid poll conducted earlier this month shows 79% of Canadians from across the country support new oil and gas pipelines to tidewater on the east and west coasts. The poll also shows 74% of Quebec respondents now support the idea of building new pipelines to tidewater.

If those numbers hold, Canada’s next government could possibly revisit Energy East. If they succeeded in getting the line built it would represent the most visionary nation building project since the building of the trans-continental railway.

No less surprising is, despite the rise in public support for pipelines, Quebec Premier Francois Legault says he won’t accept a new oil pipeline in his province. Legault is out of step with Quebec opinion on more issues than pipelines. The separatist Parti Quebecois is currently leading Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec by 10 points in party preference polls. This is not to say the PQ is any more pipeline friendly.

After11 years of Liberal anti-oil and anti-pipeline policy making, Wilkinson is finally on the right side of the Energy East idea. Some might say better late than never—better to change one’s mind than to continue being wrong. Others will say it is a flip flop of epic proportions and questionable sincerity. Skeptical pundits will question whether Wilkinson’s new found fondness for pipelines is any more credible than Mark Carney’s pledge to get rid of the carbon tax.

Wilkinson is a bright man, so it is possible he has believed Energy East was a good idea for some time. Too bad he didn’t tell us sooner. He waited too long to come clean to expect electoral redemption.

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Business

Do Minimum Wage Laws Accomplish Anything?

Published on

The Audit

David Clinton

All the smart people tell us that, one way or another, increasing the minimum wage will change society. Proponents claim raising pay at the low end of the economy will help low-income working families survive in hyper-expensive communities. Opponents claim that artificially increasing employment costs will either drive employers towards adopting innovative automation integrations or to shut down their businesses altogether. Either way, goes the anti-intervention narrative, there will be fewer jobs available.

Well, what’ll it be? Canadian provinces have been experimenting with minimum wage laws for many years. And since 2021, the federal government has imposed its own rate for employees of all federally regulated industries. There should be plenty of good data out there by now indicating who was right.

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Historical records on provincial rates going back decades is available from Statistics Canada. For this research, I used data starting in 2011. Since new rates often come into effect mid-year, I only applied a year’s latest rate to the start of the following year. 2022 itself, for simplicity, was measured by the new federal rate, with the exception of British Columbia who’s rate was $0.10 higher than the federal rate.

My goal was to look for evidence that increasing statutory wage rates impacted these areas:

  • Earnings among workers in full-service restaurants
  • Operating profit margins for full-service restaurants
  • Total numbers of active businesses in the accommodation and food services industries

I chose to focus on the food service industry because it’s particularly dependent on low-wage workers and particularly sensitive to labour costs. Outcomes here should tell us a lot about the impact such government policies are having.

Restaurant worker income is reported as total numbers. In other words, we can see how much all of, say, Manitoba’s workers combined took home in a given year. For those numbers to make sense, I adjusted them using overall provincial populations.

Income in British Columbia and PEI showed a strong correlation to increasing minimum wages. Interestingly, BC has consistently had the highest of all provinces’ minimum wage while PEI’s has mostly hung around the middle of the pack. Besides a weak negative correlation in Saskatchewan, there was no indication that income in other provinces either dropped or grew in sync with increases to the minimum wage.

Nation-wide, by weighting results by population numbers, we got a Pearson coefficient 0.30. That means it’s unlikely that wage rate changes had any impact on take-home income.

Did increases harm restaurants? It doesn’t look like it. I used data measuring active employer businesses in the accommodation and food services industries. No provinces showed any impact on business startups and exits that could be connected to minimum wage laws. Overall, Canada’s coefficient value was 0.29 – again a very weak positive relationship.

So restaurants haven’t been collapsing at epic, extinction-level rates. But do government minimums cause a reduction in their operating profit margins? Apparently not. If anything, they’ve become more profitable!

The nation-wide coefficient between minimum wages and restaurant profitability was 0.88 – suggesting a strong correlation. But how could that be happening? Don’t labour costs make up a major chunk of food service operating expenses? Here are a few possible explanations:

  • Perhaps many restaurants respond to rising costs by increasing their menu prices. This can work out well if market demand turns out to be relatively inelastic and people continue eating out despite higher prices.
  • Higher wages might lead to lower employee turnover, reducing hiring and training costs.
  • A higher minimum wage boosts worker incomes, leading to more disposable income in the economy. Although the flip-side is that we can’t see strong evidence of higher worker income.
  • Higher wages can force unprofitable, inefficient restaurants to close, leaving stronger businesses with higher market share.

In any case, my big-picture verdict on government intervention into private sector wage rates is: thanks but don’t bother. All that effort doesn’t seem to have improved actual incomes on a population scale. At the same time, it also hasn’t driven industries with workers at the low-end of the pay scale to devastating collapse.

But I’m sure it has taken up enormous amounts of public service time and resources that could undoubtedly have been more gainfully spent elsewhere. More important, as the economist Alex Tabarrok recently pointed out, minimum wage laws have been shown to reduce employment for the disabled and measurably increase both consumer prices and workplace injuries.

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