It is understandable that people often prefer to associate with people of their own groups. It is just easier to converse, live with and do business with people that share a similar background. Personally, I find that boring, but understandable. The Great Browning is the notion that over the next few hundred years the concepts of White, Black, Asian, … will all be relegated to the history books as nearly everyone’s skin will be some light shade of brown. The…
With the sad news of the Christchurch New Zealand terrorist attack being carried out by yet another White Supremacist, we had read and seen dozens of news reports with titles like: US terror attacks are increasingly motivated by right-wing views. We started investigating this article believing the major media’s claim that that 70% of terror attacks in the United States are White Supremacist related: Over the last decade, 71% of domestic extremist related killings in the US were linked to…
The first time you heard of antitrust laws being used to break up large companies you likely thought that that it would result in a destruction wealth. Depending upon your political persuasion or past experience with the company, that may or may not have bothered you. However, it is important to remember that the driver behind antitrust law is to increase competition and innovation, there by creating more wealth. In fact, breaking up large companies is usually advantageous to the…
Imagine a scenario in which a major Canadian based company is facing the prospect of being seriously damaged as a result of their own wrongdoing, nearly a decade ago, in a third world country like India or Algeria, but not inside Canada or any of its notable partners. Imagine that company lobbying to admit their guilt, change management, pay massive fines in the $250M range and have a knife held to their throat for a decade to make sure they…
In this short video we took a 10 minute discussion about the Canadian economy an focused on the discussion about how Quebec’s SNC Lavalin is treated so differently from Western Canada’s Oil and Gas industry. If you have the time, the full discussion is quite interesting and you can watch it here on the BNN Bloomberg site: PART 1 and PART 2
The latest round of American Presidential Candidates has shown that those on the left of the political spectrum are just a as willing to ignore facts and as the political right. This is a potentially catastrophic death spiral. In today’s world voters need to think more and listen less as leaders on both sides of the political spectrum drive to emotion and ignore facts. Politics has always been a perception business and at its heart, the political system is a…
The China vs United States Trade war is a constant discussion in “The West” and is highly visible because it causes companies like Apple to talk about raising consumer prices. China is very different from the United States and here is why the Chinese consumer has very little concern about the Trade War: MEDIA: The Chinese Government controls the media and they are tamping down emotions. Compare this to President Trumps approach of screaming about the trade war daily which…
In the video below Canada’s top civil Servant Michael Wernick explains what is wrong with the media coverage of the SNC-Lavalin Case. He starts by explaining that there are many things in Canadian Politics that worry him: Inflammatory language “like treason and traitor” from social media and supposedly responsible politicians alike Physical violence against politicians “I am afraid someone is going to get shot this year during the political campaign” Foreign interference Reputation of people trying to help their country being…
There is much talk about “Deferred Prosecution Agreements” because of the SNC Lavalin bribery scandals. The insinuation from many media outlets is that a Deferred Prosecution Agreement lets companies go without punishment. This is far from how DPA’s actually work. Here are the top five things everyone should know about Deferred Prosecution Agreements: 1 – What a Deferred Prosecution Agreement Is: A Deferred Prosecution Agreement effectively has the company plead guilty and do whatever the Government prosecutor wants them to…
Much is being made about the 12% decline in new vehicle sales in Alberta this past December. It is being attributed to the price of “Western Canadian Select” oil collapsing in the fall of 2018 and the Notely NDP Governments response to it. Also, Oshawa Ontario’s GM plant closure has caused much news relating to how many vehicles are sold in Ontario and how the plant closure will affect GM sales going forward. We wanted to know what the numbers…
There is a lot of hype around possible political interference in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin Libyan & Algerian bribery scandals involving Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Prime Ministers Office and former Canadian Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould. However, we want to know why the Canadian Government is still so aggressively going after SNC in the first place. Karl Moore of McGill University explains in the video below that SNC Lavalin has already repeatedly admitted guilt and paid massive fines in various…
I have helped the Alberta Wild Rose a.k.a. United Conversation Party (UCP) and the Federal Conservatives in many ways over the decades. From telecom equipment, to consulting, to canvasing, to paying for advertising, to IT support, to donations, to… well you get the point. However I have found it increasingly difficult to support the Alberta UCP and the Federal Conservatives in recent years and today may have been the breaking point. I was out shoveling my neighbors driveways when I…
If the insane value gyrations, scams and exchange failures of crypto currencies have not scared you away from them, this story should do the trick. QuadrigaCX was a Canadian based Crypto Currency Exchange until a few days ago when the founder, Gerald Cotten, died and took the decryption codes to his grave. This means about CDN $200M of ‘investor’ money is forever lost in hyperspace. To make this story worse, the are some very smelly peculiarities to it: It is extremely unusual that…
The “Oil Curse” or “Curse of Oil” or “Resource Curse” is the net negative outcome that is seen with any single industry that takes over a geographic area. The central idea is that when oil is discovered in an undeveloped land, like rural Africa, the initial promise of great wealth results in rapid development and that leads to what economists call ‘externalities’. Externalities are charges that should be calculated as part of the cost of development but instead are pushed…
There is a lot of conversation around various sources of pollution but many of them have no context so you really can’t get a mental grip on how serious the problem really is. Below is a chart we built with data collected by the University of Calgary. We hope it will help you put things in perspective. This data is specific to Canada in 2015 and while the numbers are shown in the outermost ring and in the table below,…
Three days ago Linda Mcquaig wrote an article in the Toronto Star saying: Trudeau should consider buying GM and making electric cars …Yet, oddly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed no such careful consideration when he promptly jumped in with 4.5 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the leaky, 65-year-old Trans Mountain pipeline last spring, declaring it “in the national interest” to ensure the pipeline’s expansion after the corporate owner threatened to back out of the project. And taxpayers could be on…