Juno News - May 23, 2021


$3 million for luxury car dealership while the rest of Canadian businesses suffer

Topics
corporate welfare and luxury dealership grant
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Justin Trudeau Jay Goldberg Porsches
Why are so many Canadians still in favour of lockdowns？ What would Canada do if something much worse than COVID-19 happened？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

168.11

Word count

782

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A Porsche dealership in Ottawa has been given a grant of $2.9 million to build a new car dealership. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation wants to know why the government should be giving corporate welfare to a car dealer building a Porsche dealership.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:10.840 We still have millions of Canadians who are out of work,
00:00:14.820 people whose jobs have been put in jeopardy
00:00:17.120 because the government shut them down.
00:00:20.440 Various levels of government have put in many measures
00:00:23.620 that have harmed ordinary people over the last,
00:00:26.060 coming up on, what, 15, 16 months now.
00:00:28.000 But fear not, all is not lost
00:00:30.260 because a grant has been given in Ottawa
00:00:32.840 for $2.9 million to build a Porsche luxury car dealership.
00:00:39.920 Yes, the city of Ottawa has given $2.9 million
00:00:43.380 to build a world-class Porsche dealership.
00:00:47.200 I mean, is there any other kind, really?
00:00:48.940 And it was approved by the Finance and Economic Development Committee.
00:00:53.420 Now, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is saying
00:00:56.500 that Ottawa should not be spending taxpayer money
00:00:58.460 on any kind of corporate welfare.
00:01:00.380 He says Ottawa could use this money to fix potholes
00:01:02.720 or give families a bit of tax relief,
00:01:04.940 but no subsidy to a dealership selling cars
00:01:08.080 that cost more than most people make in a year.
00:01:11.100 And I do think that Jay Goldberg from the CTF
00:01:14.220 makes a good point when he talks about how
00:01:15.920 there shouldn't really be any corporate welfare of this kind,
00:01:19.200 but certainly not corporate welfare
00:01:20.920 that is basically subsidizing Porsches.
00:01:23.500 Porsches, because if Porsche the company
00:01:25.860 doesn't need to pay for its dealership,
00:01:27.700 that means that either it can make more profit
00:01:29.940 by selling Porsches or it can offer people cheaper Porsches.
00:01:33.240 Either way, not something that I would say
00:01:35.320 is passing the government infrastructure test,
00:01:38.460 even in Canada in 2021.
00:01:41.640 I go back to March when the Canadian Chamber of Commerce,
00:01:45.040 which did a survey of its businesses and stakeholders,
00:01:48.220 found that 51%, so half of Canadian businesses,
00:01:51.420 were uncertain if they could remain open.
00:01:55.740 51%.
00:01:56.180 If you do not have small business and medium-sized businesses
00:02:00.120 driving economic growth, you cease to have an economy.
00:02:04.420 So when half of the businesses in the country are saying
00:02:06.780 they don't think they can stay open,
00:02:08.600 this is before, by the way,
00:02:09.980 Ontario's latest stay-at-home order,
00:02:12.160 before Alberta put in more shutdowns, 0.59
00:02:14.320 before British Columbia put in more shutdowns,
00:02:16.620 you cease to have an economy.
00:02:18.480 And just this week, for example,
00:02:20.580 the Canadian Federation of Independent Business
00:02:22.660 released a projection that they shared
00:02:25.160 with the Senate Finance Committee
00:02:26.480 that says 58,000 businesses have already closed permanently
00:02:31.080 since the beginning of the pandemic,
00:02:32.520 with now around 180,000 near closure.
00:02:37.160 He says one in six businesses,
00:02:39.380 I mean, 51%, that was to do with confidence.
00:02:42.200 Do I think I can make it through?
00:02:43.980 These are harder numbers from the CFIB.
00:02:45.900 One in six businesses at risk of permanent closure,
00:02:49.640 180,000 businesses across Canada
00:02:51.880 will shut their doors forever
00:02:53.080 before the end of the pandemic,
00:02:55.160 bringing with them 2.4 million private sector jobs.
00:02:59.080 Now, if you're the Liberals
00:03:00.200 and you think everything should be a public sector job,
00:03:02.860 this may not bother you all that much.
00:03:04.380 The more people dependent on government,
00:03:06.380 the more control Justin Trudeau has
00:03:08.220 over the country's economy,
00:03:09.740 and by extensions, the workers in it.
00:03:12.640 But this is huge.
00:03:13.860 One in six businesses,
00:03:14.980 and I'm going to keep saying that number,
00:03:16.320 one in six,
00:03:17.640 because this is not just about a lack of jobs
00:03:20.900 for the people owning the businesses
00:03:22.820 and running them,
00:03:23.720 but all of the people they employ.
00:03:25.760 Fewer local goods for people to buy,
00:03:27.840 which means they're forced to buy imported goods
00:03:30.280 that are sold at the Walmarts or from Amazon.
00:03:33.060 And I'm a big believer in a free market,
00:03:35.200 which means you should make that choice.
00:03:37.220 But when government is the one telling businesses
00:03:40.120 they cannot open,
00:03:41.220 it's government that's signing the death warrant
00:03:43.900 for all of these businesses.
00:03:46.080 And that's why,
00:03:47.060 despite being a fiscal conservative,
00:03:48.940 I've always been in support
00:03:50.700 of the pandemic response measures
00:03:53.000 like CERB, like SEBA,
00:03:55.080 like all of these measures
00:03:56.220 that have been targeted to individuals and businesses,
00:03:58.580 because government does not have the right
00:04:00.620 to tell you you can't work and not compensate.
00:04:03.900 Although my preferred outcome
00:04:05.300 is that government doesn't tell people
00:04:07.160 they can't work.
00:04:08.380 But this is exactly what's happening.
00:04:10.640 So 238,000 businesses
00:04:12.600 could wind up permanently closed.
00:04:15.540 That's the restaurant you love
00:04:16.740 that you're never going to get to go to again.
00:04:18.440 That's the sporting goods store
00:04:19.820 around the corner that you like
00:04:21.100 that's going to be gone forever.
00:04:22.440 That is all of this stuff
00:04:24.100 that completely fuels the economy
00:04:25.840 that the federal government
00:04:27.160 and the provincial governments
00:04:28.320 simply do not care about.
00:04:30.520 If you liked watching this clip
00:04:32.240 of the Andrew Lawton Show,
00:04:33.500 True North has lots more for you
00:04:35.300 all over at www.tnc.news.