EZRA LEVANT ｜ Trudeau dishes out $2 billion contract to buy votes in Quebec
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Summary
Justin Trudeau chose the highest bidder for his new rural internet scheme, and Elon Musk's SpaceX did a spacewalk, and it's awesome to behold. I explain why, and why I think Justin Trudeau should go with SpaceX.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. Just an astonishing move by Justin Trudeau's cabinet, deciding to go with
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the highest bidder on internet services rather than lowest bidder so they can give make work,
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fake work jobs to Montreal and bash Elon Musk at the same time. I'll explain what I'm talking about.
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But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. Just go to
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rebelnewsplus.com. That's the video version of this podcast. Especially today, I want to show you
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some amazing video from the first privately funded spacewalk. Did you know that over the last few
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days, Elon Musk had four private sector astronauts in space and they did a spacewalk and it's not a
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government program. It's not NASA. They were doing a spacewalk and it is awesome to behold. I want to
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show you those video clips. So go to rebelnewsplus.com and click subscribe. All right, here's today's
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Tonight, why did Trudeau choose the highest bidder for his new rural internet scheme? It's September 16th,
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Hey, remember about a year ago when the Maui wildfires wiped out so much of the western side of that
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island, including the internet. And I went to Maui with a Starlink satellite internet system
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that I had rented in Vancouver for just a couple hundred bucks. And it was so small and light,
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I could fit it in the overhead compartment of the plane. And I took it to Maui and I wasn't sure if
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it would work. And it worked. It gave us internet in this area that had been knocked out. And we shared
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that internet access with a variety of people and other people were bringing those Starlink systems
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too. Very cheap. It was so cheap. The guy I rented it from in Vancouver said he wasn't sure if it would
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work in the middle of the Pacific. He didn't know if it was registered or locked in. And I thought
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for 200 bucks, which is what I think I paid to rent it for a week or two, I thought, I'll risk it. And it
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absolutely worked. It worked great, high speed. It was idiot proof, like I could set it up with no
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problem. And it was sort of a miracle. We forget how plugged in we are until we don't have internet.
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And that was my first experience with Starlink because I live in a big city, but I know other
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people who live in the country, explore by them too. And of course, the founder of Starlink, because of
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its relationship with the rocket ship company, SpaceX is Elon Musk. And I got a question for
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you. If we're trying to bring internet to Canada's vast North, do you think we should use Starlink?
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Do you think we should use SpaceX? Cheap, proven to work, working right now? Or do you think
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Justin Trudeau, I'm laughing even before I tell you the punchline. Do you think Justin Trudeau can take
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taxpayers money to try to invent a competitor system that is cheaper and better by handing out
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billions of dollars to his friends in Quebec? What do you think we should do? I'll come back to that
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later. I just want to talk a little bit more about Starlink because I'm sort of excited by them.
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I just saw a couple days ago, United Airlines, which is one of the largest American airlines, has
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announced they're going to put Starlink in its entire fleet of a thousand planes. And they're
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going to have high speed internet for free in a thousand of their planes. And I just want to show
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you a little bit about what United says that'll look like, because if it is indeed high speed,
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imagine streaming video calls or whatever from the plane. Take a look.
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All systems are go. Transmission starting in three, two, one.
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That's Elon Musk. You and I think of Elon Musk perhaps as the Twitter guy. And it's true because
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we're Twitter centric. But I tell you, a lot more people are probably being touched by him
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through his global, cheap, reliable internet. And of course, the rocket ship company that puts all
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those satellites into space. That's how Starlink works. Just this week, like just a couple days ago,
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they had a private space flight to the International Space Station. Did you know that's happening? I find
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that sort of incredible. SpaceX launches four private citizens, including two Saudis, on commercial flight
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to the space station. That was last year. So he's been doing private space flights for more than a year.
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But what happened just this past week, pardon me, is a four person private mission to do a spacewalk.
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And at 1,400 miles from Earth, it was the farthest anyone had been away from the planet in nearly 50
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years. Imagine that, a private spacewalk. So you're not just going up and down for a few minutes. You're
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going up there. You're in orbit. You undo the hatch and you go out. And it's just astonishing. And this
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is the free market. Take a look at them opening the hatch. Would you be a little scared? They did it.
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There is our first view of the forward hatch, wide open to space.
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And then take a look at them actually doing the spacewalk, emerging from this private rocket ship
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I'll be with you in test matrix one, watching from the nose cone.
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And you know, because you've got the design mind of Elon Musk, and he does things aesthetically,
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the rocket ships are pretty, the Teslas are pretty. He made some pretty cool spacesuits
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too. Would you agree with me? Those are his private sector spacesuits. I don't know. It's
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sort of amazing. It's serious stuff, though. It's fun to talk about, and it's a little bit
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inspirational. But here is a chart of all the companies and governments in the world putting
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stuff into space. And SpaceX puts more than 90% of everything the Earth sends into space. That
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company does. But if you look, you'll see who's next and who's next behind that. If not for SpaceX,
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which is by far number one, number two, as you can see in the chart, would be China. If you take
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Elon Musk out of the picture, China is winning the space race. And then after China would be Russia.
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And then after Russia would be Japan. And then after Japan would be India. And only then do you have
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something called the United Launch Alliance. That's Boeing's mess. As you know, Boeing can't get their
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spaceship up to rescue the two astronauts from the space station. And then they magnified, if you
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understand that chart there, you can see even bad guys like Iran on there and an Iranian terrorist
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group is on there. So like I say, you and I might think of Elon Musk as the Twitter guy, as the freedom
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of speech guy, maybe as the Tesla guy. And those are all important things. But he's actually the leading
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astronaut executive of our age. And if you had any doubts about that, they just did a spacewalk
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with private sector everything. And NASA can't get off the ground. You know, I saw a TV show on Apple
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TV. And I was on a plane and I had nothing to do. So I watched it. And, and I was hooked in the first
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minute because they sort of did a trick on you. And, um, it's not really a spoiler. It's the premise
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for the whole show. Let me show you the trailer for a TV series on Apple TV called For All Mankind.
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And it's about, you know, going to the moon. Can you watch this trailer? I'm going to play 50 seconds
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of it, but really pay attention to the last five seconds. Cause that totally got me. Take a look
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at this. I believe that this nation should commit itself to landing a man on the moon and returning
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him safely to the earth. After thousands of years gazing up in the heavens and dreaming of this day,
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a man is about to set foot on the moon across the world. People wait with bated breath. Ladies and
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gentlemen, this is a live signal. There he is. The shock across the nation at this event is just
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indescribable. The Soviet cosmonaut has become the first to set foot on the moon.
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Now I watched too much of this series cause I was on the plane a lot. Actually, I think I just watched
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like four episodes back to back now that I think about it. Uh, the theory, the premise behind the
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show is that in the great space race, the Soviet union gets to the moon just before America does.
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And you know, if a few things had gone a different direction, they just might've remember they had
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Sputnik and they had Yuri Gagarin before NASA had its effort. And what's interesting is based on the
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premise that the Soviets get to the moon first, everything else that follows America's plane catch up.
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And I have to say, even though it was sort of dull and slow moving in parts, this TV series for all
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mankind, they were absolutely realistic in this way. The whole American project was dominated by
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bureaucracy and politics. And they had a huge emphasis I'm talking about in the show of gender and race
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and D E I diversity, equity and inclusion. And I thought that is so spot on and compare that
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to the reality of Elon Musk running circles around not just NASA, but the Chinese and the Russian and
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the Indian and the Japanese space programs. The difference between a can do engineer in the private
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sector versus these government bureaucracies is astonishing. If you want to see the anti-Musk,
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watch that Apple TV show. You're wondering, what am I doing talking about Musk so much? Well,
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back to the news of the day. Remember I mentioned Canada's getting some internet for our North.
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Here's the global news headline. The Canadian government announced a loan of $2.14 billion to help
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a Quebec company. Really? Is it a Quebec company? I'll come back to that. Build a broadband satellite
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network that will connect more remote communities to the internet. And of course, that announcement was
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over the weekend. It was timed, as you may know, for today's by-election. Do you know there are two
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by-elections today? One of them in Montreal in the district of La Salamard Verdun, which used to be
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Paul Martin's riding way back in the day. And it was where David Lamedi, the crooked justice minister,
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was from before he sort of skulked out of parliament. Anyways, so this announcement was made on the weekend
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to try and buy some votes with $2 billion. And Michael Barrett, an MP for the Conservatives,
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well, he used Twitter the way it ought to be done. He said, hey, Elon Musk, how much would it cost to
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provide Starlink to every Canadian household that doesn't have high speed? If this $2.14 billion
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plan is the panacea of expanding access, competition, and service, where is the interest from private
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investors and banks? That's always a good argument, which is if this is such a good idea,
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why don't other people think it's such a good idea besides Trudeau throwing his money around?
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And would you believe it, Elon Musk, perhaps the busiest man in the world, if he's not building
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cars, he's building spaceships, he's not building spaceships, he's building internet, he's got
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another company called The Boring Company that builds tunnels, he's got another company called
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Neuralink. Believe it or not, he responded and he said, less than half that amount. But it's not just
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that. It's less than half that amount. And it's ready now. And it's proven to work now. It's not
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some loan to some friends of Trudeau to buy some election votes. And maybe in the future, it'll work.
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It's ready now. I know that because I took a little Starlink from Vancouver to Maui and I used it and it
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was amazing. And it was 200 bucks. Anyways, Barrett, the MP wrote back to Elon Musk saying,
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sounded like common sense. Yeah. Like I say, and it works. And it's ready. So it's not speculative.
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But of course, what Michael Barrett and what Elon Musk don't understand, or maybe they actually
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understand it perfectly, is that spending more from a government point of view is the point of
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things. It's not a problem. It's why they do things. Again, that's the difference between how Elon
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Musk operates his companies versus how NASA in that TV show I was referring to. I mean,
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when Elon Musk took over Twitter, you'll recall, he fired 80% of the staff, the folks who just did
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DEI stuff and all the soft stuff. They weren't engineers. They didn't actually run the company.
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They were like barnacles on the ship. He fired them all and focused on engineering.
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And what you have to understand is that when you buy something through the government, those barnacles,
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those extra jobs, those perks, those soft things, that's what it's all about. It's a feature, not a
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bug. It's how politics works. If you are spending twice as much money as you need to, to get something
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done, you and I as taxpayers would say, oh my God, that's insane. But from a politician's point of view,
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you're thinking, I am the sugar daddy bringing home billions of dollars to my district and I want
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to brag. I want that number to be bigger. Can we get it even bigger? Can we get it even bigger? It's
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how politics is done, especially in Montreal. You'll have to remember SNC Lavalin, Trudeau's favorite
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company that he interfered with. They were, not only did they want huge contracts, they were corrupt and
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bribed their way to get them. Remember, that's that whole Jolie Wilson-Raybould thing. Trudeau was trying
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to get her to call off a prosecution of the corruption. This is the Arrive Can app. The
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Arrive Can app could have been made for 50 grand. We know that because some guys sort of made a
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replica of it over one weekend. But the reason it cost more than 60 million dollars was the whole
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point of it. Arrive Can was not about doing anything. It was about a way to shovel money to
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liberal insiders. Our friend Andy Lee points out that this is just the latest payment to the Canadian
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alternative to Starlink called Telesat. Three years ago, they got a billion and a half dollars. I guess
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they burned through it and they need more. Now, Francois-Philippe Champagne, who is the minister in
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charge of this, he saw this kerfuffle. And of course, they hate Elon Musk because he's for freedom. And
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Francois-Philippe Champagne, the Trudeau cabinet minister, said, typical Polyev nonsense. They'd prefer
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giving money to foreign billionaires instead of supporting our industry and our workers. This loan will
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help build a world-class Canadian-made satellite network and supports thousands of jobs in Quebec. Now, that's
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common sense. Well, first of all, Elon Musk is actually a Canadian citizen. I don't know if you know
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that. He immigrated to Canada. His mom's Canadian. He went to school here. He got his Canadian citizenship. But
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second of all, more obviously, Trudeau gives billions of dollars to megacorporations all the time. He gives
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billions of dollars to electric vehicle companies, tens of billions of dollars. And he's giving billions of dollars
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here to Telesat, which is a multi-billion dollar company. So they are still, they're proposing to
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give more billions of dollars. But what's even crazier about it is to create a replica of Starlink.
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I went online and I checked and Telesat, that's the Canadian company that Trudeau and Francois-Philippe
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Champagne are giving to. It may say it's Canadian, but it's actually foreign-owned in the majority. I
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understand 86 percent of the shares are owned by foreigners. So yeah, it's Canadian, about as
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Canadian as Tim Hortons. If you check on that, you'll see Tim Hortons is owned by a U.S.-Brazilian
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conglomerate. But like I say, the waste is the point. And you can see that there in the tweet.
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That tweet is saying, hey, by-election voters in Montreal, we are making stupid decisions so we can
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give you money. But there's another point here. Why would Trudeau and Francois-Philippe Champagne
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and the entire establishment, the bureaucracy, all the consultants, all the lobbyists,
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why would they prefer to spend double on something that's not proven as opposed to buying something
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off the shelf that works? Or just saying, hey, people in rural or northern parts, why don't you buy
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your own internet? And if you want to help, give them a tax credit for it. Or a tax refund.
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Instead of the government coming in and doing it, how about letting ordinary people make their own
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choices? And if you want to subsidize those individual choices, fine. Why does the government
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need to throw around billions of dollars? And why are they so averse to Elon Musk? Not only do they say
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we're not going to use Elon Musk's cheaper proven system, but he's just some foreign billionaire.
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We hate him. Why would they say that? Well, I think I know why. You might recall that exactly
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a week ago or a week and a day ago, I was in Brazil. I had never been in South America before,
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but I went to Brazil for about 36 hours because I went to one of the largest free speech rallies in
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world history. 200,000 people had lined the streets of Sao Paulo in support of the opposition leader
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there. His name is Jair Bolsonaro. Because the incumbent regime, the president of Brazil, Lula is
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his name, and his right-hand man, a judge named Alexandre de Moraes, they had banned opposition critics and
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opposition leaders and opposition journalists one after the other and banned them from Twitter and banned
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them on the internet. And when Twitter said, hey, you're not following the law, Lula and de Moraes
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banned Twitter itself completely from the internet in Brazil. You cannot use Twitter. 20 million plus
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users in Brazil had their accounts just turned off because too many of them were seeing things that
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the government didn't want them to see. Now, Elon Musk defied this, and so the government started
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seizing assets of Starlink in Brazil. But Elon Musk did an astonishing thing. He left the internet
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satellites on anyways. So he wasn't being paid. He couldn't do business. He couldn't collect the
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hundred bucks a month or whatever he was getting. But he kept the internet on. He made a tweet about it
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saying he has to take care of hospitals and schools and places in the wilderness, and it would be
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irresponsible to cut them off. I actually believe him that he cares about those customers.
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But I also believe him that he cares about free speech.
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So now do you see why Justin Trudeau and Francois Philippe Champagne, a close ally of China too,
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now do you see why they would never, ever let Elon Musk have anything to do with the internet in Canada?
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Because maybe, just maybe, under Bill C-63, Justin Trudeau's pending censorship bill
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called the Online Harms Act. Maybe, just maybe, one day he'll do a Lula. He'll do a Brazil. He'll try to
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shut down Twitter. In the name of disinformation, wouldn't surprise me, is Stitch. Now, if he's
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working with some liberal client like Telesat that has received billions of dollars, of course they'll
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turn off the switch for Trudeau. It's the least they can do. In fact, getting paid to turn off a
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system, that's perfect liberal math. But if Elon Musk himself were told to turn off the internet,
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you know he would defy them. That's why they're giving the money to tell us that.
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It's so clubby in Montreal between the Liberal Party and the corporations. We saw that during the
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fiasco when SNC-Lavalin was being prosecuted for corruption. And by the way, they didn't deny it
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anymore. They had admitted it. They just wanted a plea deal, whereas Jody Wilson-Raybould was taking
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advice from the public prosecutions directorate to go ahead with the trial. Trudeau intervened,
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and in the end he fired Jody Wilson-Raybould because she wouldn't go easy on his crooked
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corporate buddies. No one is denying that SNC-Lavalin were breaking the law. What's so astonishing
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is that Trudeau was defending them anyways. And here we are a few years later, and it feels like
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the exact same thing. A preference to give billions of dollars to Quebec insiders instead of a more
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reasonable, less slush-fundy alternative. And joining us now to talk about this murky company,
00:23:36.280
Telesat, is our friend Andy Lee, who is very good at digging around. Andy, great to see you again.
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Good to see you too. It's good to be back. Yeah, so Telesat, big news. We've been hearing a lot
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about, you know, we're supposed to be getting high-speed internet to rural communities for a
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long time now. And so Telesat was one of those companies that was supposed to be providing this.
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And so we've been funding the company heavily. I didn't go all the way back, but in the last
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couple of years alone, you know, in 2021, we had a grant that was given that actually is not really
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out there yet. It was for $600 million, so over half a billion dollars was given to them in a grant.
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They had a grant in 2018 for $85 million. And then in 2021, we had the $1.44 billion that was given to
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them. And now we're looking at $2.54 billion. And that's on top of government contracts. And again,
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I haven't added them all up. I stopped at about $400 million for the last couple of years. So
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they're also getting regular income through federal contracts as well. And so what have we gotten for
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that? We got a promise that we were supposed to have a, you know, a satellite low orbit, you know,
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I tell you, I was adding up some of those numbers. You said the 600 million here, 1.4 billion there.
00:25:09.360
I mean, you're, you're into the billions of dollars and I mean, I don't know enough about Telesat,
00:25:17.900
but it seems to me that Elon Musk is the first and the best and the cheapest and the like Starlink,
00:25:24.580
there's just no way a late to the game Canadian competitor is going to beat Starlink for quality,
00:25:33.280
cheapness, and it's ready to go right now. I don't even understand. Are they like,
00:25:37.640
are they basically trying to build a Canadian competitor to Starlink? Is that what's going on
00:25:43.480
Well, I think that was initially, um, like judging by the press releases. Yeah. That's what they were
00:25:48.640
looking at to compete with. Right. But obviously they failed to do so, um, despite all the spending,
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um, so Starlink has kind of become the gold standard for satellite communications. So, you know,
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at this point we're throwing a lot of money at something, trying to reinvent the wheel, um, and
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it's going to cost us. Uh, and the ironic thing is that, you know, we don't even have our own launch
00:26:10.140
capabilities for these satellites. Telesat actually inked a deal in September of last year
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with SpaceX, um, to launch their own satellite systems. So they've, um, I think they've secured
00:26:23.660
14 launches and they can launch 18 satellites, I believe per launch. So, you know, again, it's kind
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of like, what are we getting for value for our money? And it's sort of like, okay, well, we want to
00:26:35.300
invest in Canadian companies, but at the same time, is it worth it for somebody who's already sort of
00:26:41.440
laid this ground, right? What's the value for our money? And are we going to be getting better service
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and are we going to be getting it for as good of a price, which is, you know, it's considerable when
00:26:52.960
you look at Elon Musk is saying, well, I'll do this for less than half. Um, and the company itself
00:26:59.320
isn't worth that much, right? We're putting billions of dollars into it. I mean, it's market cap,
00:27:03.540
I think is under $600 million. They're saying that, you know, their, their sort of net worth
00:27:08.260
maybe last year from their financials was about 1.2 billion. So maybe the companies might be worth,
00:27:13.800
you know, $2 billion, but we're sinking, we're sinking two or three times into that to make it
00:27:20.380
feasible. And again, we haven't got a product yet. So it's like deliverology, right? And why are we not
00:27:27.560
holding these people to account when they're not meeting their, their deadlines, especially with
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talking about this amount of cash. And, you know, obviously this, the CEO has got some deep ties
00:27:37.540
to say our brand new Trudeau appointed financial special economic advancer, Mark Kearney. Um,
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and it wasn't just that one meeting last or this year, sorry, they were at a charity get together
00:27:49.420
in 2024. I also went back and found them at another charity get together in 2023. And then before that,
00:27:55.900
um, you know, there was talk of Dan Goldberg, who's the CEO was in, um, uh, for the London marathon,
00:28:02.160
he met up with Kearney there and there's a big blurb talking about their friendship and things like
00:28:06.320
that and how he, uh, Kearney, you know, really reinforces Dan's company and things like that.
00:28:12.100
Um, so, you know, it's kind of like, we have such a productivity problem in Canada bringing,
00:28:19.140
you know, things to market in a reasonable time. So, and, you know, that was the big thing about
00:28:24.120
Philip Champagne was like, well, you know, you're picking a foreign company. And of course you went
00:28:29.620
and a lot of people went and found the financials and this isn't, you know, um, I mean, Starlink's
00:28:35.320
probably more Canadian than Telethat is right. I mean, at least Starlink is owned by a Canadian
00:28:40.580
citizen, whereas Telethat we know is mostly owned by United States, uh, you know, fund managers and
00:28:47.380
things like that. I think that somebody pointed out it's like 0.69% Canadian owned, which is not how it
00:28:53.200
was sold. We were told in the press releases that this is a Canadian controlled company. Um,
00:28:59.260
if we've got 0.69% of it, that's not a Canadian controlled company at all. It's a very much an
00:29:04.620
American company. Yeah. It was sold. It was sold to a U S defense contractor a few years back. I mean,
00:29:10.160
I, I really don't have a strong opinion about where it should be. Uh, I mean, if the idea is to get
00:29:16.020
internet, buy it from the cheapest, best provider, the fact that, that Telethat has to piggyback
00:29:22.780
onto SpaceX's rockets makes me chuckle because even that is, is buttering Elon Musk's bread,
00:29:30.700
but the, the denunciation of Musk as a foreign billionaire and, and the admission that this
00:29:36.760
is just a slosh money around Montreal. Now it makes sense. These photos with Mark Carney,
00:29:41.680
I think you were telling me before the Catherine McKenna, the disgraced former cabinet minister
00:29:46.480
was like, like, of course, and of course there's commissions for everybody and law. I mean,
00:29:51.760
what would the lobbyist get who arranged this deal? A hundred million bucks. I don't know. I mean,
00:29:57.440
there's so much scamming that we've, I mean, this is the arrive can of, of, uh, satellite
00:30:04.240
internet. If you want to, like, I was telling the anecdote a minute ago when I went to Maui
00:30:08.520
for the wildfires, I brought a Starlink with me. I think it cost me 200 bucks to rent it.
00:30:13.680
It couldn't have been easier. Imagine instead of saying, no, the government has a program. You
00:30:19.060
have to like, like no real person would prefer a government program if you're trying to get it
00:30:24.820
done. But if you're trying to butter everyone's bread, of course you go the Trudeau way. I don't
00:30:29.760
know. I feel this is just new levels of corruption to me, Andy. What do you think?
00:30:34.660
Yeah. I mean, they're, they're always finding new ways to pay themselves creatively,
00:30:39.480
you know, and we're being told, well, it's okay. Part of it's a loan. And that is true. Part of it's
00:30:45.040
a loan. And part of the 2021 one was a loan as well. Uh, that 1.44 billion half of that was a loan.
00:30:50.900
And, you know, there, we get paid out, um, at like 4.5%. But again, that money could be better
00:30:57.640
spent reinvested somewhere else. So let's not pretend like, you know, we're getting good value.
00:31:01.500
And are we sure we got the money back? I mean, I exactly. And we've got generous loan forgiveness
00:31:07.420
in our country, right? We're always writing this stuff up because we're saying, well, we need this
00:31:11.440
as vital infrastructure or whatever. So, you know, we'll just take, you know, whatever you owe us and
00:31:16.380
we'll, we'll cross it off the balance sheet. Um, so there's that. And then, but the tragedy of this
00:31:22.660
is that, you know, we're supposed to get paid out. So this is supposed to be an investment for us.
00:31:26.600
We're supposed to get paid out in dividends. So we actually want this company to do well
00:31:32.060
because we get paid back for it if it does. So if it fails, it's not a good thing, right? It's
00:31:37.880
nothing to, to cheer about. Um, so it's really kind of like a, a lose, lose situation. Yeah,
00:31:43.220
we could get Starlink for cheaper, but again, we've all invested in that and we're supposed to be
00:31:47.080
getting paid back for that investment, um, as the company succeeds. And on that note, you know,
00:31:53.580
I have serious questions as to, you know, their, their promissory, um, points in here,
00:32:00.380
there was a press release that was given out. I'm not sure if, sorry, if it was night 2019 or 2000.
00:32:10.800
Yeah, no, sorry. It was the 2021 press release. And so in that press release, it said that Telesat
00:32:18.060
was going to, with this $1.44 billion, maintain 700 jobs. So that's fine. But fast forward to 2024
00:32:27.280
and their new press release that was put out says that they have 500 employees. So we're already
00:32:35.380
missing 200 employees between 2021 and 2023. And the company's not growing. It's getting smaller
00:32:41.140
if their own press releases are to be believed. And so now we're supposed to be told that if you
00:32:46.760
inject another $2.5 billion into it, we're going to create 2000 more jobs. Well, where did those 200
00:32:52.500
jobs go between 2021 and 2024? What happened to them? I mean, we should be seeing growth, right?
00:32:59.400
For investment. I'm okay with doing subsidies and investing, but again, we need deliverable products,
00:33:04.460
right? We need accountability. We need something that works. We need something that's efficient.
00:33:08.560
And we need, you know, a result, right? And hopefully a marketable problem. And that just
00:33:15.580
didn't happen. And again, when even their government contracts are bizarre. When you look at them,
00:33:21.480
like these are contracts that are starting off for $700,000 with the government. And then all of a
00:33:27.080
sudden, it's a $6 million contract. Well, that's quite an amendment, right? We're talking about usually
00:33:33.280
their original, and this is, you know, what we've seen broadly across the, you know,
00:33:38.320
across the scope in contracting is that we're putting out these kind of lowball contracts
00:33:44.700
and then getting squeezed through it down the road where we're seeing the final results
00:33:49.440
costing, you know, two, three, four, five, 10 times the original amount, which is bonkers.
00:33:55.340
Yeah. I mean, no one has ever heard the name of the president of Telesat because he's not a great
00:34:01.760
space executive. Everyone knows Elon Musk because he's putting a rocket ship into space twice a week.
00:34:06.820
Um, I, and now you're using the language of investment and dividend and because that's how
00:34:12.660
the government phrases it because they don't want to say the truth, but it's, I think it's capitalism
00:34:17.940
in drag. If Telesat was such a good investment, there are trillions of dollars in the global stock
00:34:24.260
markets that are all hunting for the great deals, for the great opportunities. And no, no one would
00:34:31.000
invest in them. So it's by definition, if they need government money, no one in the private sector
00:34:36.900
likes them. I find this depressing. It's like that old company Bombardier where every year they would
00:34:42.260
get hundreds of millions of dollars. We're long past the hundreds of millions, Mark. We're well into
00:34:46.620
the billions. I just think it's sort of funny in a sad way to see them all, uh, disparaging Elon Musk,
00:34:54.420
the great industrialists of our age. And I didn't know it until you told me here that even though
00:34:59.420
they're disparaging Elon Musk, it's his rocket ships that they're using to put their satellites
00:35:03.660
up there. What an incredible story. And I don't think this is going to save the liberal candidate
00:35:09.820
tonight in the riding of La Salle-Emme-Verdon, where they're having a by-election. I think that's
00:35:15.820
what its purpose was. I don't think it's going to work. I think the liberals are going to lose
00:35:20.400
again, but Trudeau's going to hold his iron grip on power. Last word to you, Andy.
00:35:25.300
Yeah. Well, I mean, corporate welfare is alive and well, if you know the right people in Canada,
00:35:30.000
it's, it's not going to go out of style anytime soon, unfortunately. And yeah, but I mean,
00:35:34.920
the real losers are of course the people who don't have internet, because I do believe that
00:35:38.940
internet should be somewhat of a human right in a, you know, a G7 country such as ourselves.
00:35:45.140
I think that it's really, really important tool for everybody to have. And again, this isn't the
00:35:49.220
only investment that we're making into it. Like you have to understand this, the Canada
00:35:52.660
Infrastructure Bank, which is a whole nother Ponzi scheme. You know, they've invested billions of
00:35:58.320
dollars into bringing high-speed internet to rural communities. Right. And that's still a work in
00:36:02.580
progress. So, you know, it's just, it's throwing a whole bunch of good money after bad. When again,
00:36:09.020
this groundwork has been laid. I mean, my thing, I reached out to Elon Musk and I said,
00:36:13.900
since you're launching their satellites, why don't you just buy Telesat?
00:36:16.840
I know. You can afford it. It's much less than Twitter.
00:36:22.580
We could actually have a profitable Canadian company maybe that's successful.
00:36:26.400
You have to fire 80% of the staff. I think that's his way. Fire the 80% that don't do anything.
00:36:32.200
Annie, this is a crazy story, but it tells us so much about our own country,
00:36:36.020
how we despise those who actually build, how we pretend that sloshing around government
00:36:41.740
largesse is the free market. And there's sort of a, there's a nudge and a wink that they're saying,
00:36:51.420
hey, Montreal, we're ringing out taxpayers for you in the name of the internet. But everyone knows
00:36:57.980
it's just graft and grift. Andy, great to see you again. Thanks for your time.
00:37:01.720
Good to see you too. Take care and we'll see how it develops. Tell us,
00:37:06.140
us investors are fascinating. Yeah. I mean, most of them are companies,
00:37:10.520
but there's one individual in there. And so I'm digging into his, his SEC filings.
00:37:15.540
Well, we'll have to, we'll have to hear more from you and we'll have to follow you
00:37:19.320
on Twitter. You're doing great investigative journalism as you always do. Take care, my friend.
00:37:25.080
Cheers. Well, there you have it. Stay with us. More after these words.
00:37:30.280
You know, the other day, Elon Musk was talking about how government just can't do anything
00:37:50.060
anymore. And he referenced the high speed train project in California, which has been talked
00:37:55.860
about for literally decades. And they've built like one mile of it from nowhere to nowhere.
00:38:02.180
And that's how it is when a government builds something, especially something complex.
00:38:07.860
The moon shot where America and NASA actually landed someone on the moon, maybe was the one
00:38:15.400
example to the contrary, where they actually managed to do it. But they don't seem to be able
00:38:20.780
to do that particular task anymore or much else. And what I learned from Andy that makes
00:38:26.120
me chuckle is that even this Telesat scheme at twice the price still relies on SpaceX rockets
00:38:32.720
because no one's sending things into space anymore other than the Chinese and Russians.
00:38:41.040
Trump is a genius. He has the pet owner's vote.
00:38:43.780
He's talking about Trump's reference in the debate against Kamala Harris of the allegation
00:38:50.040
that they're eating dogs and cats and other pets in Springfield, Ohio. Now, we sent David
00:38:55.520
Menzies down there for a couple of days last week. And as you saw, he's doing some really
00:38:59.780
great videos. But we actually could not corroborate any of the pet eating. And we didn't go down.
00:39:06.880
We went down there curious and thought it was plausible. But after poking around for a couple
00:39:12.640
of days and talking to everyone we could find, we didn't come up with any evidence that we came up
00:39:17.420
with tragic evidence that terrible Haitian drivers are, in one case, killed somebody.
00:39:24.640
And we learned a lot. But anyway, let me refer you to the truth about springfield.com to see all our
00:39:30.560
videos. But yeah, that meme of eating cats and dogs was just classic Trump meme.
00:39:38.320
CJP says, they technically fact-checked Kamala during the debate. It was a blink and you'll
00:39:43.880
miss it type thing. And even then, it was only things on her record and not the crap she was
00:39:48.540
saying about Trump. You're referring to the U.S. debate. I was in transit then, but my friends
00:39:54.900
Sheila Gunn-Reed and Avi Amini, and I think Avi might have, I think David might have been on it too,
00:39:59.380
did a live stream for the U.S. presidential debate, which is pretty fun.
00:40:03.840
Lawrence Veynot says, if things escalate with Russia, I think the U.S. election should be
00:40:08.080
postponed. Look at what's happening in Ukraine. Postponing the American elections, I don't think
00:40:12.720
that even happens in World War II or Vietnam. I don't, I don't, I think that would be a terrible
00:40:17.840
idea. Postponing the election is so abnormal. And to justify it with an emergency, well, then
00:40:26.960
there'll be emergency every week, won't there? And there'll be a climate emergency, just like
00:40:31.320
they use the COVID emergency to have mail-in ballots. I think, I think almost every emergency
00:40:37.420
imaginable can be overcome in the voting with an election, or can, can, you can vote despite
00:40:45.800
it. I can't even think, maybe during the plague, the Black Death in England, they might have
00:40:51.720
postponed a vote or two. But actually, they just moved Parliament, a few males down the
00:40:56.340
highway. And I think maybe they suspended Parliament for a few weeks. And I think about
00:41:01.200
that sometimes. And I think about the Amish. As you know, about a month or so, I visited an
00:41:05.960
Amish community in Ontario that has been fined almost $400,000 for not downloading the Arabcan
00:41:13.120
app on their smartphones. Of course, the joke being Amish don't have phones. They don't download
00:41:17.560
any apps. They don't use electricity. They don't even drive. They have horses and buggies,
00:41:22.000
literally. Imagine telling someone like that to download the Arrivecan app. They wouldn't
00:41:27.400
even understand what words you're saying. Anyhow, just, just astonishing. And what I learned
00:41:36.920
by visiting the Amish is that the mania never took hold of their community. Because if you're
00:41:43.080
Amish, you see things, you hear things, you read paper, you talk and you meet, but you're
00:41:48.520
not on your social media. You're not watching CNN or CBC. You're not hearing the propaganda.
00:41:53.680
I suppose you're getting print newspapers, but I don't think they're very worldly. And so
00:41:57.960
if you didn't have social media in your life, if you didn't have TV, you probably wouldn't
00:42:04.560
have noticed COVID at all. Maybe you would have had more people getting the flu. But I put
00:42:10.180
it to you that the number one way that we knew we were in a pandemic was because the media
00:42:16.420
kept telling us so. Our eyes themselves didn't see it, which is why they had to force masks
00:42:21.780
on everyone to keep people worried, because otherwise you wouldn't be worried. If you led
00:42:25.880
a normal life, I'm not saying the Amish live a normal life, but they didn't live the hyper-stimulated
00:42:31.320
narrative curated life that we lead, you wouldn't have got the mania, let alone the COVID.
00:42:39.520
That's our show for today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World
00:42:44.640
Headquarters, to you at home, good night, and keep fighting for freedom.