The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Carney could FALL from $90B Alto Corruption Scandal - Finance Minister dodges Ethics Committee!

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.

00:00:06.460 Prime Minister Mark Carney has a big problem inside of his liberal government,

00:00:11.340 and that problem is named Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

00:00:16.580 He has a massive conflict of interest scandal brewing for his government,

00:00:21.540 and it looks like it could turn into a massive corruption scandal.

00:00:25.540 You will remember that he was the one who pushed through $90 billion for the Alto train to be built between Toronto and Quebec City and did not disclose until about five seconds ago that his wife is the vice president of environment for Alto.

00:00:43.160 The vice president of environment that was only made that position a couple months before he hammered through a bunch of funding for them.

00:00:51.120 That doesn't seem sketchy at all.

00:00:53.040 But now that Carney has a majority government, he is trying to move heaven and earth to make

00:00:59.420 sure that Francois-Philippe Champagne never actually has to answer questions where, if

00:01:04.940 he lies, he could actually be held accountable for it.

00:01:07.820 He can do little media hits and deny he's ever done anything wrong, but he doesn't want

00:01:12.060 Francois ever actually held down and forced to say when he disclosed his conflict of interest.

00:01:18.040 Right now, he'll say that it was September, but we have no evidence it was September.

00:01:23.220 The earliest he has disclosed the conflict was April.

00:01:28.760 It was April.

00:01:30.220 And this guy, back in November, when they're passing the budget,

00:01:33.040 was literally blocking votes to remove the ALTO funding from the overall budget to be voted on separately.

00:01:40.020 Anyways, we need to break down this insane situation in just a second here.

00:01:44.520 But first, I just quickly want to tell you about the normal things.

00:01:47.500 I always say on the channel. If you like the channel, make sure to leave a like on the video.

00:01:51.820 If you're on mobile, also make sure to hype the video. You can do three of those a week, apparently.

00:01:56.820 Leave a comment on what you think about this whole thing. Subscribe if you're not a subscriber yet.

00:02:01.900 Hit the notification bell because YouTube's really hammering my most recent videos again,

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00:02:10.080 if you want to help support the channel even more, you can always hit the join button below the video

00:02:14.120 and become a member and make a small monthly contribution. Anyways, so let's start off a few

00:02:21.220 days ago with Conservative MP Michael Cooper calling out the Liberals, or again, attempting

00:02:28.000 to shield Francois-Philippe Champagne. I actually thought the story here was going to go a little

00:02:34.220 bit silent after all this, but it actually has kept heating up because Francois has not shut

00:02:40.560 his mouth. You know, the conservatives would love for him to show up to a committee on ethics and

00:02:45.920 actually, you know, answer questions that he must answer. But Francois doesn't want to do that. But

00:02:50.900 he wants to keep mouthing off to try and make pretend that this is a big nothing burger. But

00:02:55.500 here is Michael Cooper. Speaker, for more than eight hours, liberal MPs have been filibustering

00:03:01.520 to shield the finance minister from appearing before the ethics committee to answer questions

00:03:06.920 about his role in directing billions of tax dollars to the alto high-speed rail project

00:03:13.240 notwithstanding that his partner is none other than a vp at alto this raises serious questions

00:03:20.600 about a potential conflict of interest if the minister has nothing to hide will he tell

00:03:26.120 he's filibustering liberal mps to stop and come to committee sorry if the clips are a little quiet

00:03:33.080 sometimes i listen to them beforehand and i don't realize that the mp's team uploaded

00:03:37.160 a kind of low volume clip and it's this is as high as i can get it the honorable government

00:03:45.240 well mr speaker as that member knows canadian uh members of parliament designated public

00:03:51.240 office holders we follow among the most stringent ethics rules in the world we will comply vigorously

00:03:58.200 as has my colleague the minister of finance and i would take this opportunity to remind

00:04:03.560 the honorable member across that alto is a crown corporation 100 owned by canadians

00:04:13.160 by the way there uh he should remember he said that in the future because so often whenever the

00:04:18.280 cbc does something wrong or when another crown corporation does something long can

00:04:23.480 wrong can to post something like that they act like well they make independent decisions

00:04:28.120 this has nothing to do with us, except Canadians heavily funded. Like, what are we talking about

00:04:33.380 here? But the idea, that was such a dodge from Steve McKinnon there. He just basically says,

00:04:37.980 well, you know, MPs have to follow rigorous conflict of interest screenings, or we follow,

00:04:42.960 you know, rigorous ethical rules. And it's like, okay, well, he's not. I know the average MP might

00:04:49.020 be, but the finance minister is not. And by the way, it being a crown corporation doesn't make

00:04:54.780 it any better that that crown corporation is having its budget massively increased. And it

00:05:00.880 just so happens that their new VP of environment is the spouse of the current finance minister.

00:05:07.380 The thing is, this can still get the executives massive bonuses. It can still grow their power.

00:05:13.460 And it is still basically building a train that nobody really needs through constituencies that

00:05:20.360 are basically all liberal. It's the liberals building a train for liberals, hiring a bunch

00:05:25.320 of liberals to give themselves massive bonuses to probably inflate this project to 200 billion at

00:05:30.520 some point, by the way. There's nothing about this that screams good investment. But we know

00:05:36.240 there's a bunch of liberal interests involved in building it. The Honorable Member for St. Albert

00:05:41.140 Sturgeon River. Mr. Speaker, the minister has acknowledged a conflict in respect of Alto,

00:05:46.320 hence setting up the so-called ethics creed, yet he has repeatedly introduced, spoken on,

00:05:53.500 and voted on legislation to advance the project. And instead of clearing the air, we now have the

00:05:59.900 spectacle of liberal MPs filibustering at committee to shield the minister from accountability.

00:06:05.820 So it begs the question, is this what Canadians can expect a liberal majority government to look

00:06:11.580 you know what i also have to say quickly you know what i like i like michael cooper's suit i like

00:06:16.860 the suit tie and shirt combination i always have to say whenever i like what mp's wearing now

00:06:22.540 because i've kept advising that i don't i think polio needs to stop wearing only navy suits and

00:06:27.180 only navy ties but while we're on the topic mr speaker let's talk about the dream of high speed

00:06:38.860 rail for canadian okay so he's going to say absolutely diddly squat there now i want to

00:06:45.300 fast forward to another michael cooper clip where he is once again having to call them out because

00:06:50.240 again this thing has now this this whole story has now moved forward with francois philippe

00:06:55.500 champagne going on television to deny that he's done anything wrong at the same time he won't

00:06:59.940 actually come in and answer questions if you're not going to answer questions stop mouthing off

00:07:05.180 on TV. It's almost like you're inviting people to ask why you're not actually showing up if you're

00:07:09.840 so confident you did nothing wrong. Speaker, the finance minister spokesperson said, quote,

00:07:14.780 the minister fully respects the ethics screen, meaning he is neither implicated in nor parties

00:07:20.400 any discussions, decisions or votes related to Alto. Yet the minister introduced, defended and

00:07:27.340 voted on legislation to direct billions of tax dollars to Alto on at least 14 occasions. So how

00:07:34.760 How do the Liberals reconcile the statement of the spokesperson for the Minister with

00:07:39.440 the Minister's actions?

00:07:40.440 The Honourable Parliamentary Secretary of the Minister Trespo and Colonel Trey.

00:07:44.200 Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

00:07:46.200 The Minister and others have spoken about this, but I will say this, and I'll use an

00:07:50.760 Atlantic Canadian analogy, in terms of this is a rather large fishing expedition, and

00:07:57.000 Atlantic Canada would describe it as this, there's no fishing bait, there's no fishing

00:08:01.380 line, and there's no fishing pole.

00:08:04.760 Oh, if it's a fishing expedition, have Francois show up, have the entire committee meeting be a complete dud with them asking him questions and him immediately answering them and showing that this was all a big fishing expedition.

00:08:19.060 Why not? Because the thing is, the way that Francois Philippe Champagne talks on television, it gives the impression that he has nothing to hide, that he doesn't have, you know, this would be a super easy walk in the park kind of a situation for him.

00:08:31.480 uh i'm trying to find the the clip right here of francois on television and then i need to get to

00:08:36.800 the other article about this again there's been a lot developing on this specific issue here

00:08:41.780 uh i think i can find it here now i actually paused the video to give myself a bit of time

00:08:48.380 to find it but i have now found the clip thank you for juno news for posting this from a cpac

00:08:53.760 interview um yeah michael barrett the conservative ethics critic i'm saying that you're ducking the

00:08:59.240 committee trying to study the alto high-speed rail thing, accusing liberals of filibustering

00:09:03.660 an attempt to get you to committee. You've said that everything is above board with this

00:09:08.600 procurement process, and you've been recusing yourself from decisions recently on the rail

00:09:14.020 line. So why not just appear before the committee if everything's above board?

00:09:19.120 Well, it's for the committee to decide how they want to conduct their own affairs. As far as I'm

00:09:24.240 concerned have been very uh very transparent uh very upfront in the sense that uh you don't need

00:09:30.460 to take my words but the words of the commissioner which he says and not only there's no conflict but

00:09:36.100 he said there's no risk of conflict uh because i'll no okay there is multiple points of nonsense

00:09:42.520 right here right off the bat okay so he says oh it's for the committee to decide if they want me

00:09:47.680 to come and speak they wanted him to come and testify the opposition on the committee before

00:09:53.180 the Liberals won a majority, the opposition were wanting Francois to show up. And then the Liberals,

00:09:59.680 to block that from happening, basically spoke nonsense onto the record for eight hours to make

00:10:06.260 sure that the meeting never actually got to the point where he'd have to show up. And then they

00:10:10.320 waited out the clock the night of the by-elections so that Mark Carney would have three more

00:10:16.520 Liberals. And now he is changing the makeup of all the committees. Typically, what you do is that

00:10:22.400 you set the committees right after the election and that's what the committees look like pretty

00:10:26.640 much until the next election unless people have to drop out and be replaced by somebody else but

00:10:32.300 that's usually like a one-to-one swap one person's leaving and one person's joining that person's

00:10:37.660 you know unable to continue for some reason and they leave or somebody had resigned resigned from

00:10:42.740 office you know they retired and someone else replaced them no Carney is going to shuffle the

00:10:47.100 entire committee because he needs extra liberals on them so that Francois-Philippe Champagne will

00:10:52.100 not have to testify. Other liberals caught in corruption scandals will not have to testify.

00:10:56.820 And even going back to his stupid Crown Corporation excuse, Steve McKinnon's Crown Corporation 0.98

00:11:01.820 excuse, oh, it's a Crown Corporation, nothing to see here. It's totally above board. It's a 0.99

00:11:05.500 Crown Corporation. That Crown Corporation has a liberal minister's wife on the executive team. 1.00

00:11:12.840 It is a liberal-favored project running through liberal-held territory. Do we not think that that

00:11:19.960 company getting $90 billion to $200 billion to build a train that nobody really asked for

00:11:25.940 is not going to somehow be passing a bunch of building contracts and other consulting contracts

00:11:32.300 to friends of the liberals. The entire thing is already covered in a haze of corruption.

00:11:39.100 And you know Mark Carney knows this is really bad for his government. This could be his own

00:11:43.700 We Charity or SNC-Lavalin scandal because he is acting like it. We know it could be that thing

00:11:49.500 because he's acting like there is something massive to cover up here.

00:11:52.640 But I'll let Francois keep making clopping and neighing sounds

00:11:56.480 to try and get rid of this issue.

00:11:58.680 Plato is a crown corporation that reports to parliament.

00:12:03.320 And I find it sometimes, you know, there's politics and all that,

00:12:07.240 but to make personal attack against people who serve in the public sector,

00:12:13.780 I find it's distasteful, to be very frank with you.

00:12:18.880 I think the rules are in place.

00:12:20.780 Yeah, we only attack people from the private sector in this government.

00:12:23.880 And by the way, what does that even mean, dude?

00:12:26.200 Oh, I find distasteful, attack people in the private sector or public sector.

00:12:30.420 It's like, what, accountability?

00:12:32.660 Wondering why your wife got a vice president of environment job?

00:12:36.340 Let's be clear, a fake job. 0.88

00:12:38.720 At Alto, two months before you then were hammering it through in the budget.

00:12:43.900 It's to allow people to have their own careers.

00:12:46.400 and this is a process that has been applied consistently for many, many years.

00:12:54.180 I've respected all the rules and I went even beyond what was suggested to me by the commissioner.

00:13:01.400 Yeah, yeah. And by the way, no, the ethics commissioner has not said he's been above board.

00:13:06.200 The ethics commissioner couldn't actually find a record of him having recused himself

00:13:11.200 or declared his conflict of interest when he claimed he did back in September.

00:13:15.220 He didn't. There has not been a single piece of evidence that he had recused himself or declared

00:13:20.880 a conflict of interest between September and April. April is finally when anyone knew that

00:13:27.680 he had a conflict of interest. And I believe he only declared it because people found out his

00:13:31.800 wife was working there. I don't believe they share the same last name. So it was like one

00:13:35.520 of those things where unless you knew the couple, you wouldn't know that that was his wife right

00:13:39.900 away it's like my goodness come on guys yes the ethics commissioner probably said that at some

00:13:45.260 point but since then they've been saying yeah actually i don't even know when he actually

00:13:49.660 like claimed a conflict of interest he's only done that recently and now they're just saying

00:13:53.740 oh the ethics commissioner is mistaken any uh any sense of potential or possible conflict of interest

00:14:02.300 So, you know, when you do all the right thing, you have to accept that the rest is just politics.

00:14:11.040 And this is a serious moment for our country.

00:14:14.400 This is a serious moment in history.

00:14:17.180 We have to focus our attention on, you know, building our economy, empowering Canadians.

00:14:25.240 And, you know, you see what I'm doing this week.

00:14:27.280 we have a lot of big things to uh to be uh present engage with with the world and our colleagues and

00:14:35.200 that's what i'm doing and like i said i've been as transparent as one can be and i've answered

00:14:40.240 questions in the house as well and i've taken questions from media whenever someone has asked

00:14:45.440 me and i think um you know i think people should take the words of the commissioner uh and he's

00:14:51.840 been very clear with respect to that matter no no it's actually not been very clear at all and

00:14:57.520 the thing is that yes it's great that you're answering questions to the media but when you

00:15:01.600 cannot be compelled to tell the truth on topics that you don't really want to get into like why

00:15:08.560 is there no record of you having recused yourself or declared a conflict of interest last year

00:15:13.600 well we actually need to ask we need to be able to compel you to provide emails we need you to

00:15:18.560 to be able to actually show records of when you did these things. He doesn't want to do that

00:15:23.460 because it wouldn't make him look very good. But he says, oh, all the committee is going to decide

00:15:26.980 if it wants me to come and talk. At the same moment, he knows that Carney is making sure to

00:15:31.560 shuffle the committee seats to make sure that they'll have a majority of liberals and that he

00:15:36.200 will never have to show up. Here's a post now from Conservative MP Matt Strauss. He just,

00:15:41.980 yesterday said, there are 40 million Canadians and one selected to run a $90 billion project

00:15:49.160 just happens to be the finance minister's wife. They are trolling us at this point,

00:15:54.060 banana republic behavior. And it's just a headline from the CBC that says conservatives call for

00:15:58.860 ethics probe of champagne as questions raised over high speed rail. Finance minister's partner is a

00:16:05.340 VP at Alto high speed rail project. Like again, the fact that we only knew that this was a thing

00:16:10.700 in early April is, you know, some would say kind of telling. It is kind of a big deal. It kind of

00:16:19.260 could open the door for even more corruption with the project if there's already friends or spouses

00:16:25.260 of the Liberal government running the project, and these people are going to have influence

00:16:29.360 on what consultants get hired, on what companies are involved in the construction, on people who

00:16:34.920 are staffing other kind of nonsensical positions, you know, like PR, HR, sorts of things. The thing

00:16:42.180 is that this is why conflict of interest is bad. This is what we call government graft.

00:16:47.860 Graft, it doesn't matter if it's Crown Corporation, it can still be graft. The government giving money

00:16:53.900 to specific projects it knows will benefit people they like, whether it's for political reasons or

00:17:00.600 financial reasons. We already know there's effectively just a pure political reason for

00:17:04.340 this train. They want to win seats in Quebec City, because Quebec City is a block of a claw

00:17:09.680 and conservative territory. So they're going to build a train from Toronto, liberal territory,

00:17:15.520 up the coast, up to Quebec City, where they are pretty much either running the train line

00:17:22.820 through places that the liberals currently hold, so they're helping support their base,

00:17:27.820 or it's swing ridings that they want to try and win from other people. They will never help build

00:17:33.560 high-speed rail between Calgary and Edmonton because they don't actually have a chance of

00:17:38.320 winning any of those ridings, even though the Alberta government wants to build high-speed

00:17:41.980 rail. Although I'm the type of person who says, hey, it's a driving country. I don't think we

00:17:46.760 need high-speed rail. It's just not really the thing. Maybe one day we could do it if it was

00:17:51.680 cheaper. I just don't really see the utility at the moment. Regardless, though, the liberals are

00:17:57.040 obviously building things that are politically going to be helping them, and they're going to

00:18:01.940 be doing it where it will financially help friends. That's why we have a spouse in a nonsensical

00:18:08.160 position at Alto who only took the job months before they started committing $90 billion to

00:18:15.560 the project, more money than the current deficit is. If Japan was building this train, it'd probably 0.74

00:18:21.540 cost $40 billion tops, but the Alto train could end up ballooning all the way to $200 billion.

00:18:29.500 dollars it's maddening that this is just not actually being questioned that much by the media

00:18:34.840 little bits and pieces here and there but just not very much we're just kind of like acting like

00:18:40.660 this is just okay this is like you know standard practice oh yeah there's some ethical questions

00:18:47.640 being asked about the train no this could be a major major scandal in fact it already is

00:18:53.720 because the liberals are attempting to cover it up anyways so that should be it for this video

00:19:00.200 today guys thank you for watching the show and of course remember to do all the normal stuff

00:19:05.160 like share subscribe leave a comment consider becoming a channel member and i will see you guys

00:19:11.280 all next time

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 18, 2026

Carney could FALL from $90B Alto Corruption Scandal - Finance Minister dodges Ethics Committee!

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