The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 16, 2026


Carney Liberals use majority to COVER UP Corruption!


Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

182.81062

Word count

3,511

Sentence count

104

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.
00:00:06.500 I need to bring this story to your guys' attention. You've probably already heard
00:00:11.280 about the conflict of interest issues around the Alto high-speed train between Toronto and Quebec
00:00:17.240 City. The Finance Minister, Francois-Philippe Champagne, has a wife and she works as the Vice
00:00:23.120 President of Environment at Alto, and the Liberal government is giving $90 billion to Alto, a
00:00:29.940 Crown Corporation to build this train. Although if you look at other cost estimates, the thing
00:00:35.160 could balloon all the way to $200 billion. So shortly after Mark Carney got his liberal
00:00:42.940 majority just two days ago, the liberals are suddenly trying to shut down any inquiry into
00:00:49.480 the massive conflict of interest that the finance minister has with this train that he did not
00:00:55.020 disclose until several months later after it was already passed in the budget and he had advocated
00:01:02.220 for not taking it out of the budget to be voted on separately. The way he has acted during all this
00:01:07.700 has been extremely unethical and now the liberals are going to use their majority to try and shield
00:01:13.400 Mr. Champagne. There is something even crazier that happened. The day of the majority government
00:01:19.660 in this video the conservatives were talking about how the liberals were filibustering to
00:01:24.840 prevent Mr. Champagne from actually having to come and testify in front of the ethics committee.
00:01:31.720 They were running out the clock knowing that by the end of the night they would have a majority
00:01:35.600 government and when they came back they would be able to basically say well we now have the votes
00:01:40.760 to not actually be able to like force Champagne to testify. Absolutely insane. We're going to get
00:01:46.960 into this in just a second here but first I just have to remind you guys if you like the channel
00:01:51.380 Make sure to leave a like on the video, subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber, consider hitting the join button and becoming a monthly contributor as a member, really helps make the channel more sustainable for me, and of course, leave a comment with what you think about this massive mess.
00:02:07.480 Of course the liberals are using their majority to try and excuse corruption, what else would they have done with it?
00:02:14.860 But anyways, let's get into this video that was shot the night of the by-election before Carney officially had his majority, where these three conservative MPs, Tamara Jensen in the center, Leila Goodridge on the right, and Arnold Vearson on the left, were talking about them waiting out the clock.
00:02:33.780 Okay, so here we are. It's seven hours of filibuster that happened here at Ethics Committee, and I think we've seen some crazy stuff happening, all because we're trying to have the finance minister come here and talk to us about the recusing himself from the $90 billion speed ultra rail system, and he was recusing himself actually retroactively.
00:02:57.160 So we're trying to get this guy to come here and talk about it.
00:03:00.160 But they're so scared of him talking about it that they actually filibustered the entire meeting.
00:03:05.780 Tell me a little bit more, Arnold. Go for it.
00:03:08.160 So before we get to him, if you're unaware, so what Francois-Philippe Champagne had done is just this month in April,
00:03:17.180 he suddenly says, oh, yeah, of course I declared my conflict of interest and recused myself from any decisions around Alto Train.
00:03:24.920 and he claimed that he had done it back in September 2025.
00:03:30.060 The problem was is that he had been advocating for not only the budget that the Alto train was in,
00:03:37.680 but he literally blocked the other parties, the opposition, he fought the opposition
00:03:43.780 to not remove the Alto train from the budget and have it be voted on separately
00:03:49.180 so that it wasn't basically going to get passed in this giant pork-barreled budget.
00:03:53.560 You know, usually the budget is always like a big chunk of expenses altogether.
00:03:58.100 It's the point of the budget.
00:03:59.460 But with the Alto train being so expensive, naturally the Conservatives wanted to take it out and study it.
00:04:05.200 But no, no, no, Francois-Philippe Champagne fought tooth and nail to make sure that it was just going to be part of the normal budget vote.
00:04:10.980 Probably the Bloc Québécois were happy with it, too, since it's a train to come back.
00:04:14.560 But he never actually declared that he had a conflict of interest there, that his wife was the VP of Environment at Alto.
00:04:21.060 And let's be clear, VP of Environment at Alto is what we call a fake patronage job.
00:04:26.880 It's a way of being able to get the influence of Francois-Philippe Champagne in favor of 0.87
00:04:32.860 your train because you hired his wife into a fakie, stupid position. 0.99
00:04:36.580 But I'll let Arnold Viersen take it away from here. 1.00
00:04:39.120 So it's about 10 minutes after 10 Eastern time right now, and we've been here all evening
00:04:45.420 listening to the liberals read stuff into the record, basically do whatever it takes
00:04:49.900 to make sure that the minister doesn't have to appear at the committee coming.
00:04:53.920 So this meeting is suspended.
00:04:55.300 It will be coming back.
00:04:56.500 I'm sure we'll see the Liberals continue to filibuster our motion
00:04:59.120 to bring the minister to talk about his relationship with the company ILO,
00:05:03.260 which is one to have a big high-speed rail from Montreal to Toronto.
00:05:07.040 But now that they have a majority, it's not even difficult to filibuster
00:05:10.960 because they can do it.
00:05:12.160 Well, they can basically just prevent the Conservatives and the opposition
00:05:14.820 from forcing him to actually speak because they have a majority
00:05:19.080 and they can waste as much time as they want since they now control the meetings.
00:05:22.980 You know, even if the Bloc Québécois are in favor of the train,
00:05:26.140 they'd probably still be at least somewhat interested in uncovering some liberal corruption
00:05:30.340 having to do with the train.
00:05:31.660 They may still say that the train should go forward,
00:05:33.560 but Francois-Philippe Champagne should maybe have to resign.
00:05:36.320 But now, because they waited out the clock a couple days ago for Carney to get his majority,
00:05:41.380 it's now far, far easier for them to make sure that he's never going to have to testify.
00:05:45.720 We will be getting to Francois-Philippe Champagne responding a little bit later, and now the Conservatives continuing to go after this issue.
00:05:52.420 This is such a good issue for the Conservatives.
00:05:54.960 Liberals have a majority government now, but if you don't know anything about federal politics, you might not know that, or I want to phrase it that way.
00:06:01.560 That sounded really, I didn't mean to sound like arrogance there or anything like that.
00:06:04.760 That was just bad phrasing.
00:06:06.440 But federal politics, majorities are far more delicate than a provincial majority.
00:06:11.160 Provincial majority, you can just hammer stuff through all day long, no matter how small your majority is.
00:06:15.720 Carney with only a one seat majority is going to be very, it's still going to be very difficult for
00:06:20.960 him to pass stuff. Because your opposition, unless you have like 60% of the seats, your opposition
00:06:26.700 can hold you up, force you to answer questions, force you through more debates, force you through
00:06:31.500 more amendments, force you through more committees to study things. But the thing is that there is
00:06:37.600 difference between a minority where you can be forced to testify in that situation, and now
00:06:42.600 having this majority where they can basically have Francois-Philippe Champagne always have an
00:06:47.380 excuse not to testify anymore because of the power they now have on all the committees.
00:06:51.440 Sounds like his girlfriend or his wife or somebody, she's a big executive there. You know,
00:06:56.000 they were so worried about us actually getting to a vote that they talked about like going to
00:07:00.620 the moon. They talked about, you know, high speed rail in France and in England. What did you think
00:07:05.100 about the whole thing? Well, and I think this is, I guess, more par for the course. Like they are so
00:07:09.880 afraid of having light on this. And realistically, if nothing's wrong, then it shouldn't be a big
00:07:14.900 deal. Like this is, if they have done nothing wrong, if the minister of finance has done nothing
00:07:19.200 wrong, then why is he afraid of coming to committee? He comes to committee on a regular
00:07:22.400 basis. He's actually relatively good at committee compared to many other ministers. So this really,
00:07:28.820 the fact that this is where they've chosen, this is the hill they are dying on, tells us
00:07:33.120 that something isn't quite right. And so we're going to continue pushing. We're going to continue
00:07:38.660 holding them accountable, because frankly, Canadians deserve to know. So we don't need to
00:07:43.860 listen to the rest of this now. But this is a money issue for the Conservatives. I think that
00:07:48.500 Polly should go full We Charity scandal on this and show all of the ethics commissioner updates, 1.00
00:07:53.740 all of the conflict of interest screening updates that probably didn't include Champagne's 1.00
00:08:01.700 disclosure that his wife works for Alto for months and months and months. Because although he claims
00:08:06.520 that he did it back in September. The ethics commissioner has no record that he ever did it
00:08:11.180 until April when he suddenly said he did it back in September, but he didn't do it in September.
00:08:16.280 He just did it now. Polly should come out with just a giant binder full of every single week
00:08:22.600 what was this in his conflict of interest screening. Show every single week his conflict 0.85
00:08:27.900 of interest screening on the archive saying nothing about this because I believe that
00:08:32.300 every certain period of time, there's kind of like an update to the conflict of interest screenings
00:08:37.540 and show for literally days and days and months and months, he had not actually included this
00:08:44.020 because he didn't want people to know because it would have made it harder for him to advocate
00:08:47.820 for giving the company his wife works for $90 billion, if not $200 billion. Here's him on the
00:08:54.660 CBC trying to defend himself and pretend he's done nothing wrong here. And that's the kind of
00:08:59.680 engagement you know you should take that from a majority government first thing we do is to
00:09:03.360 uh give a break to the canadians and um that's the that's serious i would say government at a
00:09:09.360 serious time you know because when you're in the opposition it's easy to say whatever you want
00:09:13.840 uh even false allegations but when you're in government uh you have to make sure that what
00:09:18.560 you say is responsible and that's what we show the canadians it's a false allegation that they're
00:09:25.440 making in opposition uh but he still won't actually come to the committee so he is saying
00:09:30.000 that it is false that if you look at the record it will be proven to be false but he needed his
00:09:34.960 own colleagues to filibuster for several hours to make sure that he didn't actually have to testify
00:09:39.360 they took a knee until the election the by-elections were done so that he didn't actually
00:09:43.840 have to you know answer any questions here's michael barrett in question period yesterday
00:09:48.960 following up on this issue with the finance minister at least 90 billion taxpayer dollars
00:09:54.720 are at stake in the alto high-speed rail project and canadians deserve to know that personal
00:09:59.200 relationships aren't influencing government decisions and the finance minister recognized
00:10:04.000 the risk of a conflict of interest with his partner serving as a vice president at alto and
00:10:09.440 the law says that he can't be part of decisions discussions debates or votes when it comes to alto
00:10:15.840 canadians deserve to have confidence in their public institutions in all elected officials
00:10:21.440 and especially when 90 billion dollars at stake so will the minister come before committee and
00:10:26.600 address this conflict of interest well he's not going to come for committee because he doesn't
00:10:30.960 have to anymore and and that's the problem he could technically vote for a budget that alto
00:10:36.120 was included in but that's why he fought tooth and nail to not include not not separate alto out
00:10:42.040 which is still actually something he should have not been able to vote on but he fought tooth and
00:10:46.760 nail so then he wouldn't have to vote on alto funding by itself he wanted to keep it in the
00:10:50.920 giant budget for plausible deniability that his votes just generally for the budget doesn't have
00:10:55.440 anything specifically to do with alto although it does because he blocked them separating out
00:11:02.000 the alto funding from the rest of the spending so here we go with the answer from the liberal
00:11:07.500 government the honorable government house leader mr speaker the minister has already answered that
00:11:15.120 question. There is no risk, of course, and the minister complies, as we all must, with some of
00:11:23.180 the most stringent ethics rules in the world. As for Alto, as for high-speed rail in Canada,
00:11:29.580 it is a generational project, one that is desired by people in that member's riding and people all
00:11:37.400 over Canada. So I shouldn't have to tell you that was a non-answer. Oh, he follows all the
00:11:44.780 stringent requirements yes he eventually follows them you know seven eight months later that's
00:11:51.660 kind of a bit too late do you get to basically be as corrupt as you want in government and then
00:11:56.700 after you retire say oh by the way i had a stake in every single one of those companies that we
00:12:00.860 gave money to just so that everyone knows i'm following the rules here of course honorable
00:12:05.180 member for leeds leeds grenville thousand islands middle league we've got the government house
00:12:11.740 leader disagreeing with his finance minister here and this is the confusion that's created for
00:12:16.300 canadians it's the finance minister who said that he needed to recuse himself from the discussions
00:12:21.660 he said he needed to put in place a conflict of interest screen but then went ahead and
00:12:25.980 participated in discussions debates even said at senate committee that he was delivering the
00:12:31.580 goods for canadians well if he's recused himself why is he also voting on this issue in the house
00:12:38.060 canadians have concerns about how this 90 billion dollars is being spent they're concerned about
00:12:42.460 this conflict of interest why won't the finance minister speak for himself get on his feet and
00:12:46.780 say he'll come to committee and address it well again to answer that's because he doesn't have
00:12:51.020 to at this point it doesn't matter what's ethical or not he doesn't want to get caught in a lie here
00:12:56.140 uh and naturally the other answer was not included there because it's literally the same thing from
00:13:01.740 steve mckinnon just a very like you know arrogant noises uh you know people in your constituency
00:13:07.500 want this train, do they? It's a train with five stops between Toronto and Quebec City for minimum
00:13:13.960 $90 billion, up to $200 billion. Don't we have a deficit? Don't we have a deficit problem? Don't
00:13:20.800 we have a debt problem? Apparently, we don't. Apparently, we have enough in the budget, we have
00:13:25.960 enough room to include another $200 billion train project that's going to be paid out over the next
00:13:31.600 dozen years or so. Oh my goodness. Here's a post right here from another member of the
00:13:38.700 Ethics Committee, Michael Cooper. I think he's a really great MP. I think I put him in my top 10
00:13:43.600 conservative MPs. Michael Cooper here says, breaking, last night the Liberals blocked an
00:13:48.520 ethics probe into Minister Champagne for directing billions of tax dollars to Aalto, where his
00:13:53.800 partner is a VP. CPC is calling Ethics Committee back today. Canadians deserve answers. Liberals
00:13:59.120 must stop covering up for Champagne. Now, this is the difference between provincial and federal.
00:14:03.820 The Conservatives can force the Ethics Committee to come back, or they can call for it to come back,
00:14:09.480 but the Liberals, because they have a majority, can basically just waste the entire meeting and
00:14:14.540 make it sure it goes nowhere. But the Conservatives should just doggedly keep pushing on this every
00:14:21.080 single day. They should do rallies in Champagne's riding. They should be going, having investigative
00:14:27.080 journalists look into him and look into his wife's connections with alto over time did she only jump
00:14:33.100 on right when alto was lobbying the government in order to get the money i wouldn't be that shocked
00:14:38.220 because again her job there is pretty frivolous it's the environment vice president i don't think
00:14:44.000 that the company won't be able to survive this crown corporation won't be able to survive without
00:14:47.760 the vice president of environment it again seems like it's almost like you gave someone's spouse
00:14:53.060 a fakie job in order so that you know the minister has a personal interest in making sure it gets all
00:14:58.940 the money that it wants. But yeah, so this isn't great. This is a really good reason why we shouldn't
00:15:05.440 be giving majority governments to the liberals, but I guess Canadians wanted to do it. But
00:15:11.760 here's another corruption issue that came up. There's also Tamara Jensen questioning somebody 1.00
00:15:17.080 in a committee meeting about Brookfield and all of the connections that they have to a lot of the
00:15:21.820 projects that are getting money right now or the projects but a bunch of the
00:15:25.660 changes that they made in in basically tracking money that goes into the
00:15:30.580 government we studied the follow-up fallout from the Panama papers one of
00:15:35.080 the largest financial leaks in history and what did we hear at that time we
00:15:40.480 heard that billions of dollars were being routed through shell companies
00:15:43.700 hidden in offshore jurisdictions shielded from transparency and in many
00:15:48.340 cases beyond the reach of enforcement we heard plain as day that canada really had a problem
00:15:54.500 and not a small not a small one a structural one so uh the agency at the center of that fight is
00:16:00.740 fintrac this is the body responsible for tracking suspicious financial transactions identifying
00:16:07.140 money laundering and passing intelligence to law enforcement it's literally the follow the money
00:16:14.020 agency so here's my problem at the very moment when financial crime is becoming more sophisticated
00:16:20.900 when we're dealing with fentanyl trafficking organized crime sanctions evasions international
00:16:26.740 capital flows we're now talking about cuts to fin track cuts uh so i just want to connect it
00:16:34.020 to something a little bit more recent so we've seen repeated concerns about canadian money
00:16:38.900 pension money investment capital flowing through offshore jurisdictions like bermuda or the cayman
00:16:44.820 islands and we know that brookfield who our prime minister is linked to has investment structures
00:16:49.700 involving offshore jurisdictions to be clear offshore structures are not automatically
00:16:55.780 illegal but that's exactly the point that's what we learned from the panama papers that the issue
00:17:02.180 isn't always illegality it's lack of transparency now it's the ability to move money through complex
00:17:09.780 structures where ownership is obscured tax obligations are minimized and accountability
00:17:15.060 becomes optional and that's precisely the space that fin track is supposed to monitor
00:17:21.220 so let me ask the obvious question how can we possibly claim to be serious about financial
00:17:27.540 transparency, when we're making cuts to the very agency tasked with detecting suspicious financial
00:17:35.220 flows. When it comes to the actual enforcement capacity, we're pulling back. It seems to me
00:17:41.940 it's like installing a state of the art alarm system and firing the security guard.
00:17:46.820 Yeah, so that's not great. Very shortly after Mark Carney became Prime Minister,
00:17:52.020 suddenly all the things that actually hold, you know, that actually make sure that we track where
00:17:56.420 money is going outside of the country. Fintrac is just being heavily defunded right now. Just so
00:18:03.280 happens to be under the watch of the Prime Minister who has the greatest amount of conflicts
00:18:08.520 of interest in terms of all of his investments and what the government chooses to actually put
00:18:13.380 its money into. Yeah, that's not sketchy at all that Canadian pension funds could be investing
00:18:18.740 in Brookfield assets, and we wouldn't know it because Fintrac can't actually track it.
00:18:23.700 fantastic guys uh you know it's good that we gave this liberal government a majority because
00:18:29.540 i don't know uh i guess we'd be able to hold them accountable and that's the bad thing so i guess
00:18:34.700 for mark carney this is all fantastic because he can now do whatever he wants his ministers do not
00:18:39.920 have to testify about potential corruption issues and we can defund even though we have a 90 like
00:18:47.260 what is it like a 78 billion 85 billion dollar deficit federally right now for some reason that
00:18:53.620 the one area of government we did have to cut spending was the one that can track financial
00:18:57.960 crimes and the misuse of tax dollars fantastic offshore bank accounts galore anyways with that
00:19:05.200 all being said thank you guys for watching make sure to like subscribe share do all that fantastic
00:19:10.460 stuff and i'll see you all later