The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 17, 2023


Jagmeet Singh Whines At Profitable Businesses


Episode Stats

Length

13 minutes

Words per Minute

193.4837

Word Count

2,605

Sentence Count

137

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

Jagmeet Singh is trying to paint a picture of the NDP as a party that only cares about blue-collar, working class people, seniors, people living on lower incomes, new immigrants. In reality, the real problem is that they only care about people who are making a lot of money from big box grocery stores, like Loblaws, Sobeys, and Loblaws.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The big lie of Jagmeet Singh and the NDP is that it's a party that really cares about blue-collar
00:00:05.060 working-class people, you know, seniors, people living on lower incomes, new immigrants, when if
00:00:10.260 you observe any of the NDP's politicians, nothing could be further from the truth. These people at
00:00:14.940 the end of the day are just social progressives who are resentful against people who run businesses
00:00:19.620 and are actually profitable. It's not that the NDP hates excessive profits, but they hate profits in
00:00:25.460 any way because they define all profits as excessive, which is sort of what I'm going
00:00:30.260 to be touching on in the videos that Jagmeet Singh has recently put out. This video was actually
00:00:34.200 inspired by a comment from yesterday's video from George Davison, who said, shareholders need a
00:00:39.720 return. Most of their profits come from drug pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, referring to
00:00:44.660 Jagmeet Singh going after big box grocery chains and pretending that they're somehow price gouging
00:00:49.660 Canadians because cereal has gone up by like 5% over the past few years, even though, you know,
00:00:55.180 inflation has been going up by like 8% or 9%. Grocery stores are, in fact, actually losing
00:01:00.240 money year over year because of this, the incredibly high increase of inflation. And, you know, just
00:01:06.980 like to debunk what Jagmeet Singh thinks, businesses would not be in business as they kept increasing
00:01:11.900 prices way outside of the price range of most Canadians. Canadians can only pay for what they
00:01:16.700 can afford. And if grocery stores were increasing the prices more than they had to, they would
00:01:24.740 probably actually get undercut by a different grocery chain in Canada. But he wants to be able
00:01:30.340 to spread hatred toward people who run businesses. So he's just going to ignore all those facts and
00:01:35.220 just focus in on lying about company revenues, pretending their profits, or relying about some
00:01:41.060 profits and pretending that it was because of price gouging and not some other sort of, you know,
00:01:45.200 financial transaction the business was involved with. But this was the tweet that really set a lot
00:01:49.580 of people off, including myself from Jagmeet Singh. I'll play the video in just a second here. But
00:01:53.720 effectively, he's going after Sobeys for supposedly making record profits. He's a Sobeys just posted a
00:01:58.740 52% increase in profits. When you pay more greedy CEOs, make more. And I want to go into this video
00:02:05.100 here because it's so hypocritical and so ironic when you actually hear his words. And then I'll come back
00:02:09.720 and talk about how that post he put out actually got community noted. But here's Jagmeet Singh talking right
00:02:15.680 here. You won't believe the news that I read today. Sobeys, one of the large corporate grocery
00:02:20.160 stores in Canada, just posted a 52% increase in profits in the first quarter on food alone. Now
00:02:29.240 this comes as no surprise, as Canadians have felt the impact of high grocery prices. While people are
00:02:37.100 experiencing this real struggle, Justin Trudeau says the Canadians are grumbling. Well, they got a lot
00:02:41.920 to grumble about. These greedy CEOs are posting record profits while Canadians are having the
00:02:47.000 hardest time ever to buy their groceries. But what we have to do is take on the corporate greed that
00:02:52.140 is driving up the cost of food that is a major driver. But here's the problem. We know that Justin
00:02:57.540 Trudeau and Pierre Polyev are going to back up their big money donors, they're not going to want to take
00:03:02.520 them. I'm just cutting off there. It's so absurd that he pretends like the government is currently
00:03:09.120 right now made up of Justin Trudeau and Pierre Polyev, even though that him and Justin Trudeau
00:03:13.420 agree on all the policies. And if Jagmeet Singh really wanted to push for something that was,
00:03:18.280 you know, going to hold all the greedy CEOs accountable, he could do it. He's literally
00:03:22.640 holding up Justin Trudeau's government right now, but he doesn't really want to talk about that.
00:03:26.920 And again, what are you talking about? Like the greedy CEOs are driving up prices. Show me a product
00:03:32.520 that has been increased in price more than inflation would dictate it should be. He'll never actually show
00:03:38.100 you it because that would be a fantastic press conference by Jagmeet Singh if he was right
00:03:42.100 saying, hey, look, this pack of spaghetti used to be $3.50. Now it's $7.40. Inflation on this product
00:03:50.080 would have only gone would have only put it up to this price. CEOs are taking advantage of inflation
00:03:54.680 to price gouge people. That's obviously not what's going on. So Jagmeet Singh has no examples. So he
00:03:59.480 basically is just trying to project this vague hatred towards CEOs. And you don't have to like the CEO
00:04:04.860 of Loblaws, Galen Weston, to understand that Galen Weston and Loblaws are running themselves so that
00:04:10.300 they can make the most profits on the on the lowest possible margins, because that's how big box stores
00:04:15.460 actually work. They work off of two, three, 4% margins on most of their products, because their
00:04:21.420 goal is to sell Canadians products in bulk. If they were selling products with convenience store type
00:04:27.940 margins, Canadians probably wouldn't buy from them. And they'd go to Costco, or they'd go to Safeway,
00:04:33.000 or they'd go to Sobeys, or they'd go to another smaller grocery store, they'd go to the farmer's
00:04:37.400 market. It doesn't make any economic sense why people would be price gouging. But he's basically
00:04:41.960 involved in this giant conspiracy theory, Jagmeet Singh is that somehow all of the grocery CEOs are
00:04:47.940 getting together to like to work with each other on how to price gouge and price fix Canadians. And he's
00:04:54.340 only accusing them of price fixing, because most grocery stores tend to have very similar prices.
00:04:58.280 And it's not because they're greedy, and they're colluding. It's because a three or 4%
00:05:03.480 standard margin of profit is, you know, standard across most grocery stores. So it looks like
00:05:09.040 they are price fixing when most of them are barely above the line that makes it worth selling the
00:05:13.660 product. But whatever. But my point here is that Jagmeet Singh doesn't actually care about working
00:05:19.000 class people, you'll find that he's not really talking about Canadians. And most of the videos and
00:05:23.380 posts he makes, he's mostly just projecting hatred towards CEOs and businesses. And his definition
00:05:29.240 of what excessive profits is, is completely nonsense. I'll bring up the post again on from
00:05:34.000 Twitter. If you read the the community notes, which is extremely funny, considering that Jagmeet
00:05:38.980 Singh hasn't taken this post down and still thinks it's great. He said that it reads that Sobeys net
00:05:43.880 earnings actually dropped last quarter from 173.7 million to 149.4 million. That is absolutely true.
00:05:51.380 And then he said this jump in profit, he is quoting is from the parent company Empire Code
00:05:55.560 Limited. And this was due to the sale 56 of their gas stations in Western Canada. So it's not really
00:06:00.640 more, it's not excessive profit, they sold the value of those gas stations to someone else. And now they
00:06:06.920 have that money. And now it makes it look like they were super profitable last quarter, when really all
00:06:11.720 that happened was that they just sold off a bunch of capital that no longer generates them any money
00:06:16.540 because they don't they don't own those gas stations anymore. And they'll take that money and
00:06:20.720 reinvest it somewhere else. Nobody is making excessive profits, they're just making profit.
00:06:24.940 And I even don't even like the term excessive profits. There's no such thing as excessive profits.
00:06:29.060 If someone is willing to buy a product at a certain price, and that you have a certain profit that you
00:06:34.260 take away from that, that is just profit. There's nothing excessive about it. Someone agreed to the price.
00:06:39.520 And again, no business worth their salt is going to be trying to charge people up 30 40% on produce,
00:06:45.600 it doesn't make any sense, because everyone else in the market is going to underprice you and no one's
00:06:50.180 going to purchase anything from you. But the but this is this is the NDP's gambit, they don't have any
00:06:55.500 real solutions to anything. So at least hoping that if they're the party that hates Galen Weston more than
00:07:01.140 anyone else, the CEO of Loblaws, that maybe working class Canadians will think that they know what
00:07:06.280 they're talking about. What, in fact, actually, a lot of the policies that the NDP is proposing
00:07:11.260 would make would make CEOs richer, and would make these large companies like Loblaws and all the
00:07:17.620 chains that they own, actually much more bloated and more and owning more of the grocery market in
00:07:23.280 Canada, because regulations and, you know, minimum wage increases that the NDP is pushing would
00:07:29.260 actually make smaller grocery stores more likely to go bankrupt, giving more market share over to Loblaws.
00:07:34.940 And this is also I just want to touch on the thing that George Davis said in this comment again,
00:07:39.180 because he says that shorter holders need a return. And that is absolutely correct. What
00:07:43.180 does Jagmeet Singh think? Because he's so involved in government these days, that he thinks it's just
00:07:47.660 like immoral for people to invest in a company and to own shares and stocks in that company,
00:07:53.520 expecting that they're going to get some benefit from investing all the money. He takes a very
00:07:58.260 nationalized approach to everything. He literally has been calling for a nationalization of several
00:08:03.160 industries in Canada. So he believes that will all all excessive profits are evil, because well,
00:08:09.160 it should be government run, and it should be like, you know, it should be profit neutral,
00:08:13.400 even though government, government programs tend to spend way more than their equivalent private
00:08:18.520 programs do, because the government is incentivized to make it cost as much as possible,
00:08:22.840 they can so they can hire as many people as possible, so they can pay their executives as much as
00:08:27.080 possible. It still goes on in the public sector, just because you want to ignore it,
00:08:31.480 doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Dr. Verna Yu, the former AHS CEO here in Alberta, who like TNT,
00:08:38.160 a lot of my article series ended up getting her fired. She was making over $750,000 a year when
00:08:43.900 you added up her salary and benefits. Completely ridiculous. And she was bad at her job. At the
00:08:48.880 very least, the shareholders of Loblaws can say Galen Weston is actually very good at keeping prices
00:08:53.560 low and keeping the company very profitable. But the NDP hates profit, they hate successful businesses.
00:08:58.980 So they're just going to stamp their feet and whine about it. But this is something else that
00:09:02.880 Jagmeet Singh posted on September 16th yesterday. He says, I'm going to get Galen Weston or the
00:09:08.380 grocery store cartel monopolize or I'm sorry, it's nine minutes in the video. Let me mess up once
00:09:14.680 I'm going to get it. I'm not going to let Galen Weston or the grocery cartel monopolize everything.
00:09:19.980 I am introducing a bill on Monday that will crack down on price fixing, investigate and punish CEOs
00:09:25.560 if they price gouge and bring prices down. Guess where that investigation is going? Nowhere because
00:09:30.720 they're not doing it. And if anything, he's going to be trying to monopolize these businesses even
00:09:36.000 harder because again, like I just said, when you pass higher minimum wages, tougher regulations,
00:09:42.360 more paperwork and bureaucracy and higher taxes on corporations, the only ones that are going to
00:09:47.180 survive are the bigger ones who can handle the costs. Actually, whenever there are minimum wage
00:09:52.880 increases proposed in both Canada and the US, the people who come in and speak in favor of the
00:09:59.260 policy from the public tend to be representatives of large grocery store chains because they like
00:10:04.060 the idea that it might actually get their smaller competition to go under because they can't afford
00:10:08.340 $17 an hour, but they can. Anyways, but this is what the NDP's policy website says about this.
00:10:15.460 He says, if passed, this bill will lower your grocery prices by increasing fines for price
00:10:20.540 fixing, overcharging other abuses of Canadian consumers, closing loopholes that will let
00:10:26.080 companies get away with anti-competitive behavior at the expense of Canadians. And let me stop right
00:10:31.000 there. So anti-competitive behavior. When has the NDP ever cared about competitive behavior? If they
00:10:37.200 cared about competition in the Canadian market, they would lower taxes. They would stop backing the
00:10:42.720 subsidization of the solar companies. It's completely ridiculous. But if you're in the NDP,
00:10:48.040 you can square this circle peg, I guess. And then the last one says, strengthen merger laws and give
00:10:54.220 the competition bureau more power to stop big corporations from abusing their dominant position
00:10:59.080 and buying up smaller players in the market. Well, his regulations will just drive small businesses
00:11:04.480 into bankruptcy. And then you're basically saying that bigger corporations cannot then fill the gap that
00:11:09.720 you're creating and buy up that smaller defunct company. So effectively, grocery prices are going
00:11:15.060 to go up because we're going to be left with a smaller supply of grocery stores in general.
00:11:20.620 Again, Jamie Singh doesn't actually care about any of this. One of the YouTubers I like to watch,
00:11:25.280 Kirk Wilcox, makes the point that the capitalism versus socialism debate has nothing to do with
00:11:30.520 economics. It's all about this preening, preachy moralism from the socialist side.
00:11:36.160 They're not arguing with capitalists that their economic systems are more efficient and better.
00:11:40.640 They just think they're more moral. And so Jamie Singh's fine with Canadians becoming poorer,
00:11:45.680 as long as he can go after and yell at rich CEOs and see if he can make them poorer as well. Again,
00:11:51.700 it's like the Margaret Thatcher thing, that they'd rather the poor be poor as long as the rich were also
00:11:59.180 less well off rather than everyone be richer. It's just a very nasty and kind of gross way of thinking
00:12:06.800 about Canadian politics. And as much as Jamie Singh tries to be the young, dynamic, fresh kind of guy
00:12:12.380 in Canadian politics, he's really just a crotchety old man when it comes to a lot of economic issues.
00:12:19.660 It's that other people have more money than him, they're better off than him, and he's deeply jealous.
00:12:24.000 So he's going to haul Galen Weston up in front of some sort of investigative committee and yell at
00:12:29.780 him for not losing money on all the products they're selling as if Loblaws was noticeably
00:12:37.240 super expensive compared to anyone else. Again, go to a mom and pop grocery store,
00:12:41.640 it will probably be more expensive. They cannot actually deal in the scale Loblaws can. And I can
00:12:47.340 guarantee you a small mom and pop grocery store is not price gouging. They're offering products at a
00:12:53.120 price that is going to allow them to profit and will allow them to stay in business and have
00:12:57.860 customers. Anyways, that's it for me today. I hate the NDP never vote for them. I have my usual links
00:13:04.820 in the comments and description of this video, my gifts and go legal fundraiser against a Chinese
00:13:10.000 billionaire. It's a stupid defamation case. I'm currently winning it on behalf of TNT. And you can
00:13:15.200 also sign up for TNT emails in the description of this video, just click the link, sign up with your
00:13:20.160 information and you'll get our videos and articles sent directly to your inbox. But other than that,
00:13:25.100 that's enough for me today. Have a great afternoon, everyone.