The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 17, 2023


Jagmeet Singh Whines At Profitable Businesses

Topics
CEOs driving up grocery prices excessive profits
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Jagmeet Singh Galen Weston Justin Trudeau Sobeys Pierre Poilievre George Davies Margaret Thatcher Kirk Wilcox Verna Yu
Justin Trudeau's Marketing Sucks Canadian Politics Is A Low Information Space

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

193.48

Word count

2,605

Sentence count

137

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 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 0.98
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 0.99
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 0.99
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 1.00
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 1.00
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, 0.93
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, 0.56
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 0.73
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 0.64
00:13:10.000 billionaire. It's a stupid defamation case. I'm currently winning it on behalf of TNT. And you can 1.00
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00:13:25.100 that's enough for me today. Have a great afternoon, everyone.