Western Standard - May 04, 2026


CORY MORGAN： Canada doesn’t need a ‘Sovereign Wealth Fund’


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

183.12686

Word count

882

Sentence count

57


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Canada is a crappy place to invest into or do business in.
00:00:12.960 I mean, the regulatory environment coupled with general ineptitude from the government
00:00:16.400 has been strangling the Canadian economy for over a decade.
00:00:19.680 We had a recent report from RBC concluding over a trillion dollars in capital
00:00:24.220 has fled Canada in the last 10 years.
00:00:26.300 It's not Fraser Institute or one of those places you can question.
00:00:29.220 It's RBC. The GDP per capita continues to drop, and it looks to be an outer freefall when you
00:00:35.680 compare it to the United States. We're getting poorer. Canada's productivity is horrific as
00:00:40.760 well. When you look at those numbers, we average 73 U.S. dollars per hour per person, compared to
00:00:46.280 97 U.S. dollars per hour per person in the United States. So even the Kearney government can no
00:00:52.120 longer ignore this. Instead of addressing, though, the root causes of why Canada has become an
00:00:57.920 investment pariah, the Kearney government has instead announced the creation of a $25 billion
00:01:03.220 quote-unquote sovereign wealth fund. If investors won't invest in Canada now,
00:01:09.580 they feel that they might get part of their investment covered through a fund created by,
00:01:13.700 you know, debt dumped on taxpayers. That'll bring them in, right? Citizens who truly hate
00:01:18.340 their pocketbook are also invited to invest into this catastrophe and waiting. The government will
00:01:23.820 set the standards of how they'll determine who gets a piece of this fund, and that invariably
00:01:27.280 leads to well-connected insiders with questionable investment notions. The grifters can smell
00:01:32.760 opportunities like this a mile away, and rest assured they're already salivating over this one.
00:01:36.880 The foundation of this fund is like the debacle of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion.
00:01:41.560 Government policies made expanding the pipeline so economically unviable, the private proponent
00:01:46.140 of the project pulled the plug. Even the Trudeau government realized it pushed things too far,
00:01:51.560 but rather than cut away the roadblocks, all they had to do was get out of the damn way.
00:01:55.280 And that's what had driven the investors away.
00:01:56.800 The government bought the project.
00:01:58.740 Then through typical mismanagement,
00:02:00.680 they built the project at a 600% higher price and years late.
00:02:05.320 The taxpayer never needed to invest a penny
00:02:08.140 if the government would just have stepped aside.
00:02:10.920 The principal reason means the same
00:02:12.300 with these other major projects.
00:02:14.080 The government's the problem.
00:02:15.740 Canada's new spaceport, that's another prime example
00:02:18.340 of what happens when the government
00:02:19.180 rushes to invest in something.
00:02:20.880 A handful of creative souls who leased property
00:02:22.960 from the government for thousands a year, managed to lease it back to the government for $20 million
00:02:27.440 a year. And some of it's even retroactive. All that land contains is a gravel road leading to a
00:02:32.780 small concrete pad. Perhaps maybe there's a little hand-scrawled note there saying rocket porch or
00:02:37.640 something as well. Just think of what those economic wizards could do with $25 billion or
00:02:41.740 more to play with. Carney's already been misrepresenting this fund by calling it a
00:02:45.520 sovereign wealth fund and comparing it to what Norway has. Sovereign wealth funds are created
00:02:50.420 through government surpluses, not by putting the bill on the credit card of the taxpayers.
00:02:55.220 The funds typically have a mandate of stabilizing the local economy and investing to get a maximum
00:02:59.940 rate of return. In Norway, the fund, their fund, purposely invests 100% outside of Norway,
00:03:06.280 so it doesn't meddle with the domestic economy. It also is mostly placed in relatively safe
00:03:11.360 equities, real estate, and bonds. Carney's debt fund is going to stay 100% within Canada
00:03:16.820 and is going to be dedicated to high-risk investments.
00:03:19.980 If the investments weren't high-risk,
00:03:21.700 private investors would buy in without tax funding.
00:03:24.400 This is just another corporate welfare fund
00:03:26.360 which will predominantly invest in losers,
00:03:28.440 and it's likely going to be targeted to areas
00:03:30.140 where liberals need growth and electoral support
00:03:31.940 rather than areas actually needed development.
00:03:34.280 Look, we already have the Canada Infrastructure Bank
00:03:36.520 and other government subsidy programs in place.
00:03:38.420 We don't need another one.
00:03:39.980 All these funds and initiatives
00:03:41.780 avoid addressing the elephant in the room.
00:03:43.440 Political red tape in general
00:03:44.760 has been hampering all developments.
00:03:46.820 And the granddaddy of all those roadblocks is the de facto veto authority given to Indigenous bands over all projects.
00:03:52.980 Chiefs, both elected and appointed, along with a plethora of lawyers and bureaucrats, swarm every new development with demands and threats despite not having the authority to stop them.
00:04:02.200 Not a single major project in Canada has been proposed that doesn't have one Indigenous band or another opposing it.
00:04:07.860 The government must stop indulging these claims and lay down the law.
00:04:12.120 Consultation with Indigenous groups is a constitutional requirement, but consent is not.
00:04:16.820 If the government could find the courage to stand on its real authority and guarantee that projects would be completed despite Indigenous opposition, the investment dollars would flood in.
00:04:26.800 Canada is loaded with resources the world wants and investors would be eager to dive into them.
00:04:31.260 Alas, though, courage and liberals aren't terms we often see hand in hand.
00:04:34.880 Slush funds created through indebting citizens are easier to create than taking principled stands and governing responsibly.
00:04:40.960 This new sovereign wealth fund is just another indication of what an increasing number of Western Canadians are realizing.
00:04:47.820 Canada is broken.