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A reminder en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fi…
Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, new enemies must be identified. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine would fit the bill
Ponty retweeted
FT comments never miss.
I don’t think I’ve read such a rational analysis of the situation we’re in for a long time.
I've been in France since 2002 and have never seen the streets so violent nor the politics so extreme. From the sacking of the supermarket on my street to the prospect of Présidente Le Pen, here's me @FT including thoughts from 2 French Nobel laureates as.ft.com/r/addcad57-0f9d-4e…
Ponty retweeted
Once again the Canadian government FAILS to understand the problem
I would know, I founded and ran a tech company for a decade and raised MILLIONS from investors
And it was HORRIBLE doing business here
Let me explain
This isn't a "money issue"
This is a regulatory, economic and taxation issue combined with a deep cultural problem
Back in 2015 I founded a tech company, using my own money from working in the Alberta oil field
We developed our MVP in Montreal and launched our proof of concept right here in the West Island
Our first ever investors were our own first clients. We raised $150,000 from them
But things got harder when it came time to raise our seed round
I met with EVERY SINGLE VC in Montreal.
All told us NO
Why?
Too risky
lol... its the very definition of Venture Capital
They wanted a pitch deck, projections on 5 years, cashflow, business plan, go-to-market strategy, communication strategy, marketing strategy, Tech reviews, C.V. of founding team, financial disclosure etc
We spent more time preparing documents for them than we did scaling our business
Worse of all, they all wanted something different and would give contradicting requirements
I remember this interaction at the Espace CDPQ, the headquarter for all Venture firms in Montreal
ie:
Investor: How much do you need
Me: $1 Million
Investor: So if you only raise $750k what happens?
Me: Well we'll adapt XYZ
Investor: So then never EVER tell me a fix number. Give me a range. $750K-$1.5M or else you look foolish
I went home, reworked the pitch deck
The very next day:
New investor: How much you need
Me: $750K-$1.5M
New investor: What... you don't even know your number???
Me: well... yes but what if we raise less or more
New Investor: No, you look foolish
We said screw it. Approached American Investor
Our first was a VC firm out of Houston, Texas
Took less than 1 month from initial pitch, to closing.
In USD. For more money than what Canadians wanted to offer.
Best of all, they understood the fluid nature of a startup. No onerous and rigid plan. No overburdened documentation. Every second wasted on non-operating activities was sucking productive time away from scaling.
But Elliot... what about BDC and other AMAZING institutions in Canada
We did business with the BDC. a $250,000 loan. Which I had to personally guarantee.
Which 25 year old has assets and the balls to guarantee that amount? Very few. It's prohibitive. And reduces capital available to our homegrown companies
And this was AFTER MONTHS of explaining to them what we were doing. It was clear the BDC was setup to support traditional brick-and-mortar companies only.
Think Manufacturers or Commerces. But a tech startup? They could NOT wrap their heads around it.
Canadian banks? Forget it. Outright. Too risky
Then I watch fellow startups do the same. And move to the US.
Why wouldn't they?
In Quebec, I had to pay an extra 15% on top of my payroll as taxes. QPIP, QPP, FSS, CNESST... all to satisfy the government non-stop appetite.
Consequences: Well for a startup where every dollar counts, this means lower salaries thus harder to attract top talent (vs American competitors)
or
I simply hired less staff... thus slowly growth for both my company and the country's economy.
But wait it gets worse.
Revenue Quebec and CRA both required a plethora of compliance documents filled monthly or quarterly. GST and QST tax fillings, CNESST Salary equity (yes lol) documents, Source deduction documents, RL-1 fillings, Income tax (both QC and CAN), Workplace sexual harassment policy, OQLF policy, CNESST training and certification... the list goes on
At least 1 day a month was spent by me and some of my executives preparing and fulfilling these documents. This means we were't scaling our business and instead working for FREE for the government.
Then there is the tax burden.
Why would top talent want to come here and get taxed at up to 52% marginal rate?
While a Miami startup offers higher salary and the State taxes you 0%
Finally investor behaviour
In Canada... safe. steady return. Great for a Series C. Great for an established companies. No desire for risk. No understanding of the ecosystem.
HORRIBLE FOR VENTURE
Meanwhile the U.S. , they understand the ecosystem. 90% of their investment will go down to 0. But the few that survive will go on to earn them BILLIONS and change the world.
So this new announcement of $1.75Billion won't change the underlying issue that makes us uncompetitive.
At best, it will go to startups who will flee to the US the very second the money hits
At worse, it will just be another slush fund given to friends of the government
and I fear its the latter as usual
Ottawa kicks off process to give $1.75-billion boost to venture capital sector
theglobeandmail.com/business…
Ponty retweeted
I enjoy helping people, but I’ve mostly found “volunteering” lacking. A simulation of charity, done for the benefit of the volunteers. Like “protest,” it comes across as a meaningless sacrament in the civic religion, a hollow representation of something else.
Ponty retweeted
The glorious spectacle of Timothy Miller wearing a burka
spectator.com/article/the-gl…
Brendan O'Neill, Spectator 16th Oct
Crack open the warm bitter. Dust down the bunting. Put Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ on repeat. For at last we have something to make every true English heart swell with pride. It’s the stirring sight of that 76-year-old geezer who was arrested for wearing a burka attending court yesterday in… a burka. Oh, this blessed plot!
His name is Timothy Miller. He’s from Southampton. On 12 September he was arrested at an anti-immigration protest for parading about in an entombing niqab. The cops accused him of using the Islamic veil to conceal his identity. Not so, he replied: I really am an ageing student of Allah.
He repeated this defence at Portsmouth magistrates’ court yesterday. He lifted his veil – I’m cracking up – to confirm his name, address and date of birth. He then said he is ‘studying’ Islam and he wears the burqa to gain a ‘greater understanding’ of the faith. His draping veil was flawlessly accessorised with a fetching black handbag. . .
The sourpusses of the Islamo-left will wail ‘Islamophobia!’. They’ll accuse him of ridiculing Islamic dress. But the burqa is ridiculous. We didn’t need a pensioner from Southampton to tell us that. It is cruel, brutish, backward, sexist and profoundly anti-social to make women drape themselves in public like this. If you’re alarmed when a white male pensioner pulls on a sackcloth but cool when a brown-skinned woman is forced to do so, you might want to have a word with yourself.
It’s possible this case will force some serious head-scratching in public life. Like, why is it potentially a crime for a British pensioner to cover his face but fine for a Muslim woman? Is it because she believes Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse and that women must wholly surrender the self to divine decree? If I embrace such truthless dogmas, can I also wear a mask on the street? . . .
Ponty retweeted
Found it
Carney's connection to Labour's Rachel Reeves
Great deal for Brookfield's heat pump businesses at taxpayer expense
Former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney endorsed Rachel Reeves (Rachel from accounting) during a video message played at the Labour Party's annual conference in Liverpool on October 9, 2023
And Carney lobbied Reeves for heat pump subsidy changes in the UK
Up to 820,000 Canadian households are estimated to receive government-subsidized heat pumps under Prime Minister Mark Carney's national heat pump rebate program.
Carney, the climate charleton. It is always all about the money
Ponty retweeted
“And there is one final asymmetry, the one that ought to settle the matter once and for all. There is no flight from Europe by anyone—no community, no religious minority, no ethnic group, no political tendency—as a consequence of European far-right violence. No Muslims, no Jews, no atheists, no ex-Muslims, no gay men and women are packing suitcases in Frankfurt or Manchester or Marseille and applying for asylum in Cairo or Islamabad or Algiers because European far-right militants have made their lives untenable at home. The traffic runs, on a massive scale, in the opposite direction, and it has run in the opposite direction for two generations. Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Baha’is, Ahmadiyyas, ex-Muslims, secularists, feminists, gay men and women, and religious minorities of every description are leaving the Muslim-majority world in millions, and they are coming to Europe and the rest of the West. They come because Europe, whatever else it is, is not governed by the doctrinal architecture they are fleeing. The presence of a European far right that occasionally shouts at them, or, at the violent extreme, produces a Breivik or a Tarrant, has not slowed the movement at all. If the two extremisms were symmetrical, the flow would also be symmetrical. It is not even close. The direction of migration by itself—that is, the votes of feet cast in their tens of millions by the very people who know both worlds—is a stronger empirical statement about the relative danger of the two phenomena than any Home Office report, academic study, or half-baked media essay will ever be.”
thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-…
'A couple who believe that daycare is harmful may delay parenthood until they can afford...to stay home, or feel guilty if they...use daycare.'
Others, often single, have ++ children & place them in preK with nary a care b/c the state pays. Test the kids from these two groups.
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, revised and updated. amazon.com/Nurture-Assumptio…
Ponty retweeted
Canada’s Plato’s Cave: Mistaking Sovereignty Theatre for Strategy
What is most striking about Canada’s pundit class is its inability or refusal to distinguish between a complementary trade policy and a substitutionary one.
A complementary trade policy recognizes an inescapable fact: Canada’s economic relationship with the United States is foundational.
Canada should deepen continental integration where geography, infrastructure, capital markets, energy systems, industrial supply chains, defence, and technology make it mutually beneficial. At the same time, Canada should broaden access to other markets, attract investment from more sources, and build export relationships beyond North America. That is diversification as risk management.
A substitutionary trade policy is something entirely different. It assumes Canada can, or should, replace its economic relationship with the United States by redirecting trade toward Europe, Asia, or any other set of partners. That proposition is economically unserious.
No other market can readily replicate the advantages of proximity, integrated logistics, established supply chains, regulatory familiarity, capital-market links, and the sheer scale of the Canada–U.S. commercial relationship.
Yet much of the Canadian commentary treats these two approaches as though they were identical. The moment someone argues that Canada should more deliberately integrate with the United States, the sovereignty-TDS response appears: “Canada must diversify.” But diversification is not an answer to integration. It is a complementary policy, not a replacement for it.
A country can deepen its most important economic relationship while prudently reducing vulnerability through additional customers, capital sources, and trading channels.
This is where Plato’s cave becomes the right metaphor. In Plato’s allegory, prisoners are chained in a cave and see only shadows projected onto a wall. Because they have never seen the world beyond the cave, they mistake shadows for reality and resent anyone who challenges their world view.
Canada’s pundit and public-sector elite often see only the shadow: an exaggerated vision of the United States as a threat to sovereignty and every form of deeper integration as capitulation. They do not see the larger world of continental production, integrated electricity and energy networks, shared defence, critical minerals, AI infrastructure, cross-border capital, and the strategic competition now reshaping global commerce.
The issue is not whether Canada should have more clients. Of course it should. The issue is whether Canadian elites can develop enough intellectual humility to understand that more clients do not make the United States less central.
Diversification can make Canada more resilient and give it more options. It cannot substitute for the economic and strategic reality imposed by geography.
Canada does not become more sovereign by denying that reality. It becomes more vulnerable, because a country that mistakes shadows for strategy eventually discovers that the world outside the cave has moved on without it.
Nixon’s problem with the elites was not their brains. He said they were living in Plato’s cave.
In a 1992 C-SPAN conversation with Brian Lamb he calls the Georgetown dinner delightful and then names it intellectual incest. Inside the Beltway they talk to each other and think that conversation is the world. They do not climb out and look.
Style blinds. Prejudice hardens. He will not pretend they are dull. He says they are often sharper than he is. Knowing what moves people is the part they miss. That is how, in his telling, they keep supporting losers.
Plato’s prisoners watch shadows on a wall and call the wall the world. Nixon puts Washington in that room. The useful piece is still the same: a sealed capital can be brilliant and still be looking at its own hands.
Ponty retweeted
The Biden administration kept the core of the major first-term Trump tariffs—especially the Section 301 tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods—and in several cases increased them. It did not conduct a broad rollback. Canada should expect the same if Democrats are in charge.
Ponty retweeted
Scott Bessent explains what is driving 🇺🇸 tariffs in his landmark speech at the Reagan Institute.
1⃣ Trade policy, industrial capacity & national security are inseparable.
2⃣ Trusting that foreign supply chains would function smoothly & adversaries would always behave responsibly was a mistake.
3⃣ Buying cheap foreign products while industrial capacity was hollowed out left the 🇺🇸 vulnerable. A country cannot outsource its industries, ignore strategic concentration & expect to remain secure.
4⃣ Tariffs are driving the on-shoring of manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals, medicines, microchips & worker skills to secure domestic supply & security.
5⃣ Globalization as the de facto trade policy is over. China is in the crosshairs along with any nation that enables 🇨🇳 weakening of the 🇺🇸 by facilitating their product dumping & crimes.
Ponty retweeted
This should be no surprise. My guess is that after LeBlanc's and Freeland's interviews on CNBC this week the cancelations from US investors were overwhelming. No US investor will invest 6 cents in a Canadian government centrally planned investment, that is by design political and not by design to make money. Who in their right mind in Canada believes that investors who invest in free market capitalism would invest in a nation of centrally planned socialism-marxism? Wonder why Canadas economy will continue to be a dumpster fire? Here is the reality the Trudeau-Carney Liberals HAVE to overcome. Wall Street investors are not fools.
Ponty retweeted
So I listened to a podcast about the Rotherham grooming gangs and I don’t actually know what to say. I knew it was bad, but the behavior of the authorities was just — you know, I don’t think there’s even a word for how despicable they were.
Let me be clear here, because I think the word “grooming” softens what was done to these girls. They were gang raped, sexually abused, beaten, tortured, threatened, and deliberately addicted to drugs. One girl was doused in gasoline and threatened with being burned alive if she did not comply. These girls were physically and sexually degraded in ways that shocked even this experienced sex crimes investigator. And they were failed — over and over and over again, at every opportunity, by a government that was more concerned about promoting multiculturalism than it was about protecting British children.
What happened in Rotherham — and in other cities across the UK — was nothing less than an atrocity, and British authorities did worse than just turn a blind eye: they actively persecuted the victims, and anyone else who tried to intervene. And the scale of it! 1400 victims in Rotherham alone, 250,000 in the UK as a whole — a quarter of a million British girls, horrifically violated in a deliberate, organized scheme of sexual abuse.
Now let me address the elephant in the room: the religion of the perpetrators. There is a shameful reluctance to admit the role that Islam and Muslim cultural traditions played in these horrific crimes.
Commentators hide behind cowardly phrases like “not practicing Muslims,” when the fact is that these men’s attitude of sexual entitlement was formed in the crucible of their Muslim faith.
Islam teaches that any female of any age who goes out alone, who shows her hair, who talks to men, who drinks alcohol or uses drugs, is a whore who can be raped at will by any Muslim man who wants her. An Iranian cleric declared as much only yesterday. Islam was the framework upon which these crimes were constructed. This is an undeniable fact, and to deny it is to aid and abet future atrocities against British women and girls.
Islam teaches men that they own women. It is difficult to think of another belief system that is less compatible with how we want to live here in the West. It is impossible to think of another belief system that causes as much suffering and oppression. The idea that one half of the human race is inferior to the other is repugnant to every right-thinking human being, but for some inexplicable reason we are supposed to ignore the oppression of almost a billion Muslim women and girls, as well as the incredible suffering that those who follow this repulsive religion inflict upon non-Muslims.
Let’s not kid ourselves. If gangs of white men had been raping hundreds of thousands of Muslim girls across the UK — gang raping them, beating them, torturing them, getting them addicted to drugs — the government’s response would have been overwhelming. It would have been a national crisis of unprecedented scale — as it should have been for these brutalized white girls. Instead, the government actively persecuted both the victims and those who tried to help them, and let Muslim monsters roam free, raping and torturing children at will.
Even now, they refuse to have a real conversation about the consequences of multiculturalism. Accusations of racism are the go-to response anytime someone points out that Islam is an oppressive, violent, authoritarian, misogynistic ideology that directly contradicts everything we value in the West, and as millions of Muslim men flood our borders, our governments refuse even to acknowledge the fact that they see Western women as rape meat.
At this point, they can no longer plead ignorance. They know exactly what they’re importing, and we know why. Some powerful people see the Islamization of the West as a means to seize full social control, and stripping women of our rights is one of their primary goals.
They must be stopped.
Ponty retweeted
MOU signings.
NOTE: under PM Jean Chrétien, Canada led massive "Team Canada" diplomatic trade missions to emerging markets like China, India, and Russia, resulting in the signing of hundreds of MOUs.
OUTCOME:
A peer-reviewed landmark study, titled "Do trade missions increase trade?", co authored by Sauder School of Business economists Keith Head and John Ries.tracked these agreements and discovered they generated NO statistically significant increase in bilateral trade or export volumes.
Ponty retweeted
1. The F-350 Factor (Why LeBlanc says "Ford and GM")
The eleventh-hour collapse of the trade talks happened because of how the United States draws its tariff borders.
Under U.S. and Canadian regulatory definitions, any vehicle with a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) over 10,001 lbs enters the Medium and Heavy-Duty statistical bracket (Classes 3 through 8).
When Ford retooled its Oakville, Ontario assembly plant to build F-350 Super Duty trucks, it placed those vehicles squarely into Class 3/4 regulatory territory.
When the U.S. insisted on excluding "medium- and heavy-duty vehicles" from tariff relief, the text legally swept Ford’s massive new Canadian investment into the tariff zone.
LeBlanc is using the generic regulatory bucket ("medium and heavy duty") to defend consumer/commercial pickups built by Ford, even though the public hears that phrase and pictures a Class 8 highway semi-truck.
2. The Real Target: Global Engine Integration
Your point about Traton, Scania, and PACCAR hits the exact mechanism of the trade dispute. The U.S. tariff architecture is specifically designed to enforce strict Regional Value Content (RVC) and penalize global component shifting.
Multinationals want to design an engine once in Europe (like the Scania-derived Traton S13) and drop it into a North American truck (like an International LT) to save billions in R&D.
U.S. trade policy deliberately places barriers on these heavy vehicles because their engines, transmissions, and heavy castings are heavily globalized.
PACCAR itself has already faced the sting of these tariffs, forcing layoffs at its medium-duty Class 5–7 assembly plant in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec.
3. The Political Rhetoric
LeBlanc's focus on Ford and GM is a calculated political move. If the Canadian government frames the trade dispute as defending a European global platform (like Traton or Volvo), it loses the public relations battle in Washington and Windsor.
By framing the issue around Ford and GM, Canada shifts the narrative to protecting traditional Detroit Three assembly jobs in Ontario, effectively using the ambiguity of the "medium-duty" label to shield heavy consumer pickups from being collateral damage in a trade war aimed at global heavy-freight manufacturing.
Ponty retweeted
Brazil imports from China, Canada imported from Brazil, then exported to the US. Canada helped backdoor Chinese steel into the US. argusmedia.com/en/news-and-i… – at Calgary, Alberta
