Government Subsidies Are Bad for Poor People but Good for Big Business

When you give money to poor people, it destroys their work ethic. When you give money to news corporations, it saves democracy.  That’s my takeaway from the recent announcement that the Trudeau government will begin offering assorted goodies to the hard-pressed newspaper industry.

You have to love Postmaster Paul’s reaction; “Everybody in journalism should be doing a victory lap around their building right now.” Sorry, Paul, I don’t think Postmedia has any buildings anymore. They’ve all been sold off to appease the insatiable demand for interest payments on the part of the US hedgies who bought Canwest debt out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar, rebranded the smoking ruins as “Postmedia,” and have managed to collect full value on that debt ever since.

Brilliant business strategy! The real estate had to go, the printing plants had to go, hundreds upon hundreds of journalists had to go, all in the name of finding “efficiencies” so that the unearned cash can keep flowing to the hedge fund vultures who are laughing all the way to the bank. Now the taxpayer gets to step up to the plate to help keep the whole charade afloat.

Elsewhere in the magical world of capitalism, the Globe and Mail informs me that there are now 122,455 “idle” oil and gas wells in western Canada, an increase of over fifty thousand since 2005. What happens to these wells? Well, what’s going to happen to most of them is the tax-payers are going to be gifted the cost to clean them up.

The excellent Globe investigative report ( in its very own stand-alone eight-page section) details how the big “responsible” players in the oil patch fob off their played-out wells to fly-by-night entrepreneurs with high hopes but little money, who have nothing to lose by walking away from them in the event that their pie-in-the-sky plans don’t work out.

Capitalism at its finest!