The Reset Reach: Trudeau Takes Aim At Your Retirement Savings

Justin Trudeau with an economic idea is a truly scary thing. One can just see Canada’s eager PM sidling up to the middle class during the next election and saying, “Nice little retirement nest egg you’ve got there. Would be too bad if something were to happen to it.”

With voters apparently unconcerned over his failures as Canada’s leader— the vanishing vaccine file is the latest face plant— Trudeau is now pursuing his goal of an economic cash grab to burnish his profile at the leftist World Economic Fund. Imitating all the people he wishes he could be, Trudeau said last September, “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. So this is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.” 

Gee, how could leave out credit-card debt and burning rectal itch? As we wrote in November, “Before anyone takes Trudeau too literally, remember that he craves a permanent sinecure in Freeloaderstan when Canadians finally turf him out.  Consider this Reset riposte his job application for the UN version of Uriah Heap. But others around him in his cult-like following do take The Reset seriously, and they have three more years to get under the hood and make this vehicle inert. “

And now the PM’s sails are full of lofty virtue tradewinds as the annual Davos Conference shindig approaches. This year, with Donald Trump disposed of, all the trendy talk will be of something called stakeholder capitalism. If that sounds a lot like shareholder capitalism it’s not a coincidence. It’s supposed to confuse you. Because it’s a way for NGOs and busybodies like Trudeau to access your RRSPs.

Proposed by an octogenarian German economist named  Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF,  stakeholder capitalism is meant to rebut Milton Friedman’s maxim that shareholder capitalism raises all boats. Which appeals to our PM because something, something, something… look at that shiny object,

You may , as The Financial Post’s Terence Corcoran does, ask why replace” shareholder capitalism — with profits as the prime corporate purpose — (which) has boosted the world economy, moved billions of people out of poverty and raised living standards beyond what most imagined possible 50 years ago.”?

Corcoran describes the transition from the latter to the former thusly: “The real core of the Great Reset strategy is to seize control of corporations and place the world’s business enterprises under outside control, including greater manipulation by governments and NGOs. The objective is to take private-interest profit-making producers of goods and services and convert them into public institutions that will fulfill various other public purposes in the public interest. 

“The labels for such activity are now familiar, including CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance), Impact investing, sustainability and the like.” 

In other words, shareholder value will be ditched and feel-good activism will take its place as the central force driving society.. The end goal of the financial flip is social equity. Not social equality. (That’s yesterday’s leftist love child.) Social equality meant equal opportunity. Social equity means equality of outcome ie. everyone gets a kewpie doll. Former Obama zealot and now Ambassador the the UN, Susan Rice thinks it’s Job One for the new administration. " Advancing equity is a critical part of healing and restoring unity in our nation.”

Joe Biden may not be able to find his pockets with his pen but he found this concept serviceable as he put his establishment face on the radical left’s agenda during last year’s Democratic primaries. “It’s way past time we put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,” said Biden last July.

Now, cancel-culture revenge has been a feature of the nascent Biden administration. The complicity of major global corporations in shunning, banning and destroying the businesses and media outlets its political friends don’t like shows the process already well underway.

 If you hear Trudeau’s breath quicken it’s not a surprise. While he already purchased mainstream media before the last election, the intellectual colossus  (whose academic credentials are summed up by a few months teaching drama in a toney Vancouver private school) likes to think big when it comes to spending money on his pet projects. Getting his hands on retirement savings would be one lucrative avenue.

He’s counting on most middle-class Canadians not making the connection between shareholder capitalism and their retirement savings— which, to the surprise of many liberals— is largely composed of shares and dividends from banks, corporations and other stalwarts of the capitalism that Trudeau and Biden, career civil servants, want to dominate.

This threat to the hard-earned savings of the middle class is described by former BMO CEO Tony Comper in his new book Personal Account. Comper sees the radical economists trying to grab corporate earnings directly for their WOKE notions rather than getting that money via taxes paid on capital gains and such by shareholders.

In the book Comper envisions a corporate chairman dismissing a CEO for ignoring his shareholders. “We’ve got 30,000 employees. Based on our commitment to shareholder value and creating shareholder value, I’ve had them heavily skew their pension funds into stock in this company. By dropping the ball on increasing shareholder value and today’s profit performance, we are endangering their financial futures. 

“You know what you’ve done to the pension fund of our 30,000 employees? You’ve jeopardized it. If our shareholders aren’t receiving dividends, they aren’t paying taxes — which pay for all these social programs they’ll need in retirement. By the way, where are your measures of how their conditions have improved as a result of your focus?… How are they going to relate to shareholder improvement? Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it.”

Comper insists that corporations should concern themselves with the social good— but not at any price. “In my opinion, any corporation that says they’re implementing such an initiative — or any corporate social responsibility initiative, for that matter — because it’s the right thing to do, and that’s their only reason for doing it, is not sufficiently justified in taking it on. 

“It’s got to have an economic justification as well; first, because our primary responsibility is to the shareholders, and second, because doing good things for economically sound reasons brings benefits for the social good along on the backs of them.”

Will the warnings from Comper and Corcoran wake up the middle class to the impending cash grab on their retirement savings? Can the aimless Conservatives seize on Trudeau accessing retirement funds as a campaign issue? Will the progressive media even touch the story?

Maybe. Who knows. And never. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx