I have to admit that I was unmoved earlier in this election campaign when Justin Trudeau tried to evoke understanding and empathy for those crazed anti-vaxxers and science-deniers dogging his campaign. The new, defiant Trudeau is, for me, much more palatable.
His response to the decision to allow Rebel Media to be part part of both the French and English-language debates says it all:
UPDATE: If Trudeau needs more inspiration for his new get-tough approach, perhaps he can check out Howard Stern's thoughts.
I would say that Ezra Levant should be careful about the company he keeps, but I doubt that there is more that can bring down his reputation other than simply being Ezra.
The merchant of malice and division, repugnant to the morally sane, has launched a new scheme to keep his rapidly-sinking Rebel Media afloat, a suspect retirement savings fund.
After struggling through rocky times in 2017, Levant is apparently now looking to diversify Rebel Media’s revenue streams, teaming up with an Alberta-based wealth management firm to offer Levant’s aging viewers the opportunity to stash their nest eggs in an alt-right website.
“The fund is directed at investors seeking to save for retirement or in retirement that desire modest, regular, steady income,” reads an information sheet promoting the fund. The sheet also notes the Rebel Freedom Fund is a match made in heaven for those looking for “both a financial and ideologically based investment.”
For those of sufficiently-strong constitution, here is a promotional video for the fund, led by Dale Wells:
Interesting the company that Ezra keeps. Consider Mr. Wells himself.
On the firm’s website, Wells says “we don’t invest traditionally,” explaining the firm focuses on “one-on-one” investments like financing movies and mortgages instead of mutual funds because the markets are “manipulated” – “I don’t want to say corruption,” Wells cautions, even though “I might feel that.”
“There’s no standard of acceptable practices or accounting or anything that you could follow along anymore because it’s all manipulated,” he adds.
That Mr. Wells believes that there is "no standard of acceptable practices or accounting" is evidenced by his own checkered past.
According to Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada records, Wells was disciplined by the regulators in 2011 for “business conduct unbecoming to the public interest” when he “acted in the role of an advisor without being registered as one.”
Specifically, the panel found that Mr. Wells committed a violation by entering into an arrangement to supply a financial services company with his own computer-generated research that recommended buy and sell opportunities related to mutual funds in return for a fee, and that this information was used regularly by that firm to make trades in an investment fund. In doing so, Mr. Wells acted as an advisor within the meaning of the Alberta Securities Act without being registered as such, contrary to IIROC Rule 29.1.
In its decision, the panel reviewed the requirements to be registered as an advisor under Alberta Securities law, and concluded "the evidence clearly established that the Respondent [Mr. Wells] held none of these qualifications."
a three (3) year prohibition from conducting securities related business in any capacity while in the employ of, or associated with any Member of the MFDA, effective from August 1, 2014 to July 31, 2017.
Newly-freed from that ban, it appears that Wells may be up to his old habits, given his pairing up with that malevolent trickster Levant.
That the benighted might wish to risk some of their cash on this scheme is of no consequence or concern to me. What this episode does serve to illustrate, however, is the demographic that is being targeted, the same one, of course, that supports Levant's reactionary rants, mistruths, and distortions: the stupid, the gullible, and the sorely ill-educated.
It is almost enough to make this retired teacher despair at education's obvious failings.
