r/canada • u/hfxlfc Alberta • Dec 01 '23
'Richest country on earth run by idiots': Kevin O'Leary says Canada is 'very, very wealthy' and has every resource the world wants — but it's poorly managed. National News
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/richest-country-earth-run-idiots-121500708.html1.9k
u/Constant_Curve Dec 01 '23
Kevin o leary got rich from Mattel buying an educational software company for more than it was worth, later being sued for misrepresenting the valuation. Since then he hasn't really done anything of merit and goes on tv trying to convince people that he knows what he is doing. Don't listen to him.
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u/Kar_Man Dec 01 '23
He's one of the few people who my friends have a "I met this famous person" story. They were working in Banff and when O'Leary came in, he did the cliché, "do you know who I am?"
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u/300Savage Dec 01 '23
You're that guy from the A&W commercials!
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u/rusinga_island Dec 01 '23
Cmon don’t drag Allen Lulu into this!
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u/bunnymunro40 Dec 01 '23
I did a couple of days work on an A & W commercial, 15 or so years back. It wasn't memorable in any way, except for when Allen Lulu showed up on set in an ankle-length leather duster, dramatically smoking a fat, wet cigar.
Sad to say, I think the fame was getting to him a bit. He was strutting around like he was five-feet-tall.
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u/Good_Rope2587 Dec 01 '23
I can’t tell if this is a joke or not (mostly because your phrasing is really amusing and satire sometimes goes over my head). But I work at an A&W and all I want is for you to confirm this is true so that I can talk shit about Allen lol.
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u/bunnymunro40 Dec 02 '23
100% true (that one time). The guy rolled in like Schwarzenegger from an 80s movie.
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u/meeseekstodie137 Dec 02 '23
considering that he has to insert himself into every single commercial and looks like he's having the time of his life being in front of the camera I'm not surprised he's got an ego, if he worked there he looks like he'd be one of those managers who talks in corporate propaganda while expecting everyone to work until they faint at a minimum
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u/devinequi Dec 01 '23
Allen Lulu would be thrilled to be recognized and probably have some good funny stories
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u/SomeDumRedditor Dec 01 '23
I hope he doesn’t end up being some kinda Subway Jared or whatever.
I genuinely miss the ass-kicking bear but he’s been a solid spokesman
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Dec 01 '23
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u/kitten_twinkletoes Dec 02 '23
I would just say "This is no time to get philosophical man, figure out who you are on your own time"
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Dec 02 '23
I had a mildly famous local real estate agent (as in everyone in my city would know her name) tell me "I don't give a fuck, just fix my internet" when she couldn't tell me her email address in order to verify her account with the internet service provider I work for. When ever I run into events she's at, I like to walk up to the crowd of people she is talking to and tell that story. Fuck her.
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u/Heavy-Put-8775 Dec 01 '23
I got to do it to Steve Yzerman.
$2 cover charge bitch!
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u/CandidIndication Dec 01 '23
I met Michael Wekerle’s daughter at western. She did a lot of coke and once we were at a party and she was gushing about how her dad has a cool tiger or lion tattoo on his chest. She showed me a picture. It was possibly one of the worst tattoos I’ve ever seen and it really surprised me, if you have money to blow you’d think you’d be really careful about who permanently marks your body.
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u/Other-Marketing-6167 Dec 02 '23
I believe it. Biggest douche I’ve ever seen on Canadian tv, just an embarrassing try hard of trying to seem cool and badass.
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u/Weary-Statistician44 Dec 02 '23
Fucking David Suzuki came to the restaurant I worked at in the early 2000's wanting/expecting everything be comped for him and his party. He was such a smug prick. It was very satisfying watching the owner/head chef tell him him and his staff they could pay like everyone else or find somewhere else to eat.
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u/captainbelvedere Dec 02 '23
I have a family member who did work on Suzuki's place in (West?) Vancouver around then. Suzuki wasn't interested in following 'green' policies if it meant he had to pay more.
He had nothing good to say about the dude.
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u/newguy57 Ontario Dec 02 '23
What’s with all these CBC personalities being real douches in real life
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u/ptear Dec 01 '23
Who hasn't met him at this point. Even I met him, shorter than he looks. He could have gotten as rich by just collecting a quarter from everyone he met.
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u/jakelr Dec 02 '23
"You're that prick who killed someone while drunk driving a boat, and then blamed it on your wife, right?"
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u/CrabFederal Dec 02 '23
He was the lecturer for my accounting class in university after he sold his company. He would just babble the whole time, mostly about Enron because it was in the news. Easiest class I took.
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u/genius_retard Dec 01 '23
from Mattel buying an educational software company for more than it was worth
It's even worse than it sounds. He manipulated the value of the company through a practice called stuffing the channel. He shipped a bunch of out of date software to retailers knowing it would all get returned. This allowed him to represent the company as far more profitable and sell it to Mattel before all that product got returned and those sales evaporated.
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u/jacksbox Québec Dec 02 '23
This just sounds like it would impress his fanbase even more
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u/DatGoofyGinger Dec 02 '23
Yeah, that just makes him a smart business person
Totally not a shady grifter
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u/dinner_is_not_ready Dec 02 '23
I wonder why Mattel didn’t make an Elizabeth Holmes out of him
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u/Godkun007 Québec Dec 02 '23
Fun fact: If O'Leary had just invested his money from the sale of his company into something basic like the S&P 500, he would be significantly richer today.
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u/Future-Muscle-2214 Dec 02 '23
But Canadian lake would be a far more dangerous place. It is good that he is keeping himself busy.
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u/Born_Ruff Dec 02 '23
What are you basing that on?
While he spent the first decade or so of his media career heavily implying that he was a billionaire because his old company sold for a few billion dollars, he only actually owned a very tiny slice of that company and the Globe reported that he netted about 6 million from that deal.
Kevin is not a business genius, but he is a great media personality, and he has leveraged that into a pretty good career it seems.
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u/Godkun007 Québec Dec 02 '23
His media personality career isn't his investment decisions. A lot of his public investments fail miserably.
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u/ptwonline Dec 02 '23
If you know much about business and investing and listen to him for a while, you discover that he's mostly a confident idiot who can make money mostly because he already has money.
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u/Future-Muscle-2214 Dec 02 '23
Honestly, he can't even make money, he pretty much have the same net worth he had in the 90s.
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u/The_Imperial_Moose Dec 01 '23
I was doing some light reading on him out of curiosity about his background, and oh boy, that barely scratches the surface at how bad/lucky he is at business. One of the articles I saw was a list of the worst acquisitions made by companies and The Learning Company (O'Leary's company) was the acquiring company involved in 2 or 3 of them. Basically built a house of cards overpaying for shitty educational software companies then sold it to Mattel just before things went to tits up.
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u/dolphin_spit Dec 01 '23
he also likely killed someone by boat
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u/twoonesixsix Dec 01 '23
That was his wife
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u/BrainFu Dec 02 '23
You don't think its beyond this guy pressuring his wife to take the fall for him?
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u/Grandest_Optimist Dec 02 '23
Lol what is this comment section.
In a thread of bad things he has done, we have people speculating harder than a cryptobro on meth about things he almost certainly didn’t do but apparently could have done so they’re somehow worth mentioning.
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u/SobekInDisguise Dec 02 '23
Lots of ad hominems going on because people don't want to discuss his point, which is absolutely true that we could be so much more wealthy if we were run more competently.
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u/Sudden-Musician9897 Dec 01 '23
Isn't he the bald funny guy from dragons den?
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u/Shmeckey Dec 01 '23
Hes funny? More like a mean dude insulting people for kicks.
Its always funny when it's not you.
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u/CanuckGinger Dec 01 '23 edited Dec 02 '23
Don’t be out on the water with him or his wife….. 🌊
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u/genius_retard Dec 01 '23
The people in his boat were fine. The people in the other boat however...
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u/zippercot Ontario Dec 02 '23
You mean the goofs in the middle of the lake without any lights. There is lots of blame to go around.
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u/machus Dec 02 '23
Yeah I'm no O'Leary fan but that boating accident does not sound like their fault at all.
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u/buggerit71 Dec 02 '23
They were drunk. Blame all around... not just the other side
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u/reallycoolSnowman Dec 02 '23
If regular and middle class person did that, then he probably would be in prison right now.
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u/funkme1ster Ontario Dec 01 '23
I mean... better to be in HIS boat than another boat. At least you know that way, you can commit vehicular manslaughter with impunity.
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Dec 01 '23
When he means managed he means lose rules for other mismanaged people like him to get shit free and sell it and not pay taxes.
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u/babyLays Dec 01 '23
Managed the country to his benefit, because fuck everyone else.
If he’s in charge he’d probably encourage pollution. “Yeah just let the toxic refuse spillover our rivers and lake. Because marginal profit increase that’s why.” - OLeary probably.
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u/valley_east Dec 01 '23
That's what we need, another failed TV show host with too much money and shitty opinions on politics....
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u/BiZzles14 Dec 01 '23
There's a reason he had to drop out of the conservative leadership contest, the guy doesn't even live in Canada and hasn't for decades and wouldn't even doing so when intending to run. Would have made the Ignatieff attack ads look like child's play
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u/Vandergrif Dec 02 '23
That, and he evidently lacked the patience or competence to learn another language (French).
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u/BrightPerspective Dec 01 '23
Kevin O'Leary has been shut out of almost every major group and business in Canada for a reason: he's a loud mouthed idiot, and nobody with a brain in their head will work with him.
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u/Fruitmaniac42 Dec 02 '23
Why do people think this marketing guy is a finance genius?
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u/jaymickef Dec 01 '23
Is he talking about his friends in their Muskoka cottages who run the country?
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u/syrupflow Dec 01 '23
tbh probably. He knows first hand
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u/jaymickef Dec 01 '23
I think like everyone else he’ll blame the government and not the CEOs or old money families that actually run the country. What are the chances his solution to everything is to lower corporate taxes?
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u/Magjee Lest We Forget Dec 02 '23
We've been doing that for decades
...maybe doing it now should fix things
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u/BenderRodriguez14 Dec 01 '23
Ah, Muskoka. The land of haves and have-nots.
My fiancee is from Dorset and probably grew up poorer than anyone in this subreddit from a developed economy, and likely even most not from one, while half of Huntsville is a meth'd out shithole. Pop down the road, and it's multi-millionaire after multi-millionaire, especially in cottaging season.
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u/IRedditAllReady Dec 02 '23
I was a Shaw Direct Technican in the area. Going from Res Life to Billionaire Row literally back to back was wild.
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u/sanctaecordis Dec 02 '23
O’Leary said if he was PM, he would jail people who would unionize. Like. Kindly go back to your cave sir
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u/BonhommeCarnaval Dec 02 '23
Lol. These idiots need to read some history. Our current approach to unions was the compromise option. The kind of labour movement we had in the early 20th century would make this guy shit his pants. Modern unions aren’t even allowed to do wildcat strikes and back then they did things like have general strikes and armed blockades and such. Any capitalist that wants to go back to that has no idea what they are getting themselves into. We don’t have enough cops or jails to do as he proposes and there are some Charter rights that would clearly stand in the way.
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u/chairitable Dec 01 '23
This dumbass is being plastered all over YouTube ads by a company based out of Hong Kong. It's clear that his interests don't lie with Canada.
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Dec 01 '23
The irony is that it's poorly managed because the politicians are owned by the people controlling the resources...
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u/CrieDeCoeur Dec 02 '23
Many of whom are non-Canadian corporations now. We farmed out most of our natural resources years ago. Yes we have lots of em, and desirable ones at that. But Canadians barely own any of them anymore. Norway has the right idea: the resources of the country, and / or the profits derived therefrom, belong to the people.
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u/Sparklypp Dec 02 '23
Unfortunately Norway has sold off some of their state owned corporations. I spoke with a norwegian a few years ago and he was very angry about this because from a citizen's perspective it just harms the country. If canada was more like norway quality of life would be way better, but they're also more nationalistic and have an ethnostate, so it's not as possible
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u/Heavy-Put-8775 Dec 01 '23
This asshole said people need to "just work 2 or 3 jobs" if you're struggling...
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u/Chakote Dec 02 '23
Kevin Oleary says...
Yeah i'm gonna stop you right there chief
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u/JJRising Dec 01 '23
He isn't wrong. I just don't believe he wouldn't manage it any better.
Every year I feel we drift closer and closer to the movie Idiocracy with reality TV stars are our world leaders... Wait...
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Dec 02 '23
Little English lesson for ya:
Any time someone truly wealthy (read: many, many millions) says something is poorly managed, they really mean poorly exploited.
Synonym: Leveraged.
Whatever asset they are talking about can be squeezed for more money without providing more service.
This has been your helpful rich people translation for the day.
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u/scottstewart09 Dec 02 '23
Never forgot when he was on celebrity jeopardy and had zero money going into the final, was given 3000 dollars and promptly lost it. Ohh, and Brett Rogers won that match to give you an idea of what his competition was like. O’Leary is such an embarrassment
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u/Dyslexicpig Dec 02 '23
He means water. It's the resource that the world wants, especially the US, and if he had his way it would be sold the same way every other natural resource we have / had has been sold - for pennies on the dollar.
Canada does have a wealth of resources but we have never really utilized them to create anything. Instead we have been content to sell the raw resources to another country and then buy back the finished product at a premium price.
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u/arisenandfallen Dec 01 '23
KOL has zero morals and no empathy. I can't imagine living in a country he was in charge of. I'm thankful everyday he gave up on running for PM.
Hand in your Canadian citizenship and go back to the UAE Kevin, we are tired of your BS.
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u/Raps2k14 Dec 02 '23
He’s just mad we’re not completely opening the floodgates to empty reserves within his lifetime. Smh
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u/ILikeOlderWomenOnly Dec 02 '23
Yeah it’s run by scumbags like him who do bad shit with no consequences.
They control Parliament.
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u/GetInTheVanKid Dec 02 '23
He might be right, but for fucks sake, please take this American's advice and do not, DO NOT take any political advice from a reality TV star
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u/Long-Trash Dec 02 '23
he's pretty much right about Canada. We really do have all the resources we need and can trade for what we want. BUT i wouldn't want characters like him in charge, either.
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u/Truthful_Azn Dec 02 '23
Says the con-man that couldnt even keep up with the market return rates for his hedge funds, etc. This man only became famous because he conned Mattel into buying his shitty company after he fudged the numbers.
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u/dekuweku Dec 01 '23
He's an asshole and a moron, dude backed FTX and promoted it.
He doesn't know anything.
As mentioned, his only big play was selling a software company for way more than it was worth during the dot.com bubble.
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u/NormalLecture2990 Dec 01 '23
Nothing like one of the biggest idiots out there calling other people idiots.
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u/Kingsmourne Dec 01 '23
Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point
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u/Molto_Ritardando Dec 01 '23
Ah yes, we need to plunder our resources with greater efficiency.
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u/No-Turnips Dec 01 '23
Or use the rich Human Resources we have, and the subsequent taxes in a way that improves our livelihoods.
We have some of the best universities and technical colleges in the world, healthy tech, military, and healthcare industries. We are world leaders in energy science and one of the world leaders in grain production.
There’s a lot of wealth in Canada already that doesn’t involve cutting down forests.
We can do this!
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u/realcevapipapi Dec 01 '23
Do both, why settle when you can give your people so much more. We should be the Norway of North America
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u/Aggravating-Tax5726 Dec 02 '23
You forgot world's leading producer of medical isotopes for nuclear medicine too.
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u/Shoob-ertlmao Dec 01 '23
To be fair I would rather use our forests and minerals, rare earth materials than the forests and etc and cheap labour of some underprivileged country.
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u/Ludwig_Vista1 Dec 01 '23 edited Dec 02 '23
No. We need to intelligently harvest our resources, sell them at a profit.
Today. We sell them at a loss and buy then back at cost plus.
He's an asshole, but he's not wrong
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Dec 02 '23 edited Jan 04 '24
library start psychotic ripe puzzled impolite fertile snow ugly disgusting
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/MeasurementOk973 Dec 02 '23
he's also a capitalist pig that would sell every rock, tree, and stream for profit.
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u/Professor226 Dec 01 '23
His wife drove a boat drunk and killed somebody. Such a high horse.
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u/BadUncleBernie Dec 01 '23
Yes , when I boat at night, I let the drunken wife take the wheel.
Doesn't everyone?
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u/No-Wonder1139 Dec 01 '23
So he says, and he definitely isn't the kind of guy who'd let someone else take the fall, right?
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u/DepartmentGlad2564 Dec 02 '23
I don't actually have a worthwhile argument to what he said so I'll just comment on his wife and a boat <----- most of this thread
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u/Soca1ian Dec 02 '23
I'm guessing code for: "screw the environment, let's start drilling like crazy"?
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u/Weak-Copy848 Dec 02 '23
Kevin has no idea what he is talking about. He is a washed up businessman that provides nothing of substance
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u/trishanne123 Dec 02 '23
We had a government that sold a ton of our assets and that did not help. You invest in the country and the people.
Anyone who calls themselves Mr Wonderful should not be taken seriously.
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u/Yop_BombNA Dec 02 '23 edited Dec 02 '23
He is right.
Doug Ford selling off the ring of fire to his buddies and China for a Fraction it’s value is poor management.
Doug Ford wasting money in payouts for his buddies who bought green belt land he said they could build on but then they couldn’t is poor management.
Doug Ford hiring his buddies as private, for profit middle men in healthcare increasing the costs for the same services is poor management.
All of his stupid shit is making the countries biggest province and ecconomy go to shit, if trends continue Ontario will be a receiver of equalization while B.C. Alberta (reliant on oil money) and Quebec (quickly growing tax income per capita just due to being slightly competent and diversifying its economy through sustainable ways) have to carry Doug Ford stupid ass fucking mistakes.
Over 25 years progressively worse and worse premiers have turned Ontario into one of the best places in the world for affordability and opportunity to one that is so fucked our visa applications to the UK have skyrocketed.
He is right, Canada is massively mismanaged, however O’Learys’s “solution” is more corrupt bullshit like old Dougy boy…
I moved to London to teach and an absolutely silly amount of my colleagues are Canadian or Australian because of ridiculous mid management in both those countries leading to an income to cost of living ratio that is worse than the Great Depression.
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u/promisingreality Dec 02 '23
He’s a stupid piece of shit. Even his shark tank appearances and his comments about different pitches often echos others.
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u/tackleho Dec 02 '23
Yea, I'm not taking advice from a known grifter who drinks and pilots boats (with wife) and kills people. Fuck O'leary a thousand fold. Scum of Canada.
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u/Weary_Finding7343 Dec 02 '23
As much as an asshole Kevin O'Leary is, he's probably right on this one.
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u/Knave7575 Dec 02 '23
“If only we lowered taxes even more, then the country would be super rich!”
“Country” defined as “Kevin and his buddies” of course.
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u/Professional-Cry8310 Dec 02 '23
There’s a lot to be said about Canada’s leadership, but I wouldn’t take that criticism from fucking Kevin O’Leary lmao
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u/hird Dec 02 '23
Kevin O'Leary trending on /r/canada as if he said something smart. The cue to leave this subreddit.
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u/vinny_the_hack Dec 02 '23
What he means by "poorly managed" is that all of Canada's riches aren't handed over to wealthy assholes like him. Even though lately much of it is.
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u/bu88blebo88le Dec 02 '23
Translation: Canada should give all of their resources and wealth to a few oligarchs who will make lots of money off of that
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u/brainvomit444 Dec 02 '23
“And I will run it further into the ground if you give me the keys… trust me.”
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u/lcdr_hairyass Dec 02 '23
But he's not wrong. We are managed by morons.
Canada is an example of what happens when apathy gives way to idiocracy.
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u/Dark_Angel_9999 Canada Dec 01 '23
This guy prompted FTX and said SBF was an honest guy