Many of my readers from simplycondos.com will already know that I haven’t been a fan of Donald Trump for decades dating back to our mutual introduction into the North American residential condominium industry. I wrote quite frequently about him as he was a condo developer and I was the grand dad of condominium sales dating back to when condominiums were passed into law in Canada. I refused to recommend any Trump properties and I was dislike immensely by his sales people when he unsuccessfully tried to launch his Russian money laundering project in downtown Toronto. You can simply search “Donald Trump” here on my site and you’ll find a number of my historic blogs dating back to the early 2000’s.
I took down my internationally acclaimed web site (simplycondos.com) when I retired, to avoid the potential of having some investor that got themself in trouble with Canada Revenue Agency, trying to dump the blame for whatever he had done onto me to cover themselves with CRA rules and/or civil law. I simply converted my site into simplycharles.com when I dumped my real estate license and I’ve focused on trying to help Canadian consumers defend themselves when being exploited.
Since retiring a little over 5 years ago I finally had the luxury of time to dig into condo-related matters like con artists exploiting landlords by using the dysfunctional Landlord Tenant Board as their actual weapon to exploit small individual Canadians investing in income properties as well as lawyers lying under oath in court to support their criminal conduct and being shielded and protected by the Law Society of Upper Canada.
These days I spend a great deal of time educating myself on what’s going on around me in the world and let me tell you, I could not be less impressed with the mess all these highly educated people have gotten us everyday Canadians into. I spend hours every day on YouTube navigating my way around Bloggers, Podcasters and Artificial Intelligence generated news videos. I’ve broken down the credibility of the news I come across into categories (real people, Artificial Intelligence, and downright “Click Bait” (time wasters).
On simplycondos.com, one of my key one-liners was “believe nothing that you hear and half of what you see“. But in today’s world it is now “believe nothing that you hear and nothing that you see“. I have been shocked to learn that the decided majority of articles published on YouTube these days, somewhere around 80-90%, are Artificial Intelligence (it really says it all in the title) generated hosts presenting stories as though they are factually accurate when most are anything but factually accurate. It’s no wonder that the world is so confusion to so many when so much misleading and factually distorted news is so available to so many people!
And the most shocking is that all those AI sites are simply regurgitating existing digital data from the Internet. And amongst all this noise, we everyday people have limited ways of knowing what is actually true and what’s not true. What a friendly environment for con artists! But let’s not get off track here.
We everyday Canadians have been blessed to have Mark Carney agree to become Prime Minister. I’ve just posted a detailed respectful letter that I’m sending to Pierre Poilievre, and the Conservative Party, and I will be working hard to get it in front of every Canadian possible as it has become apparent to me that our everyday citizens are under informed or possibly better said “ill–informed“. My letter speaks for itself and I advise everyone that truly cares about our great nation to read it. Its right here on simplycharles.com (see below bottom right)
Word on the blogosphere is that Prime Minister Carney just publicly accused the president of the United States of running a corruption scheme from inside the White House and PM Carney brought the receipts. He released a 247 page dossier containing internal documents, financial records, and testimony from a senior American official that, if verified would constitute the largest corruption scandal in modern history presidential history.
We are told that Warren Buffet has given a statement so devastating that analysts are calling it the most damaging endorsement of a corruption allegation ever made. And of course there was a cover-up. The corruption if the scandal and the cover-up is the crisis.
Canadian trade officials had noticed irregularities in American positions. Certain demands didn’t make economic sense. Companies that should have been fighting aggressively for tariff relief were conspicuously quiet. Meanwhile others with no obvious stake were suddenly lobbying furiously for exemptions. The patterns just did not add up and that’s what got Canadian intelligence involved.
CESUS analysts picked up references to a parallel process, or second track of negotiations happening entirely outside official channels. The parallel tracks involved Trump connected intermediaries meeting privately with companies seeking tariff exemptions outside the formal negotiations framework and outside congressional oversight.
Over the next months CESUS assembled the dossier, 247 pages of documents and financial records obtained through one extraordinary source, a serious American trade official who was watching the corruption unfold and could simply no longer stay silent.
Prime Minister Carney was notified and his first instinct was to handle the matter quietly. He notified the White House through the Canadian ambassador and requested a private discussion. The White House response was immediate, decisive, and deeply incriminating. They covered it up. Two senior American trade officials who had internally raised concerns were reassigned within weeks.
The Trump administration requested that the Canadian government sign NDA’s (non-disclosure agreements) covering all communications related to the trade negotiations. The cover-up began the moment Carney tried to handle it quietly.
The centrepiece is what investigators called the “tariff exemption kickback pipeline“. Companies seeking exemptions from steel and aluminium tariffs were quietly directed through unofficial channels to a network of Trump connected consulting firms that charged fees ranging from 2% to 5% of the projected tariff savings.
A company expecting to save $100 million in tariffs would pay a $2 to $5 million fee to a designated consulting firm whose only qualification was its proximity to the president’s inner circle with the fees funnelled through shell companies and ultimately on to entities connected to Trump family members and major political donors. One mid sized American manufacturer paid a $4.7 million advisory fee and within three weeks the company received a tariff exemption worth approximately $180 million in projected savings.
The dossier identifies at least 14 companies that followed the same path. Trump affiliated intermediaries were negotiating preferential access to Canadian critical minerals, lithium nickel, cobalt, for a consortium of companies with ties to the Trump Organization.
The consortium would pay 30% to 40% below market rates, a discount worth hundreds of millions, and the profits would flow through a chain of LLC’s back to entities controlled by Trump family members. The President of the United States of America was using trade negotiations as cover to secure personal business deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The tariffs weren’t just bad policy they were a smoke screen.
