The True North Times
  • Yet to be castrated by Margaret Wente
  • The only thing that Andrew Coyne DOESN'T hate
  • Winnipeg? There?
  • Exporting Beaver Hides to the Metropol since 1608
  • For the sophisticated hoser
  • Peter Mansbridge’s bathroom reading material
  • It's Dynamite!
  • Now with 60 minute hours!
  • Ineligible for the Supreme Court
  • First to podcast with Wilfrid Laurier

Kathleen Wynne had walls foreclosing around her yesterday morning over allegations that she funnelled $317 million of government money to bailing out a bankrupt real estate deal gone awry.

Now, you know that this is a gross abridgement of taxpayer dollars no matter what it went to bail out, but the details are going to get your blood boiling even more. In her August wisdom, Kathleen Wynne decided that MaRS, a charity that focuses on medical and technology research, should be graced with millions from the government. The charity, a self-avowed non-profit, decided that nothing less than a $305 million dollar building in downtown Toronto could satisfy their needs.

 

 

Partnering with a private real estate firm, MaRS lobbied the government and was given $71 million cash, plus a $234 million loan, in order to buy the building. Naturally, because MaRS has literally no profits, they couldn’t pay it back, so Wynne proposed to forgive the loan and buy back the rest of the building, for $317 million total.

Now you may be thinking, “Jeremy, why did Wynne give away $71 million at first, and are now buying the building for $317 million? Doesn’t that mean we’re buying a $305 million building for $317+$71= $388 million?” Yessiree! The extra odd $83 million is donated to MaRS, I guess, which is a fairly nice donation to the charity, making up for that whole “I’m giving you tons of cash and a low interest rate loan” thing—oh wait, no, you don’t reward someone with tens of millions of dollars for squandering the hundreds of millions you gave them last time!

This is nothing more than a dirty old bailout, rewarding “non”-profit and private real estate companies for not being able to pay back their loans. In the next Wynne-approved education curriculum (which will probably feature 100 teachers for every student) I suppose the lesson plan will include tips like “if the government gives you a loan and you can’t pay it back, the government will give you more money anyway,” and other steps in the making of tomorrow’s socialist parasites who suck on the teat of Ontario until it is raw and dry.

Frankly, this is just another drop in the bucket of “if at first you don’t succeed, hey here’s 83 million dollars.”  The Liberal shills at the Globe and Mail covered this story with the headline “Liberals’ Wynne denies PC allegations of secret real-estate bailout,” but all she actually denied was the “secret” part of it, saying that it was “confidential because it isn’t finalized.” So, it’s not that she’s denying squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on a useless downtown property.  She admits to that.  She just wasn’t telling anyone about it to be super sneaky—probably just to ensure that she didn’t lure actual buyers to the property, which sounds an awful lot like collusion to me.

Lastly, revealing herself to be two steps left of Marx, she pledged that this new, $305 million nationalized building will be…used as a new government building. And what of all the extra space that’s not being used for obviously essential government operations? Well, that space will be rented out, because according to Wynne, the government does a great job in the real estate business.