by felicia rembrandt
Not long ago one of the young Turks in Canada’s mushrooming trans networks lamented on twitter the absence of any large, established trans+ rights organization.
He must have had his tongue firmly in his cheek. It’s true there’s no Stonewall, no Pink News, but what trans+ activists have is even bigger – the entire weight of the federal government, broadcast through its federally-funded media arm, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) and enforced by a growing list of anti-hate, anti-free speech legislation.
In order to understand why Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have in a few short years replaced the category of sex with that of gender identity for all legal and practical purposes, we need to look at who the liberals hang with.
Back in 2017, award-winning journalist Anne Kingston wrote a lengthy article for Maclean’s Magazine on Canada 2020, “the Ottawa-based enterprise that bills itself as ‘Canada’s leading, independent, progressive think tank’.” This was the entity that she credited with bringing the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau to power in 2015.
Both Trudeau and his best buddy Gerald Butts, who later took the fall in a different scandal, were on the founding board of Canada 2020 in 2006.
Canada 2020 has links with a triangle of American organizations created to bring Democrats back to power after years of Republican domination – Centre for American Progress (CAP) founded by John Podesta, Global Progress Initiative (GPI) also founded by Podesta, and Precision Strategies, run by a group of Obama strategists. CAP is funded by George Soros, through his Open Societies Foundation, which is also one of the major donors of trans+ organizations around the world.
While opensecrets.org keeps track of Soros’ spending on political parties in the US, it’s almost impossible to know how much Soros spends on trans+ rights action around the world. The Open Societies Foundation describes itself as “inclusive” and lists 137.1 million spent on “equality and antidiscrimination” and 81.9 million spent on “human rights movements and institutions” in 2020 on its website. How much of this goes to trans+ organizations (still frequently referred to by the outdated designation “lgbtq+” ) is hard to know, but the OSF funds the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood and the Tides Foundation, all of which emphatically champion the ideology that “transwomen are women”.
After his election, with the help of CAP et al:
Obama made transgenderism a pet issue of his administration, holding a meeting at the White House (the first ever) for transgenderism.
The administration quietly applied the power of the executive branch to make it easier for transgender people to alter their passports, get cross-sex treatment at Veteran’s Administration facilities, and access public school restrooms and sports programs based on gender identity. These are just a few of the transgender-specific policy shifts of Obama’s presidency. (Jennifer Bilek, a Federalist article in 2018)
In a 2015 Toronto Star review of a Soros biography, written by Anna Porter, Carol Goar writes:
His greatest claim to fame as a hedge fund manager was that he broke the Bank of England in 1992 by short-selling the pound. He made a $1-billion killing. He was shrewd, mercenary and merciless. He created the Open Society Fund (the predecessor to his Open Society Foundations) as “a very interesting tax gimmick” that allowed him to pass on its fortune to his heirs untaxed. He told interviewers at the time that he did not believe in philanthropy.
But after triggering Britain’s currency crisis, his attitude changed. He set out to achieve nothing less than changing the way people think and influencing the course of history. He became convinced that by spending enough money and intervening at the right moment, an individual could buy a better world. By Porter’s tally, he has now spent about $12 billion.
What sets Soros apart from other philanthropists . . .is that he uses his money to achieve his personal goals. He has no qualms about meddling in other nations’ politics. His mission is to be a pro-democracy force, changing public policies to reflect liberal democratic values.
According to Influence Watch, Soros’ “OSF’s operations are notoriously complex, and in 2016 the foundation was labeled the least transparent ‘think tank’ in the United States reviewed by NGO Monitor, an OSF-funded transparency group.”
There should be no question why Obama’s VP, now President Joe Biden, is aggressively taking up the baton after the four-year Trump interregnum. In the meantime, Trudeau, as the beneficiary of Soros’ influence, quietly baptized Canada in the pink and blue trans waters from coast to coast.
As Kingston wrote:
CAP began with a multi-million-dollar budget, thanks in part to donations from financier George Soros, and now has a staff of hundreds. No Soros-like figure bankrolled Canada 2020, which has a full-time staff of three, says Barber. There was a “Founders Circle”, but he doesn’t talk about it.
It’s likely we will never know who those founders were, but they undoubtedly provided the link between Trudeau’s backers and Soros.
One person we do know who may have acted as matchmaker for Trudeau and Soros is Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.
When she entered politics, she had a book deal to write an authorized biography of her friend and backer, George Soros. She first interviewed him in 2012 when she was editor of Thomson Reuters Digital for a profile that appeared in ForeignPolicy.com.
As Adam Radnowski in a Globe and Mail article on Freeland from 2017 wrote of the former financial reporter:
Few people who know Ms. Freeland have any doubt that she enjoys keeping high-flying company. By the end of her time in New York, some of her colleagues at the business-news service Thomson Reuters – where she landed for the final stop in her journalism career, after earlier tenures at the Financial Times and The Globe and Mail – called her "the billionaire whisperer."
But Soros is not the only American billionaire the liberal government cosied up to. Trudeau was in talks with Larry Fink, owner of the mega asset management company, Blackrock, back when he was first preparing to create the Infrastructure Bank.
In January 2016, Trudeau met with Fink at the World Economic Forum in Davos at a time when Fink was also calling for increased infrastructure investments by governments and private interests. Trudeau met with Fink again in March 2016 in New York.
Trudeau and Fink (second from right) at 2021 Bloomberg Global Business Forum
Founded in 1988, Blackrock manages $5.4 trillion (US) in assets, about 10% of world assets. Jennifer Bilek has noted that amongst those assets:
Black Rock owns the lion's share of stock in 38 of the companies donating to Planned Parenthood, which has become the largest provider of cross-sex hormones to young people. They are also among, or, the largest share holders, along with Vanguard Group, of Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, United Therapeutics, GlaxoSmithKline, AbbVie (the makers of Lupron), Merck, and Novartis. It would be easier to list the pharma giants not owned by BlackRock.
And, as retired British academic and researcher, Alan Neale, has pointed out:
He [Fink] is Co-Chair of the trustees of NYU Langone Health, which runs a Transgender Youth Health Program offering support for “gender-affirming medical interventions, including puberty suppression, gender-affirming hormone treatments, and gender-affirming surgery.” For the latter, young people are referred on to NYU Langone’s huge Transgender Surgery Services unit. Alongside plastic and reconstructive surgeons, urologists, psychiatrists and endocrinologists, the Transgender Surgery team includes 3 paediatric specialists.
Neal has also identified Blackrock as a “platinum partner” on the website of a small UK charity called “Just Like Us” that seems intent on ”normalizing the erosion of sex boundaries for under-12s.” It is also “a member of ILGA World, an international organization that lobbies governments to lower the age of consent.” This is a reminder that pedophilia has always lurked in the underbrush of men’s sexual liberation movements.
Also according to Neal, “BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, is famed for promoting socially responsible business, not just within his own organization, but in all the organizations that BlackRock invests in.”
When those organizations include governments, whose voice is most important, a CEO with ideological “values” he wishes to impose, or citizens of a state? It should alarm all governments in partnership with Blackrock that:
In October 2021, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that BlackRock was pushing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt rules requiring private companies to publicly disclose their climate impact, the diversity of their boards of directors, and other metrics.
About the same time as he was talking with Fink, Trudeau set up the Economic Advisory Council, appointing two Blackrock associates who are also friends of Freeland. Mark Wiseman was employed by Blackrock at the time of his appointment. After being fired for violating the companies “values” by having a consensual relationship with another employee, he founded FCLTGlobal (formerly Focusing Capital on the Long Term), “an organization that encourages longer-term approaches in business and investing, which was set up by BlackRock, CPPIB, Dow, McKinsey & Company and Tata in 2016.”
The other was Dominic Barton, now Canada’s ambassador to China, but then managing director of McKinsey and Co, “ a US$6-billion juggernaut operating in 50 countries” which Canadian Business described in 2011 as , “The world’s pre-eminent management consulting firm, whose employees whisper in the ears of government leaders, international regulators and chief executives of 95% of the world’s largest corporations.”
According to Canadian Business:
McKinsey is painstaking in choosing new recruits, subjecting candidates to gruelling series of up to 15 interviews. A key part of the process is ensuring potential hires hold its values, which are celebrated and analyzed on an annual Values Day when McKinsey takes a hiatus from client work to study itself: well-handled situations, ambiguous calls, how to ensure adherence to its principles in the future. “I gotta tell you, I’ve been inside hundreds of companies, and there’s nobody that has values like McKinsey,” says Kelleher. “It’s taken very, very seriously.”
These values have been referred to as a corporate religion. This might not be a problem if corporate values matched societal values and if there was transparency in the way corporations chose them and spread them out into the world beyond their own walls. That this is not the case was recognized by Barton himself, who noted that as the firm works more and more closely with government “people are leery of power that hides its face — that there’s something sinister about the mysterious adviser who sits in a corner taking notes and is never introduced.”
McKinsey and Company released a lengthy report this past November called “Being Transgender at Work” which “provides first-time insights into the participation, plight, and precarious existence that transgender people have experienced in the workplace and in their lives.”
These then are the financial juggernauts that Trudeau and his liberal government are playing with. When the likes of Blackrock and McKinsey have trillions of dollars to manage, how does a small country with a GDP of only 1.9 trillion assert any weight?
Canada 2020 has also sponsored meetings that link pharmaceutical companies with government. Again, this excerpt from Kingston’s article reveals the connections and the problems:
Concern about Canada 2020’s influence and tight ties with the federal government has already become an academic sub-genre. In his new book, Doctors in Denial: Why Big Pharma and the Canadian Medical Profession Are Too Close for Comfort, Joel Lexchin cites a two-day “health summit” sponsored by Canada 2020 and the Canadian Medical Association in September 2016 as running contrary to public health interests. The event, “A New Health Accord for All Canadians,” attracted a who’s-who of the health insurance and pharmaceutical sectors, including representatives of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the largest U.S. pharmaceutical lobby group. Jane Philpott, then the health minister, attended with senior Health Canada officials, with Philpott speaking of the importance of improving Canadian accessibility to pharmaceuticals. Alliances between government, industry and the medical profession run contrary to public health interests, Lexchin, a professor emeritus at York University, tells Maclean’s. “Drug companies have a long history of actions damaging public health,” he says, “either in the prices they set or the facts the drugs they are interested in are the ones that generate the largest revenue, not those that meet highest public health need.”
Big pharma may have initiated the astroturfing of gender ideology, but with the global size of the “lgbtq” consumer market now pegged at $3.7 trillion USD, what financial advisory or management firm can ignore the medical industrial sector that takes the largest portion of that amount? Tobacco’s reliable return on investment is gone, and most addictive drugs are illegal. An ideology that requires lifetime medication seems a perfect and perfectly sinister solution.
As one attendee of the recent Bloomberg Global Business Forum wrote: “The message to the audience was clear: it is time for businesses, government and philanthropy to work together to solve big issues affecting us all.”
When self-aggrandizement is renamed “philanthropy”, when the most ravaging gazillionaires who fund it are renamed “leftists” and think they can impose their own ideologies on people around the world, then we are no longer citizens of nations, but merely consumers in delineated sales territories.
NB: Days after the federal government announced it was employing Blackrock to help with Covid-19 recovery, all members of parliament stood up to unanimously approve an anti-conversion bill, Bill C4, that would make it illegal to stop the transing of children. The senate followed suit days later. Coincidence, or corporate command?