Could Minnesota style fraud happen in government programs here...

Plus, Canada's crime stats are down.

Could we be seeing the same kind of massive fraud being uncovered in Minnesota in Canadian government programs? While I think there is plenty of grift and a lot of waste, having spent years covering these programs, I doubt we would see the scale of fraud and abuse happening stateside.

First off, there is the sheer scale of the American government compared to ours.

The U.S. federal government spends more than $1.1 trillion per year on social programs and support either through direct programs or funding for state and local programs. The Canadian federal equivalent is less than $300 billion, on scale we would be larger, but the American government is big, bloated and unresponsive.

First off, if you haven’t been following the Minnesota fraud story, it’s been dominating the headlines - at least at places like Fox News - for weeks. Over the Christmas break a young activist and online influencer named Nick Shirley released a video of his trip to Minnesota to investigate claims of fraud thought to be in the billions involving daycare centres, autism programs, housing programs, food programs and more where money is being siphoned off.

Already exposed but not getting enough attention…

Much of what Shirley uncovered has been exposed before by some local media and activists trying to bring light to it. I wrote about that in my latest column for the Toronto Sun.

The point of my column isn’t to undermine Shirley, it is that this has all been raised before and has been ignored by the powers that be in Minnesota - which means Democrats - for years now. Investigations have been conducted, reports issued and the fraud and abused ignored.

A few weeks ago, President Donald Trump started speaking about it, that caught people’s attention and now Shirley has the online world talking about he did more on the ground journalism than most of the MSM have on this issue.

This is being portrayed as a Somali issue, and there is a big portion of this driven by Somali organized crime in the Minneapolis area, but it is more widespread than this. Apparently everyone figured out that Minnesota was an easy mark under Governor Tim Walz and the fraud is very widespread.

In the reports I read, people were accused, in some cases convicted, of using the funds they siphoned off from government programs for the less fortunate to buy real estate in Ohio, Kenya and Turkey for a start.

Now, back to Canada…

While I don’t think we would see anything on the scale of what is alleged in Minnesota in Canada, that doesn’t mean blatant fraud doesn’t happen. Do you remember when National Post uncovered the documents showing bureaucrats warning the government of false payments during COVID for CERB and the Trudeau Liberals shrugged it off and said keep the payments going?

This may have been the closest to what we are seeing stateside with $4.6 billion going to ineligible individuals including prisoners, dead people and children and another $9.9 billion going to ineligible employers.

There was also a recent story about Canada Revenue Agency paying out untold millions in GST/HST rebates to people who were not eligible. They might even have been paying those funds out to organized crime groups running a circuit scheme to extract free money from the government.

There’s also no end to the bad decisions on grants and funding such as the following documented by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

• $105,000 for a study on the life cycle of grocery carts.

• $50,000 for research on sexual and erotic video games.

• $8,800 for a sex‑toy exhibition in Germany.

• $12,500 for senior‑citizen sex‑story performances.

• Parks Canada spending $800,000 to cull 84 deer

The difference between all of these examples and Minnesota is that these are bad policy decisions by the government or small scale graft dispersed over a wide population. In Minnesota, this appears to a widespread but coordinated effort to defraud the government.

Several people have already been convicted on the $250 million swindle of the Feeding Our Future program to provide meals to kids from low-income families.

Canada’s crime is down, but only if you ignore the last ten years…

You know how people say you can make statistics lie? Well, that’s definitely the case when it comes to all the people saying crime is down in Canada.

Really? What is your point of comparison?

If you want to look at last year or 2023, then crime in Canada’s largest city is down and homicide is at a decades low number. That’s all good news, but when you look at serious crime outside of homicide and look past our last few record breaking years, things are still bad.

If crime fell back to down to lower levels, I’d applaud, but as I pointed out in my Sun column, that’s not what is happening.

If you just measure crime stats on a year-over-year basis, then things have improved, but only after years of record increases. Saying crime is down overall is like gaining 50 pounds and then claiming you’ve lost weight because you dropped five pounds – you’re still heavier, and crime is still higher than it was.

We’ve had a ten year increase in crime, driven in part by Liberal soft-on-crime policies. Having it drop a bit but still be up dramatically compared to 5-10 years ago isn’t something to celebrate, we still need to do better.

Give the full column a read and share it, and this newsletter if you would, on social media. Right now, we have politicians, police and media outlets like the Toronto Star trying to convince everyone that crime is down by carefully selecting stats.

One thing to note…

I hope that as a subscriber or regular reader of my work you realize that I share original source material with you as often as possible. Today, it’s the crime stats in my column so that if someone has questions, thinks I’m lying or wants to look at it another way, they can.

On other days it might be the video or transcript of a speech by a politician so that you can make your own decision on what they said, how they said it and what they meant.

That doesn’t happen everywhere. As a journalist seen as leaning to the conservative side though, it’s required for me. There is an army of people who will accept the MSM pablum narrative without question but pick at every statement I make.

I’m seeing that quite a bit today in the online comments about the crime stats. People don’t want to accept reality, they want to bend it.

You can argue with my interpretation of the stats or the source material, but the bare facts will be provided as often as possible and those, you just have to live with them. As the saying goes, facts don’t care about your feelings.