The Ben Mulroney Show - The FIFA WC corner / taxpayer waste awards!

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

GUEST:   Franco Terrazzano / Canadian taxpayers federation If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. The streets are a lot of soccer. Welcome, welcome. Welcome, FIFA. Welcome to North America.

It is time for the World Cup, Toronto, Vancouver. We're ready. We are ready. And we were hoping that, that what we could focus on moving forward was not the political stories of, you know, that have been bogging us down. We want to talk about the beautiful game. Am I using that correctly?

The beautiful game? The beautiful game. But no, we can't. We have to start dead serious. Thomas Parti. Parte. Parte. Parte.

Thomas Parte. Thomas Parte. He missed Ghana's World Cup opener after Canada denied. denied his visa. I sure do hope that the gasps from the progressive left in Canada, when the referee was turned away for writing and saying sympathetic things for the terrorist group Al-Shabaab, I do hope that they still have some progressive love left in the tank for Thomas Parte. I think I'm saying it right.

Now, when I tell you what he did, you might change your minds. But hold on. Come on. Like one good turn deserves another, Olivia Chow and Premier Eby. So he's a 32-year-old Villarreal midfielder. He faces seven rape charges. One sexual charge in the UK from incidents between 2020 and 2022. He has pleaded guilty, pleaded not guilty to all of them.

So look, innocent till proven guilty. So Olivia Chow, David Eby, you should be getting in front of a microphone right quick. And David Eby, I'm just going to say it. He's black. So according to your logic, he's got to be a refugee. There's a hero story in there somewhere. So I'm waiting for you to be like justice for Thomas Parte. Don't let Thomas Parte miss the party.

I think there's a theme in there. I think you should run with it. And I think you should bring as many of your progressive allies to the press conference and maybe go over to Europe and do like one of those, you know, bringing aid to him, much like the flotilla farce in Gaza. So he's going to miss the country's first game, but he will play the next two in the U.S. Hold on. I misread that sentence the first time.

You're telling me that the Gestapo-led USA is letting him in? Yep. Well, hold on. My brain hurts here. Because if he wasn't, if he's let in there, then he should have been let in here. David Eby, I'm calling upon you to make sense of this nonsense. Please come to the hero's mission. This is your mission.

Save Thomas Parte from missing. Because as a refugee, he's worked so. hard, so hard to do this and how dare the Canadian government take this away from him. I mean, if the Ghana guy is from, is, um, it would be treated like gold here. Then, I mean, this guy would be treated like a king. No. To be continued. Yes.

Now for the rest. Now, that was the serious stuff, even though it sounded like I wasn't taking it seriously. But the seriousness was under the surface. It was, it was subliminal. Let's just go with the liminal now. FIFA has forced Haiti to change their World Cup jerseys at the last minute. Why, you ask? Well, because they have artwork on their right hip.

And it's silhouettes that are inspired by the Battle of Vertier and the Haitian Revolution. And those images could be interpreted as political. And the guy who designed the whole thing, the kit, as they call it. It's like the jersey was meant to honor Haitian pride and resilience. and not to make a political statement. But they still complied with FIFA's request and removed the imagery for the tournament. Haiti had already worn the band shirts in their friendlies,

and this marked the second time in a year that they had to redesign their uniforms. And officials said, revolutionary imagery violated the expression rules. You'll remember, well, you might not, because I think I said it in the local hour of this show, but the TTC here in Toronto, the organization that runs the subway and the buses and streetc cars,

they designed their own TTC FIFA kits. Why they need it? I don't know because they're not playing, but they wanted their own. And the taxpayer said, sure, we've got the money. Let's do it. And the jerseys looked fine until people actually put them on. And what they had on the, what turns out they had on their shoulder was an upside down red square.

And if you followed the war in Goddollinger, at all, that has a very particular political statement to it. It means something very, very specific and not a positive thing for Jews. And so

we decided on this show that we were not going to ascribe malevolent and mischidious motivation to what can absolutely just be ignorance. But once you know, what are you going to do? And we're still

looking into it, but I think the only option for the TTC was to round up all of those jerseys and burn them. Once you know you did bad, the only way to do good is to burn those kits. We're looking into it and we will get back to you on that.

So the Haitian national team is well, we're watching it. We're actually no, okay. Moving on. Speaking of fashion. Speaking of fashion, I don't know how you feel. I don't know what you do when you're when you're going to a job interview

or when you're flying to somewhere to impress people. You may dress up. Some people don't. You know how I feel about people wearing flip flops and men wearing sleeveless shirts on planes. I have a problem with that. The Democratic Republic of Congo

has arrived in North America. And they are the best dress team I think I've ever seen. They're wearing black suits with the, these leopard print sashes. Now, I'd like to be clear, I could not pull this off, but they're all dressed in double-breasted suits, and they have gold luggage,

and they have, I guess, these leopard print pillows as well. They look like they were inspired by the costume designer from coming to America. I think the pillows are the luggage. No, no, the pillow. Oh, the pillow is part of the luggage? That's the luggage, yeah. Oh, it's a weird design. Oh, I see. It's like a big bag.

Oh, I see the hole in it. Okay, that makes sense. But they also have the care. Like, these guys look like, I mean, a million bucks is not enough. And I think they should just because how good they look, they need to start every match with at least like one point. Like one nil at the beginning of the game. That's how good these guys look. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, team Italy would not show up with that much style.

So, yeah, you're darn right. Okay. So that's, that's what one team looks like. Let's talk about fans because I already have my favorite fans. My favorite fans are the Scottish fans arriving in North America. Let's listen to a little bit of that trip across the pond and what they ran out of. Scottish fans are known for three things. Their kilts, their chants, and their libations.

I've been drinking since what they did. I got up this morning. 1 o'clock in the morning I got up. That's when some fans began heading to the airport, bound for the U.S., bound for the World Cup. We ran out of beer. That's my only complaint. The pilot telling us when the beer ran out, he switched to wine. So I'm going to go and have a nice whiskey at my digs, and then I'm going to go out and hit the town. I've got to find cheers.

That's what I want to do. I want to find cheers. It's the spot where everyone knows your name. By the end of the weekend, Boston will know the Scots, certainly by their attire. What's an airplane seat like in a kill? Yeah, it's a bit hot and sweating. I love you. Gonna go find cheers. It's good, hot and sweaty.

I love it. It's a well-known fact that the world is controlled by the five richest families, known as the Pentavrette, who meet tri-annual in a secret Colorado mansion known as the Meadows. Dad, who's in the Pentaroid? The Queen, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders, before everyone tets up. I hated the Colonel with his wee-beattie eyes.

And that smuglok on, he says, oh, you're going to eat my chicken. Oh, oh, Dad, how can he have? hate the colonel because he puts an addictive chemical that makes you crave it fortnightly. That's why you smart ass. Yes. And on that note, just a translation for you. Apparently, in Scotland, when you refer to my mom gave me a piece or I brought a piece on the plane, that means sandwich.

In Canada, in North America, peace means gun. So don't say that last sentence about bringing a piece on a plane. And there you go. All right, we're going to take a break. when we come back, a good friend from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is going to let you know how your hard-earned dollars were wasted in government. We know that. We take that for a fact. Some waste it better than others, and there are some awards to give out.

So we'll talk about that next. So one thing you need to know about me is I have something that I like to call a pomo, the pleasure of missing out. I do not believe that I need to be everywhere. But some people do. And some people don't want to miss anything. And if you are somebody who enjoys our show, but for one reason or another, you miss it. There are so many ways for you to enjoy the show. You can find us as a podcast on all the platforms, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon music. The podcast is available on YouTube as well.

So you can catch, you can see this, you can see that my punum, as they say. Or you can catch little snippets of the show on all the social media platforms. We want to be wherever you are so that you do not miss out on. You don't have FOMO of missing BMS. And one of the things we love talking about is how well and efficiently and respectfully our politicians treat our tax dollars. I think it's universally appreciated that every politician in this country knows, that they have a sacred duty to spend our tax dollars as if they were spending their own money. I, of course, am full of it when I say that because there's never been a problem spending our money. Fortunately, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation keeps a pretty close eye on this.

And every now and then, they decide to honor the dishonor of how that money is spent by giving out awards, the Teddy Waste Awards. And to give us the highlights or low lights, depending on your perspective, is Franco Tarasano from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Franco, welcome. Hey, Ben, you already got me laughing with that introduction to this segment. Thank you very much. Tell our listeners who don't know what the Teddy Waste Awards are. Oh yeah, we've been doing it for 28 years and we've got myself on stage. We've got our mascot, Porky, the Wasteater, a big, a big pig in a tuxedo and we're handing out these Teddy Waste Awards, right?

These big golden pig trophies to the politicians and bureaucrats who went out of their way to waste our money in the past year. And this year we had some great winners and nominees, let me tell you. Well, before we get into it, let's remind people that they're not wasting our money anymore. That money's been wasted. That's been gone for a long time. now wasting our grandkids and our great grandkids money. Yep, yep, 100%, man, especially after the federal government just doubled the debt in 10 years, hey?

Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about the municipal Teddy Waste Award winner. I have to believe a lot of people, a lot of cities, really in contention for that one, but one really took the cake. Oh, yeah, it had to be the city of Toronto this year, right? because Toronto spent 2,000 bucks on a plaque celebrating Conrad, a raccoon that died 10 years ago. Sorry, hold on, but let's, so this is a thing that happened. Oh, yeah, it went viral.

There's a real thing that happened. I missed it. I must have been caught up with something else. I missed this. So my city spent $2,000 on a plaque to commemorate a raccoon. What was special about this guy? What would be their justification for it? Yeah, yeah.

Your city spent that. Hey, and I'm sure you're getting all this property tax relief, right? I'm sure the roads are great, made a marble, no potholes, everybody's safe, right? Is there a story behind this raccoon? Like, what's special about this raccoon? Yeah, there is, right? So Conrad, the raccoon, he died in 2015. Now, about 4,000 raccoons die every year in Toronto.

That's not special. But after Conrad passed away, the poor little, the poor little fellow, there, he was left on the sidewalk for like 15 hours, right? It took like the city 15 hours to remove him. So, uh, Trontonians, they, they made vigils for him. They brought flowers and candles. There was a hashtag that went viral. And 10 years later, I guess you have these bureaucrats in Toronto who are like, well, we've got so many tax dollars. Right. Let's, let's burn through 2000 for a plaque for this raccoon who died 10 years ago. Um, you know, Ben, I don't know if you're going to like this joke. I just got to state anyways as a Calgary Flames fan.

But hey, the silver lining to me is that a dead raccoon in Toronto now has more hardware than the Leafs. Oh, yeah. Oh, you heard Intrepid's heart just broke just a little bit. That means it's a good joke. Listen, people can do whatever the heck they want.

You want to have a vigil. You want to spend your time and your money to honor a raccoon. You go right ahead. I had raccoons in my house and the city forced me to like put them in a box when we got rid of them right next to the house. And then they came back in. So I called that group again, and then they tried to get back in a third time, at which point I called an Italian contractor.

He assured me that he took them to a beautiful farm just outside the city. I'm sure that's where they ended up. But then they never came back. That's how I feel about raccoons who are essentially squatters. Well, trash pandas. All right. Let's move on from the city level to the provincial level. So who wins the provincial 10?

any waste award? Well, you know, probably to no surprise, it's BC Premier David Eby. And I mean, he worked hard for this award. Yeah, he really went above and beyond and wasting taxpayers' money. And, you know, he spent $350,000 bucks on three soccer balls that are made out of wood leather. It's $350,000 bucks on three fake soccer balls. And what do you do with them?

He put them in a display, right? It's a PR stunt. $350,000. And, you know, I'll be honest. I'll be honest. I'm not the biggest soccer fan in the world. You know, my family, Italians, they're really hurt right now with what's going on. We didn't make it.

But let me tell you, I'm pretty sure soccer balls are both round and not made out of wood leather. Apparently, E.B. doesn't watch soccer because these balls weren't round. You can't kick them. They're made out of wood leather. And they cost taxpayers 350,000 bucks. Look, the great irony is these guys spend money as if they were billionaires. And they hate billionaires.

It's crazy. Come on. Like, how is BC in debt? Like, they're on top of a literal goldmine. Okay, let's keep going. The Federal Teddy Waste Award. Oh, yeah. It's the Canada Revenue Agency.

It had to be, right? The scathing, scathing Auditor General Report that came out a couple months ago, showing that, you know, when you call the CRA, you get a bureau. bureaucrat on the phone, 32% of the time. And you know what? It's even worse when you do get someone from the CRA on the phone, right? If you call and ask about your own personal or individual tax questions, they gave out the wrong answer, 83% of the time.

83% of the time they gave out the wrong answer. So I'm over here just scratching my head being like, why are Canadians even call in the CRA? You might as well just ask a magic eight ball for tax advice. I mean, they could have hired, they could have hired an army. of homeless people who would have given statistically better advice. Well, yeah, Ben, I wasn't always great in school. But guess what? If I was taking a multiple choice test and I just put C for every answer,

I would have done better than a CRA bureaucrat. Yeah, exactly. All right, we got time for one more, the Lifetime Achievement Teddy Award winner. Oh, and they've been working so hard for this award for so many years. It's the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Now, folks, they're essentially a federal government slush fund paying for research. They cost taxpayers a billion dollars.

The government claims that they're researching the issues that matter most to Canadians. I'll just let you be the judge. They spent $94,000 on a study about fat fashion photography on Instagram and social justice selfies. The researcher, a direct quote, said, basically, I fart around on the internet for most of my teaching and research. Yeah, we can tell. Spent thousands, thousands on a study about letters to a porn star. Thousands on another study about gender identities of online Harry Potter fan communities. Thousands on another study about the gender politics of Peruvian rock music.

Wait, no, no, no, wait, wait, repeat that, please, sir. Sorry, I buried the lead. 20 grand studying gender politics of Peruvian rock music. That's a classic right there. Yeah. But hey, Ben, this is my favorite. This is my favorite because it's so outrageous. They spend $100,000 dollars,

studying the birth, life, and death of a grocery cart. You know, honestly, if we can be, like, if I can take the humor out of it for just one second, I did not vote for Mark Carney or these liberals, but one thing I was hoping for us, like, you know what? I will be at least a little bit happier. If this guy comes in and says, you know what, the days of Justin Trudeau are over and I'm going to show you because every time something like this pops up on my desk, I am going to treat it with the respect it deserves. In other words, I'm going to cancel it.

I'm going to make sure that that money is no longer wasted because it's money we don't have and it doesn't help anybody. I haven't seen evidence of that. And that is, I mean, I'm not surprised, but I was hoping to be surprised in the other direction. I haven't seen evidence of it either. And, you know, we're kind of laughing and making light of this, right? because if you don't laugh, you cry. But at the end of the day, right, people are paying too much tax because governments waste too much money.

And these politicians are bureaucrats, they either don't know or don't care how hard people work for the money they earn and the taxes they pay. From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Franco Tarasano, thank you, my friend. Hey, thank you. Since the dawn of time, humanity has been at war. It has shaped the world around us. And if it somehow feels like we've been here before, it's because we have. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian, and on my new podcast, Hostile History, I take us inside history's most defining wars and rebellions.

From Genghis Khan to the war in Iran, find out how the past can explain the present. Search for and follow hostile history on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.