I have opened a file on celebrity business TV personality Amber Kanwar. I am collecting unflattering freeze frames of her. I am holding focus groups to figure what to name-call her. Please pray for me, I hope I can still avoid a full-blown meltdown, like that time I wrote 3 pieces on Mark McQueen with thousands of words.
For now, she shall be known as Bay Street Amber. That’s actually her handle on social media, but I mean it in the sense that she is too cozy with Bay Street. I don’t expect to find any smoking gun. But I don’t need to. A desire to be liked is by itself a conflict of interest. I can’t ever recall her doing a tough interview, especially not of a powerful person. In the recent past, she was a director of the Empire Club. And she’s still a moderator at their events. She’s also available for business events as a host, emcee or keynote speaker. That alone proves to me she has a vested interest in The System. She works for The Man. This is just like Hillary Clinton being paid to speak at Goldman Sachs. You can’t take money from businesses and look after the interests of the people. I don’t know too much about the Empire Club, except it’s very business-y. My understanding is that it's more like an “ideas forum” rather than a private club. These are just pretexts for powerful people to network. Just think of the name. Didn’t Wes Hall teach Amber about the importance of de-colonizing whiteness? It’s all inter-sectional, I think.
Here’s Amber conducting a total fluff interview of Wes Hall indulging his fairy tales about THE GREAT BIG CONSPIRACY TO KEEP BLACK PEOPLE DOWN.
So he's saying he wants to speak to diverse people as long as they think like him. This was back in January, I tried to exercise some restraint after that, let it slide. There’s a Borat-style movie out called Am I racist?, that exposes what Wes Hall and his ilk are doing. He is a “race grifter”, that’s the term. He's the Canadian Meghan Markle. He gloms on to phoney-baloney trends like ESG and DEI and builds businesses around them. He whines about representation without any pushback from Amber. And it’s always about boards. Wes Hall was abandoned by his parents. In his own telling, this is a widespread problem in Jamaica. In his particular case, things worked out. But one of his brother was killed and another was deported from Canada, both due to involvement in gangs and/or drug trafficking. How is the corporate world, let alone blue chip boards, supposed to reverse the ills of society, such as poverty and parental neglect? There are a million different angles Amber could take if she had any interest in probing for the truth. Rather than bowing to whoever has power, in the moment. And of course there's the irony of two visible minorities who have done pretty well in this country having a pity party about under-representation. I have to watch these interviews for research purposes, so you don't have to, it's quite irritating.
Wes Hall is soooo 2020. He has boxed himself into this phoney-baloney messianic persona, even as less and less people are buying his crocodile tears. NoBull Klev, on the other hand, genuinely cares about poverty, whether Black, White or anything in between. I’m 80%+ serious when I talk about The System, which is run by The Man. This has been a gradual awakening, facilitated by the greatest tool of mass education ever created, Twitter. The comedian George Carlin said that you don’t need a formal conspiracy when “interests converge”.
George Carlin on The System.
And so Power Corp. doesn’t need to hand over an envelope of cash in an underground parking to make sure Amber doesn’t ask any harsh questions about why Wealthsimple peddles crypto “assets”. Amber’s household economy rides on crypto - her husband, Stefan Coolican, is a lawyer, turned investment banker, turned crypto executive, turned blockchain entrepreneur. Between 2018 and 2022, he was CFO of Ether Capital, which was co-founded by Som Seif. Som is a director of both Ether Capital and Wealthsimple. Interests converge. So when Amber interviews Michael Katchen in 2021 at the height of the meme stock craze and crypto mania, do you really think she was at liberty to conduct a hard-hitting interview, given that her husband, in essence, worked for a director of Wealthsimple? I fail to see how these conflicts of interest are different - in substance - from those that have marred Amanda Lang's reputation (you can read her Wikipedia page for more information).
Perplexingly, Amber posted two interviews she did with deep crypto skeptics on her Instagram last year. Well, what can I say, all marriages have their tensions. This was after Stefan had left Ether, when he co-founded a blockchain startup called NASD, whose main service is called Noble. So I might be missing some nuances about Amber’s interests. See if you can figure it out:
Noble is an appchain built for native asset issuance in Cosmos and the boundless Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) ecosystem.
Wow, this is what has been missing in my life! Anyways, overall, Amber is part of The System. Don’t pop my bubble.
If Amber so much as wants her kids to have good jobs in the future, she has to be part of The System. In my view, being a journalist should be like being a nun: it should come with a vow of poverty and social isolation. In contrast, it’s a virtual certainty that Amber likes the finer things in life. How do I know this? I’m a modern-day Freud, I don’t need to answer to you. I don’t know why people post stuff online, considering that anything you reveal can be held against you. Here’s Bay Street Amber’s profile pic on Twitter:
I assume this is her home. Her kitchen is nice, not too splashy. I still think many of her journalist colleagues will be envious though. But it gets worse. Look closely in the background above her head. She has a transom window above her door! It makes the wall structurally weaker, so you have to add more support, it’s more expensive. That’s crazy, who but a billionaire can afford a transom window in Toronto? I bet she has a mud room too. Outrageous! Even if this is in some far-off suburb, it's still unfair, since Amber gets to commute on a flying carpet.
Do you remember the song Jenny from the Block? It goes: “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got, I’m still Jenny from the Block.” Amber is closer to Posh Spice, than J. Lo. She went to a fancy-schmancy private school called Ridley College in the Niagara Region. Annual tuition is between $30-$40k these days. Or $73k for boarding students. If you must know, her parents Vijay and Neena Kanwar started a chain of medical diagnostic clinics specializing in cardiology and nuclear medicine. Around 2022, annual revenue was reported to be $70m. They are loaded. Amber's father Vijay Kanwar has had several high profile appointments, including as a director of BDC and Chair of the Toronto Airports Authority. Amanda Lang also comes from a powerful family and is partnered with Geoff Beattie, who used to manage the Thomsons' money and was on RBC's board. Unless they have uncommon courage, their ability to be journalistic rabble-rousers is constrained by being so enmeshed in The System.
Here’s an excerpt from Amber’s bio from the speakers agency she belongs to:
Amber Kanwar is a distinguished keynote speaker, emcee, and host, renowned for her authoritative insights into business and financial markets.
Her official BNN bio says she is a “relentless digger.” The rest of the bio is full of superlatives like that, "premier" this, "insightful" that, etc. Even John Ruffolo has other people do his hyperbolic PR.
“I get excited when it’s a central bank decision day. I love going through a financial statement trying to find a story.” - Amber Kanwar
“Importantly, I get out of the newsroom. I have lunch and dinner with sources. That is where the real insight comes from. Reading notes gives you an understanding of what’s happening but going out and talking to people gives you the full picture of what is happening and why.” -Amber Kanwar
I don’t particularly buy into the “journalists are dumb” cliché that is pretty pervasive on Bay Street. I believe journalists are time-constrained generalists, it’s difficult to be an expert on everything. But lofty claims naturally invite scrutiny. So let’s put Amber to the test by scrutinizing her recent interview with Mike Katchen. He’s an important player and Wealthsimple is the very type of “disruptor” that Amber has taken a particular interest in. In a way, this is Amber’s Super Bowl. Let’s see if all her “research” pays off, or if she’s just finding excuses to expense meals.
As part of Wealthsimple's 10th anniversary, Katchen brought his "drug dealer with a heart of gold" schtick to BNN.
So Amber thinks that Wealthsimple is the same mission-driven company as ever? Wealthsimple started offering passive investing using ETFs and today, it's primarily a broker encouraging individual investors to try to be an investment genius in stocks and crypto. From managed passive to DIY active - that's a pretty big 180. Anyone with a passing familiarity knows this arc. Either her research process is not working or she is happy to be a corporate propagandist.
Look at BNN's reviews on Google, I'm far from the only one bringing up these issues.
Think how confrontational the political media is, even in this country. Do people want to have a Miss Congeniality TV friend or do they want the truth? Some people question my "mean girl" methods. They are moral simpletons. Life is full of tradeoffs, all you can choose is what's important to you - a hierarchy of values. I simply believe that the truth is more important than politeness. Plus, do you even know how many people I have saved from depression or even the brink of suicide thanks to kompromat-induced schadenfreude? So far, it's zero, but it could happen. Earlier this year, BNN had a round of layoffs. The other big anchor at BNN, Jon Erlichman, left last month and launched a YouTube channel. Amber was not part of Jon's on-air send-off! She was probably at Bilderberg. I am sure there are still talented people left at BNN who want to do genuine journalism. For over two decades, journalists have been steamrolled by waves of technology and cultural shifts.
Amber Kanwar initially left business studies for journalism school because she wanted to write about social injustice and inequality. How is that plan working out? As I write these lines, Amber is probably off doing some pretentious wealthy person activity like apple-picking or having a family photo taken with everyone wearing matching white outfits. Can Amber relate to the downtrodden, which, to some extent, includes her journalism colleagues? I don't think so! She wants young people to live in dimly-lit basements YOLO-trading on Wealthsimple, while she and her Empire Club cabal live in the lap of luxury! She wants Black people to stay down by promoting a victimhood mentality so that she has staff to take care of her mansion. Transom Window Champagne Liberal Amber Kanwar can't possibly relate to ordinary people like NoBull Klev or Donald Trump can! Name-calling is a complex art that requires much thought and deliberation, but Amanda Lang 2.0 is a strong early contender.