Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hosts the Public Policy Forum’s testimonial dinner in Toronto, April 20, 2017. Photo By Adam Scotti/PMO.

Any report published by a so-called “think tank” should be taken with not just a grain of salt but a pound of the stuff since these captured organizations are inevitably only acting out the ulterior motives of their funders. The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, for example, has pumped out a steady stream of reports for the past 50 years extolling the privatization, tax cuts and deregulation favoured by its libertarian donors. Most think tanks, or public policy institutes as they prefer to be called, are inherently conservative because they are funded by rich people who don’t like paying taxes and instead donate that money to foundations which in turn fund a range of favoured charities. Think tanks that churn out pseudo-scholarly research designed to influence government policy and regulation, or lack thereof, are a favourite recipient. This has resulted in what Joan Roelofs, author of the 2003 book Foundations and Public Policy, calls a “new feudalism” in which democratic institutions are being quietly supplanted by Big Money through foundations.

While most think tanks are conservative, some are liberal, notably including in Canada the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum. Liberals tend to form government about twice as often as Conservatives, after all, so if you want to influence federal policy it might help to spend a bit of dough on that side of the aisle. The PPF is notorious for its poorly-varnished efforts on behalf of clients, however, such as its 2017 Consultative Forum on China, which the Globe and Mail described as being “bankrolled by major corporations” in order to “persuade Canadians to embrace a free-trade deal with China.”

National Post columnist Terence Corcoran attended the PPF’s annual awards gala that year, which he described as a “Liberal hug-fest filled with deep-eyed handshakes and arm-grabbing congratulatory gestures.” It featured as master of ceremonies a then-shiny Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “In others words,

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