Great now here in Canada a billionaire bussiness man called Kevin o'leary who also had his own reality show just decided to run as leader of the Conservative party! In an interview he did, if you read the words he said you would think it was trump talking! A carbon copy of trump! And he is an arrogant egotistical guy! I hope to God that us Canadians learn from the mistakes our neighbours down south made and not elect this guy! Although I have a feeling he will probably win the leadership and eventually become prime minister! Our very own Canadian trump! Lol we are all screwed!
Noooooo! I don't wanna dislike Kevin
you should. he certainly dislikes you.
he's a garbage fire of a person who sees literally everything and everyone on earth in terms of its value to him in dollars and cents. i've met him briefly a couple of times and on every occasion did not see him say one decent or kind word to anyone. to him everyone else is all just flies buzzing around him, there to be squashed or swatted away unless you can directly increase his net worth. he has openly admitted on television several times that he hates poor people because they're just lazy and/or leeches. at least with trump i get the sense that even though he is obviously an asshole of the highest calibre, he can be genuinely nice to people and treat them as a human. i never once got the sense that o'leary could do that, or treat anyone with respect unless they bought something off him.
oh, and he's not even close to being a billionaire. mind you, he's got somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300-400 million, so he's still extremely wealthy, but calling him a billionaire is giving him vastly more credit than he deserves. his entire schtick both on tv and in real life is convincing people that he's vastly more wealthy and powerful than he really is, and that he's some financial wizard, when in fact his only venture into actual finance (he opened a fund management firm a decade or so ago) shattered catastrophically, and in the canadian financial industry o'leary funds is a bit of a laughingstock for how badly it wiped out - hey, turns out that refusing to buy any stock that doesn't pay a dividend is kind of a shitty investment strategy. he made all his money from (borderline fraudulently, as it later turned out) selling his first company for at least a full order of magnitude more than it was worth, and opening a winery that's sold relatively well in canada, although the only real association he has with it is that he paid for the land and his name is on the bottle.
in 2014 the bookstore i was working at had him in for a book signing, which was preceded by a short q&a. someone asked him how much money he had made from deals done on both dragon's den and shark tank. at that time, he said he had made somewhere around 75-80 deals, and that he had broken even on *two* of them, and that only one really turned much of a profit, and he still managed to say this as if this was some sort of accomplishment. three out of the other four "dragons" on dragons' den were in for book signings as well in the time i worked there, and they were all fabulous people who had a sense of perspective and respect for the others around them (jim treliving is probably both the richest man and the nicest man i have ever met) - they all were asked the same basic questions, and they all had profitable deals in the double-digits or close to it.
he sucks at business. he sucks at being a politician. he sucks at being a decent person. i'm wondering, ashley, what reason you ever had to like him in the first place?
luckily, his chances of winning here are near-zero thanks to the way the political system here in canada works; the party membership, rather than ordinary citizens, elects the leader in a convention, rather than holding any primaries. word is the conservative party bureaucracy *hates* him, he can't speak a word of french (traditionally a dealbreaker for politicians hoping to lead a party, because then you have no hope of getting any votes in quebec), and he can't appeal to the masses the way that trump did because the masses don't pay membership dues to show up at stuffy political conventions where they have to sit through 12 hours of discussion about the nuances of the party platform and the machinations of riding associations before casting a vote. i won't say his chances are *zero*, because one look to the south shows that clearly you never really know, but i'm not too concerned.
this whole thing smacks of the kind of situation where a 5 year old sees his older brother shaving then starts kicking and screaming that he can do it too cause he's a big boy too and why can't i have what you have and waaaaaaaahhhhhh. he's literally aping everything trump is doing out of pure jealousy - donald trump is what kevin o'leary wishes he was in his wildest dreams, but he knows he'll never even come close to trump's league, so he pulls attention-whoring shit like this.
tl;dr - kevin o'leary sucks and he's completely full of shit and nobody should listen to him because he's the kind of person would disembowel his own grandmother if someone told him she swallowed a quarter.