Photo source: https://www.southshorestmargarets.ca/

MP Rick Perkins has ‘’Zero” relationship with Kevin O’Leary and Maxime Bernier despite key roles in their 2017 Conservative party campaigns.  

Rob Parker 

April 14, 2025. 

Conservative Member of Parliament  Rick Perkins, elected in September 2021 representing South Shore—St. Margarets is the incumbent in the current federal election taking place on April 28.  Perkins’ past support for extreme MAGA-supporting politicians like Kevin O’Leary and Maxime Bernier has raised questions. 

Canadian conservative politicians who for years have repurposed the strategies and style of U.S president Donald Trump have found themselves scrambling to change their messaging after Trump began threatening annexation. 

The U.S president, during an interview with Fox host Laura Ingraham on March 19, 2025, said that “Canada was meant to be the 51st state” and he was considering the use of ‘’economic force’’ to achieve this. Perkins is especially vulnerable to this sentiment shift, given how the South Shore MP has adopted Trump’s MAGA talking points and support for far-right figures. 

The Lunenburg Barnacle’s reporting on Perkin’s ‘’America First Investment Portfolio”, which includes a number of Silicon Valley companies closely aligned with President Trump, raised further questions. The Barnacle reported that Perkins did not reply when asked if he intended to divest.  

Rick Perkins’ publicly available online information provides scant details about his political career prior to 2021 and no information about his central role in the 2017 campaigns of Bernier and O’Leary for leadership of the Conservative Party. 

Both politicians have since both gone to extraordinary lengths to disgrace themselves, with the quisling O’Leary flying to Mar a Lago to ‘’negotiate’’ with Trump and Bernier leading a party courting the support of Nazis. 

The Monorail Man

On March 25th, when Jon Stewart called O’Leary “such an asshole that even the other people on Shark Tank think he’s an asshole”, few Canadians would disagree but this was not a revelation.

O’Leary leveraged his TV fame to promote cryptocurrency exchanges, such as taking 15 million dollars to promote Sam Bankman Fried’s cursed FTX trading platform. When FTX collapsed, O’Leary defended Fried who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024 after orchestrating “one of the largest financial frauds in history, stealing over $8 billion of his customers’ money.” 

O’Leary has been accused of participating in fraud on so many occasions that they are too numerous to detail but when ‘’Mr.Wonderful’’ flew to Florida to kiss the ring in January 2025 is when Canadians got a real whiff. 

Picture from Daily Mail: U.S President Trump with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and O’Leary 

Donald Trump told the World Economic Forum on January 23, 2025 ‘’We have a tremendous deficit with Canada.  We’re not going to have that anymore.  We can’t do it.  It’s — it’s — I don’t know if it’s good for them.  As you probably know, I say, “You can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit.  We won’t have to tariff you, et cetera, et cetera.”

O’Leary said we were “intrigued” and suggested Canada didn’t need all that water for just a small population. 

“The population of California, sitting on the world’s largest amounts of all resources — including the most important, energy and water. Canadians, over the holidays the last two days, have been talking about this. They want to hear more.” 

O’Leary told Fox Business on December 26 Canadians wanted him on the case.  

“So, I’m gonna go to Mar-a-Lago. I’ll start the narrative. Of the 41 million Canadians, I think most of them would trust me on this deal”.

Maple MAGA

Long before he wheedled his way to Florida to try and negotiate Canadian sovereignty, O’Leary ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party. 

South Shore MP Rick Perkins can still be seen on the website for the exploratory committee for Kevin O’Leary’s 2017 leadership campaign for Canada’s Conservative Party. O’Leary’s campaign claimed that Canada is broken, and that the nation needs a TV entrepreneur to clean up the ‘’mess’’. 

Leader of O’Leary’s exploratory committee, Mike Coates, wrote a column in the National Post in May 2017 making the explicit comparison:  

“Although everyone was cautious of the Trump analogy, there was clearly a constituency within the party for a political outsider with a proven track record in business.”

“Our financial policy in this country… is broken,” O’Leary said in 2016 promising a DOGE-type slashing of government programs: “What I’m going to be doing with this platform and why I’m here today is I’ve decided that in every government policy or government spending from now on, I’m going to spend a tremendous amount of energy exposing it to the public and showing them where it’s broken.” 

Rick Perkins boasted to Halifax Blogger Andrew MacDonald about his efforts to get O’Leary elected saying that ‘’we sold as many memberships in Newfoundland as there were existing memberships–100 percent”.

Despite O’Leary’s being a frontrunner in all four Atlantic provinces, he suddenly made the decision to drop out saying he could not win a general election. The National Post reported in April 2017 that O’Leary met with Maxime Bernier and struck a late-night deal to throw his support to the far-right politician. 

Mad Max

After O’Leary dropped out suddenly Rick Perkins was in high demand, according to MacDonald’s reporting, but went to work for Bernier and lobbied for O’Leary’s membership cards to follow. 

Perkins told Andrew MacDonald that his endorsement mattered: “I believe it does put Bernier in the lead in Atlantic Canada. MacDonald reported in May 2017 that when he asked if that support helped Bernier, the MP for South Shore-St.Margarets replied “It doesn’t hurt”.

Maxime Bernier was a controversial Canadian Foreign Minister under Stephen Harper who resigned after his girlfriend Julia Couillard ‘’revealed on television she had discovered secret Nato documents in her apartment after one of the minister’s visits.’’  Her ties to Hells Angels biker gangs and business which allegedly specialized “systems of high security technology” involved in airport security were extensively covered in the media and Bernier was forced to resign. 

In September 2018 Bernier left the Conservatives to found The People’s Party of Canada known for racist far right support. Photos shared by journalist Alheli Picazo show Bernier shaking hands with a skinhead in a Totenkopf t-shirt most-notably used by the SS-Totenkopfverbände, tasked with guarding Hitler’s death camps. 

Global News reported in September 2019 that: “The former leader of a U.S. neo-Nazi group, a former Soldiers of Odin member and a Pegida Canada official were among those whose signatures were submitted to Elections Canada last year to officially register the People’s Party of Canada.” 

Records allegedly show that one of these signatories was Shawn Walker who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in 2005 that “Adolf Hitler is without doubt the greatest leader and philosopher of the 1900s.” A 2019 investigation by Niagara This Week reported that in June of 2006, Walker was allegedly arrested on federal civil rights charges for allegedly leading a series of organized attacks on Mexicans and Native Americans in Salt Lake City bars in 2002 and 2003. He now reportedly lives in Ontario. 

While the PPC is not an openly Nazi or fascist party, many see Bernier as someone who can open up possibilities and the PPC messaging is designed to appeal to this group. 

Yet, in 2017, MacDonald’s reporting shows that when Maxime Bernier was on the campaign trail vying for the leadership of the federal Party, Perkins was ‘’solidly entrenched” in the Bernier camp. 

The MP was sent a series of questions. His response is quoted in full.  “I have no relationship with either of these people. Zero.” 

-Rob Parker is an investigative researcher and a member of the Council of Canadians South Shore St. Margarets.