Empirical Evidence Versus Bluster

Although this is just a brief clip, it does, I think, show why the 'right' prefers ideology and 'talking points' to empirical evidence:

The Royal Bank's Abasement of Its Employees

It may be helpful to remember the following video the next time you see an RBC ad portraying the bank as the solution to everyone's problems. Forty-five soon-to-be-former employees (after they have trained their replacements) would beg to differ with the characterization. I suspect if I had an account with RBC, I would be closing it very soon in protest.

H/t Kev

More Praise for Kevin Page

Readers of this blog will know that I have a deep and abiding respect for people of real integrity, those capable of moving beyond narrow self-interest to embrace ethics and principles in the conduct of their lives. Kevin Page, of whom I have written several times, is one such individual who has set a sterling example for all of us.

Today's Star has several letters of praise for the former Parliamentary Budget Officer, several of which I am reproducing below. Please be sure to check out the full array of them on the Star website. The respect accorded him in the letters suggests his example will be remembered long after Harper and his ilk are but historical footnotes.

The job no one wanted, Opinion April 1

Not only does this reveal a man of courage, but it highlights the courage we all need to resist “the consolidation of power at the expense of citizens” taking place in our time.

Whenever privilege becomes concentrated to a few, whether we are talking wealth, political power or mass communication, nations fail. Canada is failing because political, economic and educational privilege is being consolidated to a few rather than dispersed among many.

But the remedy doesn’t lie within Parliament, or with big business or with the media conglomerates. It lies as Kevin Page rightly diagnoses, in our “need to wake up.”

Not only is ‘Canada’s Parliament losing its capacity to hold the government to account” but we are losing our capacity to hold our markets to account for making a few wealthy at the expense of the many, and our capacity to ensure the vulnerable are provided for by our social programs and our institutions of care.

To speak up against this trend is a job nobody wants, especially if job security is threatened. But without that courage, our democracy and prosperity are at stake. Not just for the vulnerable, but for all of us.

We need to wake up.

John Deacon, Toronto

Wow! What a letter. I am blown away by Kevin Page. Now here is a guy who gets it. He understands his role and does so with integrity and professionalism and with the best interests of the Canadian taxpayer in mind.

One may reasonably think that the Conservatives would do everything possible to ensure he stays on board instead of showing him the door and replacing him with someone nice but “not so efficient.”

This reminds me of Dalton McGuinty balking at the rehiring of Ombudsman Andre Marin in 2010. It turned out fortuitous for the provincial leader as his government needed transparency after the G20 debacle and Marin’s office was there to help.

Maybe Prime Minister Stephen Harper should reconsider his tired cloak and dagger routine.

Jeff Green, Toronto

Kevin Page and the PBO have made a great contribution to Canada in the past five years. What Canada needs to succeed in the future are more Kevin Pages and fewer Stephen Harpers. On behalf of Canada, thank you Mr. Page.

Charles Campisi, Oakville

Thank you Mr. Page for sharing your thoughts with Canadians. In spite of continual stonewalling from the present federal Conservative government, you, as head of the PBO, were truly a very conscientious, thorough, “sticking to the facts” and “no axe to grind” type of civil servant and we all Canadians should be proud of you. Best wishes in your future endeavours. Aquil Ali, Toronto Kevin Page is one of my heroes. I copied his letter in the Star and sent it, along with my own cover letter, to 20 of my family and friends. I asked them to contact their MPs and demand that they support even more power to the position to the PBO’s position in the future.

I sincerely hope that we have not heard the last of Kevin Page. We need his courage, character, skill and sense of right in this country. I hope that his service to Canadians will be recognized with an Order of Canada. (It certainly won’t be given by the Conservative government with Harper as leader!)

Listen up Justin Trudeau! Kevin has gifted his sons with an amazing legacy and has given “We The People” an incredible example to follow. This is a wonderful example of turning a tragedy into something very positive.

Kathryn Walker, Toronto

My sincere thanks to Kevin Page for his dedicated service to Canadian taxpayers like me. Under difficult circumstances, he has shown himself to be a man of integrity, class, and principle. It’s a shame his political masters in the Conservative government couldn’t manage something similar. Bravo, sir.

Susan Sterling, Toronto

Just Trust Us

We all remember the abortive attempts by Kevin Page, Parliamentary Budget Officer, to find out specifically how federal budget cuts were going to affect programs. The Harper regime was of the view that such detailed information wasn't to be shared, despite the pesky expectations that a putative open democracy tends to foster among its citizens. Essentially, the answer we were given was, "just trust us."

A detailed analysis of recently released spending reports conducted by the Globe and Mail suggests two things: thanks to cuts in the budget of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency we can trust the regime to render our food system less safe, and thanks to cuts to Aboriginal Affairs, we can trust that the concerns of natives will continue to be only a political irritation for Ottawa.

But hey, the regime is well on its way to keeping its promise to balance the budget by 2015, and as we should all know by now, our function is to serve the economy, no matter the unfortunate consequences that may ensue.

The Scourge of Wealth- UPDATED

I often think of the famous line from the New Testament in which Jesus says "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." Some say the reference is to a gate in Jerusalem called the Needle''s Eye through which a camel could enter only by getting on its knees. Many progressive biblical scholars regard the term 'kingdom of heaven' as the inner peace and happiness that arises when we are in harmony with the will of God, treating our fellow humans with compassion and justice.

Whatever the precise intended meaning, the analogy proclaims a truth that is hard to deny: the more affluent one becomes, the more difficult it is to resist the impulse to expand that wealth at the expense of others. This is, of course, a truth that the Occupy Movement recognized, and it is a truth that is getting widespread exposure thanks to recent news stories. For example, prominent Canadian lawyer Tony Merchant and his wife, Liberal Senator Pana Merchant, have been discovered to have set up an offshore account with $1.7-million in the Cook Islands.

According to documents obtained by the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Merchants were among 130,000 people from around the world to have stashed money in accounts in the Cook Islands, a self-governing New Zealand territory in the South Pacific.

While there is nothing illegal in such set-ups, they are often used as mechanisms of tax avoidance, usually through the illegal failure to report income accruing from those assets. According to the Consortium of Investigative Journalists,

A recent report by the Tax Justice Network found that the equivalent to the total combined GDP of U.S. and Japan is being hidden away by those rich enough to use offshore accounts.

As revealed in today's Star editorial,

The Tax Justice Network, based in London, estimates that some $21 trillion to $31 trillion is stashed away worldwide in unreported income. That’s a potential tax loss of $190 billion to $280 billion, based on a 3-per-cent return and assuming a 30-per-cent tax rate, the network reckons. The “black hole” of unreported wealth is vast and it has a major impact on public finances, political influence, the distribution of the tax burden and inequality.

Will these crimes of tax avoidance soon be addressed? While the editorial acknowledges that Jim Flaherty has recently declared his intention of going after these tax cheats, the fact is that the Canada Revenue Agency is expected to be substantially downsized over the next three years, calling into question the Finance Minister's sincerity. And the editorial makes clear how serious a problem this is for our country:

Canadians for Tax Fairness, a group that campaigns for sharing the burden equitably, estimates affluent Canadians have stashed $160 billion into offshore havens, costing us nearly $8 billion a year in foregone tax revenues. That’s many times what Ottawa hopes to recapture. And even that may understate the problem.

All of which brings to mind something Leona Helmsley once said: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” Her view, I suspect, epitomizes the kind of disdainful and contemptuous thinking that many of the rich in their splendid isolation fall prey to. We should be equally wary of their enablers.

So I think we are right to be very suspicious and cynical about Ottawa's intentions. Recovering billions in tax avoidance dollars might not only disrupt its very cozy relationship with the corporate world, but also derail the Harper regime's relentless drive to reduce government's presence by starving it of the tax revenue needed to fund the many programs that help to define the Canadian quality of life, a quality of life that may not resemble that of the rich and famous but does frequently offer surprising and profound moments of grace.

H/t Alex Himelfarb

UPDATE: Click here for Linda McQuaigs lacerating assessment of the Harper regime's 'efforts' at recovering the aforementioned lost monies.

Internet Interruptus

Today is the second day I have been without direct internet access owing to some sort of problem on the Bell network. Yesterday I was in the midst of writing my daily post when it went out, and I later went down to my local library to upload it. Similarly, this morning I was at a grocery store with free Wi-fi where I checked my email and uploaded a comment on yesterday's post.

While my topic today is unlikely to offer any profound insights, I do want to write about the nature of community. Like many, I have long denigrated the notion of any real community existing in the virtual world. Facebook, for example, abounds with the trivial or egocentric (worst sleep ever last night), the treacly (if you love your mother, even if she is no longer here, share this), and the inane (click on this to see the funniest cat video ever); as well, the depth of friendships on that platform tends, in my experience, to be at the shallow end of the pool.

That is why I was a bit surprised to discover yesterday how much I missed my 'community' of fellow-bloggers whom I read regularly. Unlike when we go on vacation and have little or no internet access, during which time the suspension of contact with the larger world is a nice respite, this current unanticipated disruption of that contact has been unsettling, to say the least. While I have always felt a certain affinity with those I read and those who post comments on my blog, it wasn't until yesterday that I realized what a significant part of my life they occupy.

I suspect there are several reasons for this, one of the most compelling being that I am comforted in the knowledge that there are many people involved in blogs and Internet organizations who have both political awareness and passion, knowledge that is heartening given its frequent absence in the general population. As well, I am often led to new facts and perspectives through these people, who take me well beyond the usual newspapers and journals that I read for information.

Related, I suspect, is the same affinity that any community feels that arises from shared values. That is not to say that I read only those who reinforce my worldview and that I am closed to new ideas; rather I read those whose minds and sensibilities I respect, people who by and large do not fall into the frequent right-wing trap of name-calling, ad hominems, and shrill base emotionalism. Indeed, even when we do not agree, I respect the difference in perspectives because I respect their minds and character as revealed in their writing.

I don't see anything superficial or unreal about these virtual relationships. Although it is unlikely that I will ever meet these people 'in the flesh,' I feel a definite kinship with them. And I guess, when all is said and done, that is the most important basis of community.

Pondering Pandering Political Parties

I am long past the age where I expect very much from politicians of any stripe. While it is easy to target (and I frequently do!) the Harper-led Conservative Party as the party of the corporate agenda, it is also sadly true that both the Liberal Party and the NDP have as their greatest priority the acquisition of power, frequently at the expense of principle. For example, putative messiah of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau, is shockingly shallow when it comes to policy pronouncements, the better, I assume, to form them closer to the next election according to perceived public preferences, the reflection of which could lead to victory at the polls. The NDP, with their frequent references to 'the middle class' and their middle-of-the-road policy orientations under Thomas Mulcair are no better.

There is an excellent piece by Glenn Wheeler in this morning's Star that reminds us of these political realities. Entitled Liberal party and the labour movement need each other; the author, a lawyer for the Canadian Office and Professional Employees Union and a member of the Liberal Party’s National Policy and Election Platform Committee, reflects on the fact that while the union he works for is trying to discourage the public from flying Porter Air due to the fuel-handlers' strike, the Liberal Party is pushing discount rates it has negotiated with the carrier for the upcoming Liberal Leadership gathering in Toronto.

This situation, he suggests, is emblematic of the abandonment/downgrading of union concerns by the aforementioned parties at a time when labour is under unprecedented attack both by the Harper regime federally, and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives who are championing 'right-to-work' legislation that would essentially be the death knell of the union movement.

Because I am experiencing some Internet problems right now, I will end with a strong recommendation that you read the full article to see why Wheeler believes that strong unionism and a healthy political climate are complementary, not contradictory objectives. One can only hope that in their race/lust for power, Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair bear that fact in mind.