How To Stop Stephen Harper's Use of The CRA As An Instrument Of Terror: The Beginnings Of A Plan

Lately I have been writing some posts on Stephen Harper's reign of terror, his relentless attacks on charities that oppose his agenda. Groups as diverse as the United Church of Canada, Oxfam, and PEN Canada have fallen victim to this vindictive miscreant, undergoing audits thanks to the Prime Minister's misuse of the CRA as his chief weapon. The more I read and learn about this egregious and contemptible misuse of power, the more upset and angry I become, given that this strikes at the heart of one of our most treasured freedoms, the right of free speech. I have been thinking about ways to try to combat this reign, but that is perhaps the subject of another post.

For now, let me direct you to a piece written by Professor Edward Jackson of Carleton University. Entitled Why The CRA Is No Longer An Effective Instrument of Public, the essay offers an effective overview of the arrant hypocrisy of the regime that claims to be ensuring the sanctity of taxpayer dollars through its zealous mission of ferreting out 'abuse' by nonprofits holding charitable status:

Its campaign of vexatious audits of the political activities of progressive charities has created a chill in political dissent, and is a new low even for the Conservative regime.

At the same time, CRA's Minister is musing about requiring charities to provide lists of their donors (in fact, this information is already available in the system, but you get the drift of the political messaging here). And there are even reports that, under the cover of the courts, the CRA can't qualify poverty reduction as a charitable objective. At a time of high unemployment in many parts of the country, rising income inequality and more, what could be more preposterous than disqualifying poverty reduction?

But that's not all.

Around the time of the ramping up of the campaign against the NGOs, the CRA actually cut hundreds of auditors who had been working on criminal investigations, special enforcement and voluntary disclosure programs.

What encourages me about Professor Jackson's article is that he goes on to suggest some specific measures we can all participate in before this hateful and vindictive regime is ousted:

1) Express solidarity with the charities that are targeted for political audits by taking out memberships and making donations.

2) Support the building of a coalition against the political audits and for a court challenge to the government.

3) Prepare questions for the Minister and leadership of the CRA as to who made the critical decisions over the past few years, and why -- on the charities issue, and also on the criminal investigations issue.

4) Develop a plan for completely overhauling the unit that deals with charities.

5) And work with the opposition parties on a detailed, post-2015 plan for rebuilding Canada's tax agency into an institution of which Canadians, including its own staff, will once again be proud.

As he says, at least it is a start, and we can well imagine that with the participation of enough Canadians of goodwill and passion, it could well gain momentum just in time for Harper's rendezvous with the electorate next year.

Your Saturday Smile

A bit of a busy morning ahead, so for now, enjoy:

Apologize, You Sleazy Bastard

The Geneva-based, International Commision of Jurists, has issued a written demand that Sideshow Steve Harper and his supposed justice minister, Peter MacKay, apologize to Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin for the drive-by smear job they tried to pull on her following the failure of their bid to seat Marc Nadon on the Supreme Court of Canada.

Not only was there no wrongdoing on the part of Justice McLachlin, they opined, but the Harper-MacKay tag team was an assault on the independence of our highest court.

“The ICJ considers that the criticism was not well-founded and amounted to an encroachment upon the independence of the judiciary and integrity of the Chief Justice,” the commission said in a letter from its headquarters in Geneva to Gerald Heckman, a University of Manitoba law professor who spearheaded the complaint.

It accepted Chief Justice McLachlin’s explanation, as expressed in a public reply from her office to the allegations of impropriety first made in April by the Prime Minister’s Office, that she had spoken to Mr. MacKay and her office had spoken to the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Ray Novak, only to alert them to a potential legal issue.

Unfortunately, the ICJ's stinging rebuke arrived in the midst of Canada's national nap time, the middle of the summer recess. Of course with a regime that regularly places itself above or at least outside the law the independence of the judiciary and integrity of the Chief Justice are of no great moment. Besides in the dark recesses of Harper’s mind, what actually happened is what he believes to have happened, not some foreigners’ opinions.


MoS, the Disaffected Lib

Justin, You Need to Read This

While Justin Trudeau's pandering Liberal Party may praise Israel's "commitment to peace," Israeli society is displaying a darker, brutal face.

Lisa Goldman, director of the Israel-Palestine Initiative at the Washington think tank, New America, writes of an Israel utterly at odds with Trudeau the Lesser's obsequious drivel.

Goldman writes of, "a series of events that were marked by violence and incitement against the Arab population, from the government to the street. One member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, called for a war against the Palestinian people on her Facebook page. Another called an Arab legislator a “terrorist” during a parliamentary committee session, while still another, the leader of an ostensibly centrist party, submitted a proposal to ban an established Arab nationalist party with sitting members of the Knesset. The editor of a right-wing newspaper suggested that now was the time to transfer the Arab population out of the occupied West Bank. In Jerusalem, mobs of hyper nationalist youth rampaged through the cafe-lined downtown streets chanting “death to Arabs,” assaulting random passersby because they looked or sounded Palestinian. Most horrifically of all, a 17 year-old Palestinian boy from East Jerusalem was abducted from the street by six young Jewish men, three of them minors. The police found Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s corpse in the nearby Jerusalem Forest shortly after CCTV cameras recorded some young men forcing him into a car. He had been doused with gasoline and burned alive. Three of the six boys confessed to the crime and re-enacted it for the police.

This orgy of internecine violence was sparked by the mid-June abduction of three Jewish teenage boys – Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and and Eyal Yifrah – who were hitchhiking in the West Bank. The army carried out a massive three-week manhunt for the boys, that included pre-dawn raids and dozens of arrests; it ended with the discovery of three corpses buried in a field near Hebron. And while the men who committed the crime were almost certainly Palestinian, Hamas has vociferously denied involvement even as the Israeli government continues to accuse them of masterminding the abduction and murder as an act of terrorism.

After the nationally televised funerals for the boys, with moving eulogies delivered by their mothers, the country seemed to explode. Ultra nationalists openly organized anti-Arab demonstrations via Facebook groups.

Something has broken down in Israeli society. Friends who always said they would never leave because they were too deeply rooted in the place, its language and their families are deeply worried and even despairing over the radical rightward shift of the mainstream political discourse. Several have said they were looking for opportunities abroad because they couldn’t see themselves raising their children in a country where dissent was slowly but surely being suppressed even as the national discourse hardened rightward.

Israel has always been a flawed democracy with many festering internal divisions. Its policies toward the Arab minority reflect the unresolved tension of a conflicted identity: Should Israel aspire to be a liberal democracy or a democracy for Jews? But in the five years since Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister and formed a governing coalition composed of far-right, racist and anti-democratic parties, something very fundamental has changed in Israeli society. It feels as though the majority is willing to suspend essential elements of democracy in favor of Jewish nationalism. There doesn’t seem to be a place for dissent anymore.

The reduction of Gaza is an Israeli work in progress that has been going on for years. Within five years, ten at the outside, Gaza's dwindling fresh water supply should be exhausted, the groundwater rendered unfit for human consumption due to the engineered inundation of sea water. Meanwhile Israel continues building illegal settlements across the West Bank that render the very notion of an independent Palestinian state unachievable. This isn't a state of apartheid, it's a programme of incremental ethnic cleansing.

As for Trudeau and the neo-Liberal Party of Canada, their true colours are now completely beyond disguise.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

Possibly The Most Important 60-Minutes You've Spent In A Good, Long While

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, delivers a stark warning and a call to arms in this year’s Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute address. Monbiot warns that we’re about to feed the environment into the gaping maw of the financial sector so responsible for its current degradation.

Monbiot says that neo-liberalism will complete the devastation of our already reeling environment. He points out, in words that ring true for Canada also, that we lack the political leadership we need so desperately to protect our environment.

“This is the horrendous mistake that New Labour here and the Democratic Party in the United States have made. ‘We’ve got to win the next election so we’ve got to appease people who don’t share our values, so we’re going to become like them. Instead of trying to assert our own values, we are going to go over to them and say, “Look, we’re not really red; we’re not scary at all. We are actually conservatives.” That was Tony Blair’s message. That was Bill Clinton’s message. That, I’m afraid, is Barack Obama’s message. ...We’ve ended up with a situation where there are effectively no political alternatives to neoliberalism being advanced by the ...government. In which the opposition is, in almost every case, failing to oppose. It is in this position because it has progressively neutralised itself by trying to appease people who do not share its values.”


Does that sound familiar? It does to me. Monbiot captures the abandonment of the Left and centre-left in Canada by New Democrats and Liberals alike. They’re all neoliberal petro-pols and, as such, richly deserving of our contempt and loathing. Monbiot warns of the darker side of neoliberal politics – the inability to support anything but neoliberal solutions to our environmental threats. Foremost of these, he warns, is the madness of “natural capital” – monetizing the environment, component by component.

“You are effectively pushing the natural world even further into the system that is eating it alive. Dieter Helm, the Chairman of the Natural Capital Committee, said, ‘The environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed.’

“There, ladies and gentlemen, you have what seems to me the government’s real agenda. This is not to protect the natural world from the depredations of the economy. It is to harness the world to the economic growth that has been destroying it. All the things which have been so damaging to the living planet are now being sold to us as its salvation: commodification, economic growth, financialization, abstraction. Now, we are told, these devastating processes will protect it.”

“It gets worse still when you look at the way in which this is being done. Look at the government’s Ecosystems Market Task Force, which was another of these exotic vehicles for chopping up nature and turning it into money. From the beginning it was pushing nature towards financialization. It talked of ‘harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitizations enhance the return of investment of an environmental bond.’ This gives you an idea of what the agenda is...

“What we are talking about is giving the natural world to the City of London, the financial centre, to look after. What could possibly go wrong? Here we have a sector whose wealth is built on the creation of debt. That’s how it works, on stacking up future liabilities. Shafting the future in order to serve the present, that is the model. And then that debt is sliced up into collateralized debt obligations and all other marvellous devices that worked so well last time round.

“Now nature is to be captured and placed in the care of the financial sector, as that quote suggests. In order for the City to extract any value from it, the same Task Force says we need to ‘unbundle’ ecosystem services so that can be individually traded.

“That’s the only way in which it can work – this financialization and securitization and bond issuing and everything else they are talking about. Nature has to be unbundled. If there is one thing we know about ecosystems, and we know it more the more we discover about them, is that you cannot safgely disaggregate their functions without destroying the whole thing. Ecosystems function as coherent holistic systems, in which the different elements depend upon each other. The moment you start to unbundle them and to trade them separately you create a formula for disaster.”

Monbiot concludes that the only way to save our planet is to utterly reject neoliberalism, no matter the name of the party that embraces it. What he’s saying is that we have to reject not just the Conservatives but also the Liberals and the New Democrats. He says the message from these parties is “follow us and we’ll give you a slightly less worse government.” He’s right and that’s just what the Liberals and the New Democrats have on offer. They’ve already gone to the Dark Side, you just need to be honest with yourself and admit it.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

UPDATED: Harper's Reign of Terror - Part Four

Except, that is, in Harperland. The latest Orwellian edict to come down from the Harper-directed CRA, reported by The Winnipeg Free Press, is as follows:

The Canada Revenue Agency has told a well-known charity that it can no longer try to prevent poverty around the world, it can only alleviate poverty — because preventing poverty might benefit people who are not already poor.

The bizarre bureaucratic brawl over a mission statement is yet more evidence of deteriorating relations between the Harper government and some parts of Canada's charitable sector.

The lexical scuffle began when Oxfam Canada filed papers with Industry Canada to renew its non-profit status, as required by Oct. 17 this year under a law passed in 2011.

Ottawa-based Oxfam initially submitted wording that its purpose as a charity is "to prevent and relieve poverty, vulnerability and suffering by improving the conditions of individuals whose lives, livelihood, security or well-being are at risk."

The international development group, founded in 1963, spends about $32 million each year on humanitarian relief and aid in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America, with a special emphasis on women's rights.

But the submission to Industry Canada also needed the approval of the charities directorate of the Canada Revenue Agency, and that's where the trouble began.
Agency officials informed Oxfam that "preventing poverty" was not an acceptable goal.

"Relieving poverty is charitable, but preventing it is not," the group was warned. "Preventing poverty could mean providing for a class of beneficiaries that are not poor."

Oxfam Canada's executive director called the exchange an "absurd conversation."

I really have nothing to add to that assessment.

UPDATE:

In my haste to put this little nugget up last evening, I neglected to include one piece of information that demonstrates Oxfam is yet another victim of a vindictive and intolerant Harper regime:

Oxfam Canada was singled out for criticism earlier this year by Employment Minister Jason Kenney over the group’s opposition to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

And in July last year, Oxfam Canada signed a joint letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, taking issue with reports that government officials had been asked to compile “friend and enemy stakeholder” lists to brief new ministers after the summer cabinet shuffle.

Harper's Reign of Terror - Part Three

The prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully.
- Samuel Johnson

While I doubt that many within the Harper regime are literary types or schooled in the humanities, I suspect the above quotation or variants thereof represents the underlying spirit of their relentless attacks on nonprofits that oppose the government's ruthless agenda.

And now there are indications that the noose is tightening, that the focus of those attacks is widening, with the purpose not only of cowing advocacy groups into silence lest they lose their charitable status, but also their supporters.

Today's Star offers this chilling lead:

Canadian charities would have to turn over lists of their donors’ identities to the Canada Revenue Agency under a proposal being floated by the Conservative government.

The cover story being offered by the regime is that it would better equip the CRA to detect charity-receipt fraud, inasmuch as the majority of Canadians now file their tax returns online, where actual receipts are not required. By having a list of donors and the amounts given, the revenue agency could easily ferret out fraud.

On the surface, such a proposal would seem to have merit, simply a measure reflecting sound fiscal management. However, as with almost everything the Harper cabal offers, there is a nefarious side to such a measure, as

... some charities are wary of the administrative burden — and the potential close surveillance of groups that criticize government policies.

Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay made the suggestion behind closed doors this spring to charities officials in Ottawa as the government seeks ways to tighten regulation of Canada’s charitable sector.

Findlay asked officials of the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Canadian Cancer Society and others for their input, as well as their reaction to a proposal to standardize the format, size and colour of official income-tax receipts for charitable donations.

The consultation took place before a March 26 media event at which Findlay and Kevin Sorenson, minister of state for finance, boasted about the government’s achievements in reducing red tape for charities.

So how did those who attended the meeting react? Understandably, given the justifiable fear of regime repercussions, few want to comment publicly. One attendee, who requested anonymity, said that it was initially met with “stunned silence”.

“You can imagine why neither of these proposals would reduce red tape for charities — and why, given the current climate, there would be significant concern about the intent,” said the source.

And what might that intent be? In addition to the existing audits being directed against those who offer criticism of its reactionary agenda, the regime would have another cudgel (increased administrative costs) with which to threaten nonprofits, as well as one to wield selectively against their supporters.

Think about it. Is there really a leap in logic to suggest that the long arm of the Harper-directed CRA could now reach punitively into the lives of supporters of targeted nonprofits? Could those in accord with the goals of nonprofits that criticize government policy find themselves, once their donor information was in the hands of officials, suddenly receiving notification of impending tax audits?

Can you imagine how pervasive the chill would become? Can you imagine how crippling the effect would be on targeted nonprofit support?

There was a time when I would have dismissed my above thoughts as the manifestation of an unhinged conspiracy enthusiast. Sadly for our country, that time has long since passed.