Tax Fairness: A Doubtful Prospect

Recently I wrote a post expressing doubt that the tax treaties signed by Stephen Harper at the urging of big business will not in any way be amended by Justin Trudeau. Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs), as manipulated by Harper, allow for the legalized theft of countless billions of corporate tax dollars from the public treasury, thereby limiting what government can do to alleviate social and economic woes here at home.

Judging by some letters in today's Star, I see I am not alone in my suspicion that relief will not be forthcoming from our 'new' government:

Re: Why not outlaw use of tax havens? Letter June 22

Re: Loopholes costing Canada billions in lost revenue page, June 17

Sadly, Robert Bahlieda is a prophet crying in the wilderness. The criminalization of corporate tax avoidance is next to impossible when, as he rightly argues, it is ingrained in our culture and politicians routinely coddle business interests.

While it took great courage for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reject austerity and embrace infrastructure spending, it will take even more political chutzpah to entertain radical tax reform when Canadians are unwilling to pay even for the programs and services they need.

In the end it is we the citizens who must object to the privatization of our democracy. We need to care enough about it to insist that our representatives uphold the importance of taxation in a civilized society – the principled starting point of any true reform.

Salvatore (Sal) Amenta, Stouffville

This article should leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about who Western governments, and in particular the Canadian government, represent. It sure as hell isn’t the average voter in Canada.

I resent my hard earned tax dollars being spent on giveaways to multinational corporations like Bombardier, GM, and many others to ostensibly “create” new jobs, or “preserve” current employment, when these wealthy corporations pay next to no Canadian taxes. They then use their profits to buy back shares to better reward their executives, while at the same time cutting employees.

As the article points out, Canadian government policy has been to encourage the offshoring of profits.

The most effective way to stop this corporate gravy train is to eliminate income taxes on profits and replace them with a turnover tax of 1 to 3 per cent on all sales in Canada. Taxes on profits are easily subverted as we have seen with the shifting of taxes between Ireland and other jurisdictions.

A tax on corporate sales for the privilege of selling in Canada would at one fell swoop eliminate all the fancy accounting practices and legal manoeuvres to avoid taxes. Sales are the easiest thing to monitor and the most difficult to obscure.

Don Buchanan, Etobicoke

When discussing corporate tax avoidance the argument is made that Canadian multinationals need these “tools” to give them the “best ability to compete on international and global scale.” We’ve heard this kind of argument in another sphere – doping and steroid use in professional and amateur athletics.

Perhaps it’s time the multinationals were also barred from competition and stripped of their hardware so that the ethical ones can thrive.

Sid Potma, Toronto

The integrity of Canada’s tax system, as it’s currently written, looks disproportionately to its citizens for the tax base to maintain our country. I would appreciate it if some one would publish a list of the Canadian companies/corporations blatently avoiding billions in corporate taxes, thus placing an unfair burden on all of us to maintain the basic lifestyle we have become accustomed to.

Richard Kadziewicz, Scarborough

Anyone Who Refuses To Connect The Dots Here

... will never accept the fact of climate change:



Want more information on the dangers posed by algae blooms? Click here.

And just remember, sports fans, these are only the preliminary rounds.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Canada Day.

UPDATED:The News Keeps Gettting Worse

In a column on Tuesday, environmental blogger Robert Scribbler noted that the Northern Hemisphere Jet Stream had merged with the Southern Hemisphere Jet Stream.

“It’s the very picture of weather weirding due to climate change. Something that would absolutely not happen in a normal world,” he wrote. “Something, that if it continues, basically threatens seasonal integrity.”

“Historically, the Tropics — which produce the tallest and thickest air mass in the world — have served as a mostly impenetrable barrier to upper level winds moving from one Hemisphere to another. But as the Poles have warmed due to human-forced climate change, the Hemispherical Jet Streams have moved out of the Middle Latitudes more and more. ”

“That’s bad news for seasonality,” he continued. “You get this weather-destabilizing and extreme weather generating mixing of seasons that is all part of a very difficult to deal with ‘Death of Winter’ type scenario.”

If you watch the accompanying video, you will be struck by the interconnectedness of climate systems. Changes in those system thanks to climate change threaten to become catastrophic.

In the following YouTube video, Beckwith says

that the jet stream behavior signaled “massive hits to the food supply” and “massive geopolitical unrest.”

UPDATE: Thanks to the dogged determination of The Mound to find out more about the above-described situation, I am happy (though a bit chastened) to report that the dire news presented above is based on poor science. The Washington Post offers this rebuttal:

The claims are unsupported and unscientific, and they demonstrate the danger of wild assertions made by non-experts reaching and misleading the masses.

The Post reporter

reached out to several atmospheric scientists, who have graduate degrees and are trusted sources in the profession, for their reaction to these claims. Without exception, they said air flow between the hemispheres is not at all uncommon.

“This is total nonsense,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington. “Flow often crosses the equator.”

Mass added that the cross-equator flow identified by Scribbler and Beckwith is not between mid-latitude jet streams, as claimed. “The analysis is making mistakes that even one of my junior undergrads would not make,” Mass said.

Ryan Maue, a senior meteorologist with a doctoral degree who works at WeatherBell Analytics, agreed with Mass that the cross-equator flow is totally normal and not evidence of a joint hemispheric jet stream. “Cross-equatorial flow at both upper and lower levels is part of the seasonal transition of the Western Pacific monsoon through boreal summer,” he said.

“Sometimes the flows connect up with each other and make it look like a larger flow structure is causing the jet stream to flow from one hemisphere to the other, but it’s in no way unprecedented,” Roy Spencer, a professor of atmospheric science at University of Alabama-Huntsville, explained on his blog.

My apologies for so readily accepting Beckworth's claims. It was an obvious failure in critical thinking.

A Post Fact-Checking World?

That seems to be the opinion of Donald Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord, who offers this view: I honestly don’t think this ‘fact-checking’ business ... is anything more than one more out of touch, elitist media-type thing.

I'm sure the rabble would agree:

Sustainability Needs To Be More Than Just A Word

A Star letter-writer has an insight on sustainability well-worth sharing:

Re: Canada a model for sustainable forestry, Letter June 19

Reading the response to Thomas Walkom’s editorial from Forest Products Association of Canada and Ontario Forest Industries Association, I was once again encouraged by how much progress has been made reducing, reusing and recycling the language of environmental activism for corporate messaging.

Terms like green, environmentally friendly, and eco-everything were always so vague it is not surprising how easily they were co-opted by advertisers to hawk products that are nothing of the sort. But sustainability has a simple, clear, specific definition. Sustainability is the capacity to endure.

What apologists such as letter writers Derek Nighbor and Jamie Lim are peddling should properly be referred to as Sustainability(TM) as this term is also becoming nothing more than happy-sounding marketing for demonstrably unsustainable activities.

By the end of today, there will be fewer trees and less forest wilderness in Canada and on Earth. What remains of these complex ecosystems will be more fractured, less diverse, less resilient, less healthy.

Even if that were the whole of it, the destruction of these ecosystems – and, ultimately, the resources and services they provide – is simply not sustainable. And, of course, that is nowhere near the whole of it.

Among other impacts, the replanting that Nighbor and Lim laud, when it happens at all, is usually a genetic monoculture of non-native species, all at the same stage of growth. These are not regenerating forests. These are plantations; deserts of wood compared to the vital forest ecosystems they have supplanted.

By the end of today, there also will be fewer species, less water, less soil, more carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, and more persistent toxic pollution in everything – including our bodies. Nothing about our presence on Earth is currently sustainable.

I am often at a loss for words to describe the scale and pace of our pathological destruction of the natural world. I am compelled to fight against losing the meaning of the very word that describes the crisis.

What cannot endure, will not endure. Unsustainable activities will come to an end whether we like it or not. We should get actual sustainability before it gets us.

Kevin Farmer, Toronto

If you need further evidence of the havoc being wrought thanks to our collective heedlessness, look no further than this:

Kool-Aid, Anyone?

Unless you have taken a strong slug of a particular Kool-Aid, I suspect you will be suitably appalled by the following. Indeed, the responses of the folks who were asked what it would take for Donald Trump to lose their vote reminds me of an old tune sung by Tammy Wynette.

And Now, Another Word From The Truly Insane

Stephen Anderson, I see, is back at it. You may remember the hate-filled screed that this truly insane evangelical launched into following the Orlando massacre, one that was subsequently taken down from YouTube for violating its policy on hate speech.

Not to be silenced, Raw Story reports that this unhinged pastor launched into a new tirade after businesses began severing their relationships with his and other like-minded churches. As I mentioned in my previous post on this obscene parody of God's love, he is difficult to listen to.




The sickest part is that this ding-dong truly feels he is a persecuted Christian.