In search of Don Newman and "the spin stops here"

Here's a news story outline that Don Newman needs to turn his prodigious talents to, namely a post mortem on Flaherty's so called Tax Fairness Plan, starting with the hypothesis that:

"Flaherty's phony tax leakage claims can't withstand peer review, since they are mere fabrication. Mark Carney's fabrication. Fabricated to achieve a hidden agenda that serves narrow commercial interests, contrary to Canadians' broader interests."


Canadians have been told income trusts cause tax leakage. Canadians have been told to accept that premise on faith. Many reporters have alluded to the existence of tax leakage and have done so on blind faith. What gives? How does that remotely resemble accountability and transparency? Where is the journalistic rigor? There is none. Here is the crux of the matter, as reported on by Steven Chase of the Globe and Mail:


“What we want to know is how they took information and processed it to come up with these losses so we know if it's valid or not,” Mr. Tait said. (Gordon Tait of BMO Capital Markets)
“If you want your data to be accepted, it has to be scrutinized. It's got to be subject to peer review. You can't just come up with your own little theory and not show anybody how you came to it.”


For reasons known only to themselves, journalists in Canada are doing their profession and Canadians at large a great disservice. The worst offenders are folks like Terry Corcoran. Eric Reguly and that "Wealthy Boomer" guy, infamous for the piece he penned in December 2006, no doubt on behalf of the Department of Finance entitled “Earth to income trust investors, don;t blame Ottawa for your investment woes". His article then went on to describe investor’s outrage at losing $35 billion as being "manufactured rage”.

Wrong. The only thing "manufactured" about income trusts is the "manufacture" tyax leakage numbers cited by the Minister of Finance and Prime Minister of Canada. How “manufactured” do you suppose Canadians' rage will be once they learn that the Conservative Government's tax leakage numbers are "manufactured", particularly when Canadians realize that $95 billion in Canadian takeovers and $2.2 billion PER YEAR in real tax leakage has been INDUCED by this very income trust double taxation policy?

I don’t see any of these very reporters mentioned above bemoaning the tax leakage from the LBO of BCE, when in fact that tax leakage is real as opposed to imaginary. What could explain this? Double standards? Hidden agenda? Incompetence? Syncophants?

Where is the CBC on this $35 billion theft? Or as Stephen Harper called it, “raiding of seniors nest eggs”?

Last time I watched the National. Peter Mansbridge was fawning all over the perpetrator of this crime: Mark Carney. But then, staff at the CBC receive healthy pensions that make them immune from the reality of 75% of Canadians who don’t.

Don Newman of CBC’s Politics for whom I have immense respect, says that his motto is “the spin stops here”? With all due respect to Mr. Newman, this spin called tax leakage remains wholly unspun. It’s high time Canadians learned about Jim Flaherty’s manufactured numbers and the narrow interests his policy was designed to enrich, or as Dominic D’Allessandro, CEO of beneficiary Manulife Financial tried his best to "position" as:

“The notion and the implication that somehow the government on this file is responding to initiatives that originated with corporations is not based on reality.”

If Dominic D’Allessandro wants to prove that point, then he too should be calling for the government to release their tax leakage numbers and subject them to rigorous peer review. I thought CEOs in the financial services industry were big proponents of transparency? Or is their love of transparency just a big smoke screen? The smokescreen called tax leakage?

Finance refuses to divulge key trust data
STEVEN CHASE
Globe and Mail
January 23, 2007