David Dodge: A self acclaimed expert at torquing in Technicolor

I am getting confused. Was it David Dodge who said that Stephen Harper’s and Mark Carney’s economic predictions amount to dreaming in Technicolor, and the Bank of Montreal’s David Porter who said that Stephen Harper is torquing his economic predictions, or was it the other way around? Either way, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

I do know that former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge has been guilty of some pretty egregious torquing of his own, as he dreamed in Technicolor before the Public Hearings on Income Trusts back on February 1, 2007.

That was back when David Dodge was seeking another term as Bank Governor and was attempting to extract himself from some very untimely and favorable statements he had made about the importance of income trusts to both business and retirement savers, in the days immediately leading up to Flaherty’s Halloween surprise. No doubt, those statements by David Dodge were most unwelcome in certain quarters and constituted somewhat of a career limiting move for David Dodge. So faced with this moral dilemma, as between wanting another term as Governor of the Bank of Canada and speaking the truth about income trusts, what did David Dodge do? Well, he simply torqued his testimony to curry favour with his masters. All of a sudden, his views on income trusts took on a new hue, drawn from David Dodge’s Technicolor palette of opinion.

In so doing, the supposed plain spoken David Dodge opted to “piss our money down a rat hole”, to borrow a phrase of his from his exclusiive Globe interview this week. In fact, David Dodge pissed precisely $35 billion of our money down a rat hole, in his unsuccessful attempt to curry favour with his bosses and secure another term as Governor of the Bank of Canada. Instead, Mark Carney was awarded with that prize, since he had done vastly more to execute Flaherty’s income trust policy of deceit, than David Dodge could ever hoped to have done.

One thing that David Dodge was successful at securing, at least in the minds of millions of Canadians, was his reputation of being gifted at torquing his testimony and ruining their retirement futures in a bid to hang onto his job. David Dodge was able to glide effortlessly from comments that supported income trusts made days before, to comments that condemned income trusts, and he achieved this transition by invoking the utter falsehood known as tax leakage. Like Jim Flaherty and Mark Carney, David Dodge had no evidence to support these patently false claims of tax leakage. His testimony was merely naked torquing of the truth into something that was a callous lie. A callous lie, the intent of which was to preserve himself another term as Governor of the Bank of Canada.

Meanwhile all of David Dodge’s testimony about income trusts, both favourable and unfavourable, should be rejected as invalid, since all of these observations were accompanied by David Dodge’s constant enjoinder of “limited evidence suggests”. Neither David Dodge, nor the Bank of Canada, had done the requisite homework to qualify them to speak on the matter of income trusts in an authoritative manner. But that didn’t stop David Dodge from making his ill informed pronouncements, did it? Meanwhile those who had done the requisite work, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and HLB Decision Economics were relegated to the sidelines during the Public Hearings on Income Trusts, which proved to be nothing more than an exercise in opinion shopping, where people’s opinions, like those of David Dodge could be bought and sold in the open market in order to proffer up justification for the pre-ordained outcome, which was to deprive Canadians of investment choices that didn’t maximize the fee streams of Canada’s large life insurers or that didn’t maximize foreign private equity’s ability to rape Canadian businesses through debt leverage buyouts, such as the LBO of BCE that ensued immediately in the aftermath of Flaherty preventing BCE from converting to a tax maximizing, value maximizing income trust.

Could David Dodge have predicted the future any worse than he did of have been more hypocritical in their actions? That’s what happens when you listen to people who base their views on limited evidence or who prove themselves so adept and so willing to torque the truth to achieve nefarious ends. David Dodge, Mark Carney, Jim Flaherty, Stephen Harper are all guilty of the same sin, torquing the truth and dreaming in Technicolor, as the situation calls for and for the sole purpose of maximizing their personal lot in life.

They should all be told to go torque themselves and piss their retirement savings down a rat hole next time. Their usefulness to society has long since expired, along with their ability to ever redeem themselves, especially since David Dodge now works for that tax flow through entity, the income trust known as Bennett Jones LLP.

Given his great public policy concern over the alleged "tax leakage" from income trusts, perhaps David Dodge could let all Canadians know how much in taxes that Bennett Jones LLP remits every year to the Canada Revenue Agency? To make things easier for David Dodge and to prevent evasive responses, this is a multiple choice question:

(a) Nadda
(b) Squat
(c) Zilch