Globe misses the big picture: It's about the truth, stupid

The Globe’s headline article today is entitled “Harper misses the big picture”, concerning Harper's missing of the big G20 photo op.

Well I’m sorry, photo ops aside, the GLOBE is the one that is guilty of missing the big picture, which is that journalism’s role in our society is to report the truth, not promulgate lies. Many of the facts of that big picture story, concerning Stephen Harper's $35 billion income trust fraud, have been faithfully reported on at the Globe by Steven Chase, but his often subtle investigative work has been completely undermined by all the nonsensical opinionated dogma on income trusts by people at the Globe like Eric Reguly, Derek DeCloet, Andy Willis and Margaret Wente, of all people. Occasionally Jeffrey Simpson or Lawrence Martin will weigh in with some sweeping statements and erroneous conclusions of their own for good measure and to please their masters, while at the same time as they are pontificating about how the press needs to do a better job at financial news reporting in light of the pathetic job done by financial news reporters in the events that led to the global meltdown. Someone, please hand them a mirror.

Well people, facts are facts. It is the news media’s obligatory role to uncover the facts and connect the dots. That was the lesson recently taught to the news media by Jon Stewart.......of the Comedy Network, for heaven’s sake.

Why the Globe has consistently suppressed the truth about income trusts is something they will have to explain. Their reasons are of secondary importance. The big picture is we don’t need governments lying to us. Unlike many others I refuse to be lied to by my government on this or any other issue. I agree wholeheartedly with Michael Ignatieff when he proclaims, as he often does: “Canadians deserve the truth”

Well, what’s the Globe’s stance on the truth and the need for the truth by Canadians?

It is the fundamental role of the news media to report the truth and to uncover lies. The Globe has failed miserably in this task. They are happy to report the tax leakage pronouncements of Jack Mintz that have been highly orchestrated to mimic those of the government, but the Globe does nothing to uncover Jack Mintz’s complete hypocrisy and academic sham when it is revealed to the Globe by me that Jack Mintz is saying one thing in public and the exact opposite in private, when Jack Mintz admitted to me in writing on November 28, 2006 the following:

“I do want to point out that there is a serious flaw in some analyses especially on the taxation of pension and RRSP accounts. Finance was not right to treat the impact as zero.”

Not that I ever needed Jack Mintz to reveal this gross modeling error on the part of Flaherty/Carney et al in the first place. I have known that fact since November 1, 2006 when I made but one phone call that led to my receiving a copy of the definitive study on tax leakage, written during and for the Goodale consultative round entitled “The Tax Revenue implications of income trusts” by HLB Decision Economics. Something that has never been reported on by the Globe...the definitive study on tax leakage researched and written in collaboration with the Department of Finance by a very credible organization that advises governments around the world and for whom their reputation and integrity means everything.

Meanwhile Flaherty’s and Mark Carney’s "version" of the "definitive" study of tax leakage, takes the form of 18 pages of blacked out documents, thereby quickly morphing the income trust issue into a litmus test issue concerning Canada's actual real world adherence to the concepts of transparency and accountability, the cornerstone of any true democracy.

How could I, as a private citizen, come into possession of the definitive answer about alleged tax leakage, which proved the government was lying about tax leakage and the Globe and Mail couldn’t? More like a case of the Globe running away from the ubiquitous truth.

This tax leakage carnard argument of Flaherty’s, as promulgated by the Globe, represents the act of willful suppression and distortion of the facts by Canada’s major national print newspaper. That is a a disgrace to the journalism profession and an insult to our democracy.

As for Jack Mintz, I only wrote to him to see how a presumed academic would reconcile his misrepresentations of reality to the public with what I knew already to be the truth. Jack Mintz is an expert in nothing, since experts deal in facts, not fabrications. Tax leakage is a fabrication. Jack Mintz is an shill for the government and those interests for whom this tax policy was custom fitted to serve. Furthermore, he is completely lacking in independence, for anyone interested in properly researching his many corporate directorships and past paid advisory assignments with US private equity firms.

As for the Globe, you have a lot of lost moral and professional ground to make up for in correcting the key role you have played in the decimation of Canadians’ retirement savings and retirement standard of living and for the foreign takeovers of Canadians trusts and job losses at BCE that you played a major role in fostering and enabling will all your editorialized opinionated falsehoods concerning this income trust policy. I learned at the age of 8, it is never a good thing to lie or to distort the truth, which is why lying is a practice that I abandoned at that early age, in my first failed attempt to do so. Unlike the Globe I didn’t think I was nearly smart enough to get away with it. Nor, by the way, are you.

I caution you: Truth is relentless. Reputations can be fleeting.