Jim Travers, of all people, writes about: The quiet unravelling of Canadian democracy

Don’t you find it a trifle ironic that the main political writer for the Toronto Star would write an article today entitled The quiet unravelling of Canadian democracy?

I do, for the reasons which I will explain.

I think Jim Travers is an excellent writer, ie wordsmith, but he seems to shun the truth that is all around him. He is guilty of the very thing that he is prescribing as a solution in his piece today namely......connect the dots.....insofar as he has failed to do so himself.

That was the very observation which I made, but two days ago, in my piece entitled “Globe misses the big picture: It's about the truth, stupid”, in which I made the point: “It is the news media’s obligatory role to uncover the facts and connect the dots.”

On the issue of income trusts, Jim Travers is as guilty as others in failing to connect the dots. Perhaps Jim Travers is seeking a better Canada where there are isolated pockets of democracy and repression of the truth in others?

Good luck with that concept. Not sure how that would work, since democracy is an absolute. Not something to be selectively metered out when it suits your purposes or in regions that tickle your fancy.

Jim Travers is right. We ARE witnessing The quiet unraveling of Canadian democracy. Some however, like myself, have been anything but quiet on the issue of Canada’s unraveling of democracy, or the fraud that is going on in this country.

Some are prepared to acknowledge the good work that I am doing , such as Seymour Schulich who recently applauded my persistence in seeking truth and justice by saying “LIKE THE GUY WHO SCREAMED ABOUT MADOFF--YOU WERE THE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS--I KNOW THE REAL STORY.”

The only difference being that the GUY WHO SCREAMED ABOUT MADOFF is a national hero and I am a lone voice in the wilderness. Am I the only Canadian who is not prepared to be lied to by their government?

Therein lies the difference between the US and Canada.

Too bad for Madoff that he didn’t set up shop in Canada, as Flaherty did, because Madoff would still be a free man, and the press would have remained oblivious throughout, a privilege extended to members of Canada’s plutocracy. Just look who put that fraudster Conrad Black into jail. It sure as hell wasn’t the Canadians media, Canadian legal system or lax Canadian Securities Commissions was it?

Jim Travers needs to understand that The quiet unraveling of Canadian democracy begins when governments hold certain truths to be self evident, especially those certain truths that happen to be blatant falsehoods.

Better that they be held out by the government as self evident, because the government would never be in a position to prove them as true, in the glare of daylight and full disclosure, The exercise for politicians seeking to hoist bespoke policies on an unsuspecting public is to devote as much energy and resources into fashioning the central policy arguments to ring as being “self evident”.

This is what the exercise on income trusts has been all about. Holding out the argument of tax leakage to be self evident. Meanwhile refusing to abide by the Accountability Act or any rudimentary test of transparency, by issuing 18 pages of blacked out documents as the Orwellian form of “proof”.

The irony to Jim Travers being the one to write about The quiet unravelling of Canadian democracy in the Toronto Star, of all newspapers, is that the Toronto Star has no interest in dealing in truth and is content to see Canadian democracy unravel, if it means achieving their temporal and short lived commercial gains.

I met with the Toronto Star editorial board in April of 2007, when Bob Hepburn was Editorial Page Editor. Appropriately. He was joined by some 6 or 7 of his colleagues. I thought my best argument to disabuse these Star writers who had already decalared their support of the trust tax in numerous articles (and as motivated by the paper’s own commercially based reasons), was to undermine Flaherty’s false notion of tax leakage and to use the 18 pages of documents that had been recalled by Flaherty for heavens sake, to make the point that maybe, just maybe, Flaherty was hiding something. Hiding something that I could blow wide open with the insights afforded by Dennis Bruce of HLB Decision Economics and his work INSIDE the Department of Finance, namely that the government’s tax leakage numbers are wrong based on the fact that they leave out 38% of the good, in their good/bad analysis.

I was completely flabbergasted/unimpressed when these supposed journalists began reciting all their home grown, shoot from the hip reasons why this information should be kept secret? You know, just like the personal health records or nuclear armaments secrets that they are not. Kept secret? Please give me a break. Is this the Toronto Star or the Toronto bureau office of Pravda?

It was at that very point in time that I was witnessing The quiet unravelling of Canadian democracy......in the Editorial Board meeting room of the Toronto Star.

Perhaps Jim Travers could put his new found religion and gospel about democracy to good use, by writing about the $35 billion government fraud known as tax leakage? Failure to do will simple make him a part of the problem and bot part of the solution.

Come on Jim. It is very lonely here, being THE GUY WHO SCREAMED ABOUT MADOFF [FLAHERTY}— [AND] THE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS.

Or do you work for the SEC? Pravda? Jim Flaherty?

The quiet unravelling of Canadian democracy
Muzzled MPs. A powerless cabinet. Politicized senior bureaucrats. Unaccountable parties. Canada's democracy is in trouble. To fix it we have to connect the dots
Apr 04, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (44)
James Travers