Rogues Gallery

A lot can happen in the space of two short years. Just take a look at the front page of today’s Report on Business in the Globe and Mail (of all papers), where you will see the Rogues Gallery consisting of the CEOs of BCE, Manulife, Torstar and GM.

Canadian politicians and policy makers take note: With the exception of Rick Wagoner of GM, these three other individuals represent the rogues gallery of those who instigated and/or enabled the highly destructive policy known as the income trust tax. Not that this is what the article is even about. However what the article is actually about is an even more powerful statement than had it been about income trusts proper. Instead, this article is about three CEO’s that the Globe has selected to make its point about ”HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?”

Evidently the Globe thinks that the recent combined payment of $43.1 being gifted to the outgoing CEOs of BCE, Torstar and Manulife is too much. I’ll let them decide on that issue. What is of greater significance to me is that the very people, some would say culture, that the Globe has singled our for rebuke over excessive pay in the face of profound under performance, are the very people who fought tooth and nail to preserve the corporate status quo, by killing the superior form of capitalism known as income trusts.

The fact that they resorted to hiding behind the blatant policy falsehood known as tax leakage is evidence of their disdain for fair play and truthfulness. You don’t need me to tell you that capitalism isn’t working very well these days. Just look all around you. These people featured in today’s Rogues Gallery all had reasons, of a personal or commercial nature, to kill the threat posed to them by income trusts. I have explained what those motives were on the part of BCE, Manulife and Torstar for the better part of the last two years, so I wont repeat them again, as everything I have hypothesized on that front has borne itself out in reality. Please forgive me for being right.

Is it not a strange confluence of events and circumstances that the very people who are being singled out by the Globe as the poster children of excessive pay for under performance are the VERY PEOPLE who collectively conspired or to have helped enable the income trust tax and the unreported nature of the fraud upon which that policy was premised? It is not worthy of pause, to ask oneself the fundamental question of why policy makers in Ottawa were heeding the self serving advice of these people in the first place and creating for them bespoke tax policies of their own custom design......if it wasn’t to perpetuate a culture of entitlement and corporate abuses and overall malaise and executive non-accountability and effective "ownership" and "command and control" of Canadian enterprises by mere management versus the true owners......namely the much abused investors in Canada's capital markets.

Wake up Ottawa. We have a problem here.......and an obvious solution. Income trusts provide a level of highly effective self regulation that puts the true owners in the driver’s seat while providing Canada with an abundant source of low cost, low default capital while at the same time maximizing Ottawa’s tax collection and affording average Canadians the opportunity to provide themselves with retirement income without resorting to inherently flawed investment vehicles like ABCP, Manulife’s Income Plus or the litany of garbage produced on Wall Street and mimicked in Canada with equally disastrous results.

Can I own a piece of Canada please, without Manulife or Power Financial taking out a fee stream or narrowing my choices so that I become captive to their wares or running afoul of Torstar’s Machiavellian scheme to have a select number of shareholders control the company while those with the greatest economic stake don’t even get a vote or standing in the way of BCE taking itself private as the means to enrich its under performing management at the expense of every other stakeholder in the company?

Please? Stephen Harper promised me that I could....not that long ago?