Harper's anti-trust tax was an anti-trust tactic

Harper’s income trust tax was designed to benefit Canada’s large life companies like Manulfe and Power Corp’s London Life and Great West Life and to extend their monopoly on Canadians retirement savings choices. Meanwhile Obama is beefing up and enforcing anti-trust measures to prevent monopolist actions, that US Justice Department’s Head of antitrust division said helped contribute to the global economic meltdown.

U.S. to make antitrust policy tougher: report
Mon May 11, 2009

(Reuters) - The U.S. government plans to reverse its antitrust policy and put more pressure on companies eyeing bigger market share through their dominance, the New York Times reported on its website.

Christine Varney, head of the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division, will announce the policy reversal in a speech on Monday at the Center for American Progress, the paper said, citing people who she consulted about the policy shift.

The changed policy will be a reversal from that of the Bush administration, during which not a single case against a dominant firm was lodged for violating the antimonopoly law, the paper said.

Varney is expected to say it was a major mistake during the outset of the Great Depression to relax antitrust enforcement, that enabled many large companies to engage in pricing, wage and collusive practices that harmed consumers and took years to reverse, the paper added.

Ineffective government regulation, she argued, is contributing to the current economic problems.

"As antitrust enforcers, we cannot sit on the sidelines any longer," she said, adding that new legislation may be needed to improve policing of the marketplace.

Her division has also launched a program designed to find fraud or anticompetitive collusion surrounding the government's $787 billion economic stimulus package.



Income-trust crackdown: The inside story
When the telephone rang, Flaherty knew he had to act
Globe and Mail
November 2, 2006

High-profile directors and CEOs, meanwhile, had approached Mr. Flaherty personally to express their concerns: Many felt they were being pressed into trusts because of their duty to maximize shareholder value, despite their misgivings about the structure. Paul Desmarais Jr., the well-connected chairman of Power Corp. of Canada, even railed against trusts in a conversation with Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a trip to Mexico.