Jim: What’s Power Corp’s idea to send Ottawa $2.3 billion more a year? Manulies?

Jim: I am surprised that I haven’t heard back from you yet concerning my proposal of yesterday to send Ottawa an additional $2.3 billion in tax revenue a year, and provide major stimulus to Canada’s economy from coast to coast to coast, while at the same time addressing a major pension issue for the 75% of Canadians who are without pensions. After all, that proposal on my blog had no less 75 visits yesterday from your Department of Finance. Those 75 visits weren’t all you were they?

See: Proposal here

This proposal of creating a third retirement savings account that borrows all its features from RRSPs and TFSPs in a manner that is most favorable from a government tax revenue perspective could be implemented in a matter of days by a stroke of a pen. It would get the unanimous support of the House? When has that ever happened with one of your initiatives, like the time you reduced the withholding tax paid by foreigners on corporate interest from 15% to zero. Did that receive unanimous support of the House? Reducing corporate tax rates by 24%? Every day that you wait to implement this creative solution is costing Canadian taxpayers $6.3 million, $42 million a week and $180 million a month! That’s an awfully expensive parking meter to be left unattended.

To put this golden opportunity into terms that you could best understand, this stream of tax revenues is enough to fund one Whitby Abilities Center every 2.3 days. I know you weren’t there yesterday at the Whitby Mayor’s Annual Speech to the Whitby Chamber of Commerce, but both Christine Elliott and I were, and I can tell you Christine received a very strong round of applause when Whitby Mayor Pat Perkins congratulated your wife for her role in convincing you to provide $15 million in funding for the Whitby Abilities Center, that your wife and campaign manager sit on the board of, and which was solely funded by taxpayers across the country, with no corresponding benefit to them.

The Whitby Abilities Center location is ideally suited for your son to take advantage of, along with others for whom this is a convenient location. Just imagine if this special benefit were made available to other children in need of an abilities center in more urban dense areas across the country? With $2.3 billion in additional annual revenue, you could equip the entire country with abilities centers in the space of six months and have enough money left over to make EI more fair and equitable, as your wife and many others are calling upon you to do at this time of greatest need. Imagine the round of applause she would get for that move, that extends beyond the confines of simply Whitby, not that Whitby is without its infair share of laid off manufacturing workers.

Jim, you need to start thinking outside of the box and show your creative and passionate side. Show us the inner Finance Minister we all know that you are capable of being. That will require that you stop taking all your worst advice from the likes of Dominic D’Alessandro and Paul Desmarais Jr, who were the ones who lobbied you to kill seniors’ nest eggs so they could sell more of their synthetic investment wares. Not only did their advice work against the interests of ALL Canadian taxpayers, their advice also served to blow up in their own faces. Just look at Manulie, whose goal in killing income trusts was to sell more variable annuities nonsense like Income Plus, which they failed to hedge and which brought Manulie to its knees. Just look at Power Corp who wants a world in which shareholders don’t get to vote on management compensation or have a say on whether Power can waltz off an make non-accretive acquisitions like Putnam Investments. Under the discipline of the trust model that Paul Desmarais Jr. so abhors, this acquisition would never have been permitted, and what a good thing that would have been, since it would have prevented Junior from writing of $1 billion of that investment, within the space of two short years.

So what are Power Corp’s idea to send Ottawa an additional $2.3 billion in tax revenue a year? What’s Manulie’s idea whereby you can build one Whitby Abilities Center ( or some other pet project of yours) every 2.3 days?

Your entire income trust tax was predicated on the false argument that income trusts cause tax leakage, using your flawed and contrived analysis. The beauty of my proposal to you is that you can remain resolute in believing you analysis was neither flawed or contrived. No admissions of guilt on your part are required under my proposal. Furthermore you will be $2.3 billion a year richer. You will look like a financial genius and a problem solver of the people. The only guilt you will be burdened with, is the guilt associated with not taking this graceful exit from the income trust problem of your own creation.

It’s time you flew from the nest and started making it in life on your own and without the incessant instructions from the likes of Power Corp and Manulie, who are two birds of a feather and who have no misgivings whatsoever about trashing your political and personal reputation, if that’s what it takes to raid seniors nest eggs, and for them to garner unfair advantage. You need to start listening to Michael Ignatieff on these types of matters, for it was Micahel Ignatieff who wrote:

"Successful countries knock down the barriers -- of red tape, regulation, and monopoly -- that divide citizens, confer unfair advantages or prevent people from working together"

Jim: It’s time you stopped pandering to the life insurance monopoly/oligopoly in this country and stopped conferring Dominic D’Alessandro and Paul Desmarais Jr, with an unfair advantage, if only for their sake.

Or do you intend this quote of Michael’s to be one of your attack ads on Michael’s character and ideals in challenging Canada's corrupt order of things whereby advantages are conferred on the rich an powerful, and spun for the masses as a phony exercise in "leveling the playing field"?