The people's caisse against Michael Sabotage

This is an examination of former BCE CEO, Michael Sabia’s role in the implementation of Jim Flaherty’s income trust tax.

If there is any doubt whatsoever in your minds about how the income trust tax came into being, ponder this for a moment, from the Globe’s article entitled “ Income trust crackdown, the inside story” , printed 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, and told him he should act quickly to stop the raft of conversions, according to sources.”

Never before have a group of persons whose duty is a fiduciary one to maximize shareholder value, ever acted in such clear violation of that duty, and employed the willing services of Ottawa to sabotage their shareholders. The fact that this occurred was made ever more obvious by the fact, that one of the main perpetrators, Dominic D’Alessandro, attempted to deny such lobbying events took place, when he stated on February 2, 2007 before Parliament’s Public Hearings on Income Trusts that:

“The notion and the implication that somehow the government on this file is responding to initiatives that originated with corporations is not based on reality.”

Purpose:

The purpose of this piece is to present the case that Michael Sabia was an instrument of the Harper government in bringing down income trusts, in his own act of shareholder and public policy “sabotage”.

Sabotage is the word that best captures Michael Sabia’s conduct at BCE in his Machiavellian attempts at maximizing shareholder value. Unfortunately this is not a story that can be told in 20 words or less. For that you may wish to read the comments of readers to the Globe article entitled: “Sabia targets Caisse controls over risk” at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090430.wcaisse0430/CommentStory/Business/home

Typical of the readers comments there would be any one of the first five comments posted, which read:

1. Sabia Smash and Grab ... typical of the style that led to the collapse of BCE. what a klutz!

2. After what Sabia did to BCE and their shareholders, Caisse is hiring a goat to be the gardener.

3. This should be interesting!

4. Another vicious kick right in the face from Canadian business leaders to their own credibility. Sabia moves to 'change the culture' at Caisse

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAHAAHAAHAA!!!!!!

OH that's a good one!! HAHAHAHAAAHAAAHAA!!!

What's he going to do? Make them as exciting, competent and entreprenuerial as ... BELL CANADA???

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAAHAAHAAAHAAHAAAAA!!!!!

5. The G&M profiled Jean Monty who wanted to set the record straight about his time at Bell. That was only after he realized the internet would still make available all of the negative new about him. So he tried to build a IT giant without knowing the basicinfrastructure of the internet.
Now the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec has hired Sabia to run a pension fund. This after Teachers (the pension fund) said he was not qualified to work for them.
He is already doing the same modus(?) again and getting rid of people. Will be interesting who gets the top investment job and how they did during the downturn. And why are they leaving their current job. Was it $$$$ or let go from a broker/bank.

Such is the nature of the people’s caisse against Michael Sabia.

I will now elaborate on my conclusion that Micahel Sabia’s actions while at BCE were an exercise of sabotage, in which the former civil servant Michael Sabia engaged in that common practice used widely in the civil service whereby bureaucrats force the decision making hand of the elected officials for whom they serve, by presenting a contrived set of alternatives that make all but the one they themselves favour almost impossible to choose by the decision maker himself/herself.

Decision making is very much a science as there is an entire field devoted to it called Decision Theory. As practiced by official in Ottawa and former official in Ottawa the process has been completely corrupted, through means such as manufactured arguments (eg. income trusts cause tax leakage) or by precluding certain options from ever seeing the light of day (eg. Catalyst Proposal to the Strategic Oversight Committee which was not disclosed to BCE shareholders as required by securities laws).

It takes a special kind of person to achieve what Michael Sabia was able to achieve in his role as CEO of BCE. In what ostensibly was an exercise in maximizing shareholder value for BCE shareholders, Micahel Sabia was consistently sabotaging very real alternatives to do so, for reasons no doubt related to what was in his own personal best interests. However that is for him to “explain away” and not for me to speculate. What does not require speculation, but rather a faithful recounting of the events is that Michael Sabia was consistently sabotaging alternatives to massage the outcome of his wishes. Those acts of sabotage include:

(1) Gaming Ottawa in the aftermath of Telus’ announcement to convert to an income trust, to sabotage the income trust alternative for not just BCE and Telus, but for all at great cost to Canadian taxpayers and average investors.

(2) Imposing unreasonable road blocks in the way of the proposed merger offer by Telus, through extraordinary means such as a non-disparage clause in the Non Disclosure which precluded Telus from disparaging the effects of a private equity leverage buyout and better inform Canadians what the litany of adverse consequences of a junk bond leverage buyout would be , and by refusing to meet with Industry Canada or the CRTC jointly with Telus to overcome and address very real regulatory issues, thereby rendering Telus’ proposal dead in the water. See Diane Francis article entitled “Unreal constraints sandbagged Telus” at http://www.financialpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=e701ba6d-9072-4d63-953e-bb939e958229&k=36841

(3) Kyboshing the only proposal that would have seen itself to conclusion, namely the Catalyst Proposal, and which offered the optimal outcome for all stakeholders, by failing to disclose the Catalyst Proposal to shareholders and employing the services of BCE owned Globe and Mail to falsely malign this proposal and using the lax enforcement of Quebec’s Autorité des marchés financiers to achive that end.

Ironically, these acts of sabotage were not met with the final outcome that Michael Sabia so desperately attempt to orchestrate, namely the leveraged buyout of BCE by Teachers’ and US Private equity, since Michael was too intent on sabotaging BCE’s existing bondholders to have cut a deal with them, and to protect himself and BCE’s Board from lawsuits that might ensue should the bondholders actually suffer losses from the insolvency of BCE, as he inserted an “Insolvency Clause” in the agreement between BCE and Teachers’, which in the end wasn’t met, and served to blow up the deal of his dreams.

All of which could have been avoided had Michael not been so intent on destroying the existing BCE bondholders’ investment value and extracting some measly extra $1.00 for shareholders., something which he was not prepared to do for bondholders, but which he ultimately did to shareholders when he re-cut the deal in the summer of 2008 and reneged on some $1.00 in dividends per share that had been promised to BCE shareholders under the terms whereby they had approved the deal. It was at that point that BCE should have demanded payment of the $1 billion reverse break fee, or have held Teachers’ to their original contractual commitment. Why agree to an insurance policy in the form of a reverse break fee, if only to not use it, and allow your position to be diluted?

The remainder of this piece will describe the role played by Michael Sabia in item (1) above, how The Saboteur gamed Ottawa to kill income trusts. The role that Michael Sabia played in shutting down income trusts caused investors the loss of investment CHOICE and caused Canadians to lose $35 billion in their life savings. I understand that Michael Sabia is now going to become the CEO of the Caisse, an opening that only became available because the former management was responsible for losing $39 billion in retirement savings assets. And for that role in life, Michael Sabia comes eminently well qualified?


How Sabia gamed all Canadians, Parliament included, and achieved a lose, lose, lose outcome.

Introduction to a policy to double tax publicly traded trusts, but no others:

As we all know, Jim Flaherty’s Halloween drive-by shooting of seniors’ nest eggs was caused by the twin announced conversions of BCE and Telus. There was nothing innocent or honest about that entire connivance, as it was a faux crisis deliberately designed to provide justification for Stephen Harper’s policy betrayal flip flop. It was a flip flop based on the blatantly false and manufactured argument that income trusts cause tax leakage, which they most certainly do not. I would love for someone to prove otherwise.

This fraudulent argument needs to be fully exposed, in order for Canada’s democracy to be restored. Passing legislation on total falsehoods that deprive Canadians of essential investment choices for retirement and inflict massive losses on their life savings is not a democracy, but rather a cleptocracy, since it was clear from the outset who was going to waltz off with this foregone value and loss of choice, stolen from investors, namely Canada’s large life insurers (Manulife and Power Corporation), Big Oil (Suncor) foreign private equity (such as KKR, Provident Capital and Brian Mulroney’s Blackstone), and Canada’s pubic sector pension plans (Teachers’ OMERs Caisse) and the “Captains of Canadian industry”, who fail to realize they work for their owners, the shareholders, and mot the other way around.

The income trust matter is simply the battleground over which the issue of who controls the deployment of a business’s excess earnings is most recently being waged. The income trust model places that control firmly in the hands of the business’s true owners, its unitholders, whereas the corporate model has devolved to the point where that control has been wrested away by management, whose only goal is to maximize their personal compensation, often with reckless consequences to the business in question and all of society.

BCE is an excellent example of that, since look at what the disastrous outcome of an insolvent BCE that was actively sought out by Michael Sabia, its CEO, had it become a debt leveraged buyout basket case. The fact that this was the outcome that allowed him to max out on his personal compensation was the only reason he so desperately sought this outcome and went to such great lengths to kill the option known as income trusts.

The twin conversions of BCE and Telus:

Telus’ intention to convert into an income trusts was real, whereas BCE’s was anything but, and was part of a highly orchestrated event led by Michael Sabia to force upon Canadians his preferred tax regime and one which places corporate managers in charge of how a businesses’ excess earnings are redeployed into the economy, as opposed to those decision being made by the owners of businesses managed by people like Michael Sabia. Keep in mind, CEO are merely paid help and not some regal supreme beings that they think they are, and which Ottawa constantly defers to them as.

I will present the evidence for what Michael Sabia’s and BCE’s true intentions were, in this highly choreographed charade.

To reacquaint yourself with the pressure cooker atmosphere in which this faux crisis of BCE and Telus that brought down income trusts took place in, I suggest you read the article entitled: Income-trust crackdown: The inside story. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061102.wtrusttick02/BNStory/Business/home

Trust tax linked to private equity buyouts

Also for Ottawa to claim as Jim Flaherty infamously did with his comment of “It’s not my fault” that this trust tax would NOT LEAD to the wave of trust takeovers by way of leveraged buyouts ( and the associated loss of tax revenue) is either completely delusional or comes from someone who knows absolutely nothing about capital markets. The Department of Finance was completely aware of this dynamic that would occur between the trust tax and leveraged buyouts, as faithfully and professionally uncovered by Steven Chase in the Globe and Mail in his article entitled: “Trust tax linked to private equity buyouts” on June 13, 2007.

The faux crisis

The subtitle of the Globe article referred to in the Introduction above is: “When the telephone rang, Flaherty knew he had to act”. This is in reference to Michael Sabia calling Jim Flaherty on October 11, 2006 to inform him that BCE was going to follow Telus’ announced conversion to a trust which had been made on September 11, 2006. This is just what the Doctor ordered to provide the twin towers of false justification for Jim Flaherty and Stephen Harper to bring their version of financial terrorism on innocent Canadians saving for retirement, and comfortable in the knowledge that the Prime Minister had just been elected on a stated and written policy platform of “NEVER raiding seniors nest eggs by taxing income trusts.”.

That was before this group of completely self interested people came knocking on Ottawa’s door to do an end run around the true owners of their businesses, which they merely managed. How is this for deceit and betrayal of your shareholders and a complete abrogation of a Directors fiduciary duty:

“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, and told him he should act quickly to stop the raft of conversions, according to sources.”

Both of these announcements by BCE and Telus saw that value of these two companies’ share prices increase, since the market will pay a premium for companies that adopt the earnings payout discipline imposed on them by the government’s rules concerning tax flow through entities, as well as the market convention that income trusts not make acquisitions unless they are “accretive” to the monthly distributions that they make. No company in Canada better exemplifies a business that would benefit from these two fundamental principles, because BCE has been a serial squanderor of excess shareholders’ earnings into one failed foray after another. The most recent example being the $6 billion that Jean Monty torched on the acquisition of Teleglobe in the short space of two years.

The faux rationale:

Meanwhile the conversion of BCE to a trust would mean that Ottawa would collect massive amounts of tax revenue from BCE’s and Telus’ otherwise tax sheltered corporate earnings and instead, pay them out to investors, all of whom are taxable at the average rate of some 38%, versus ZERO at the corporate level. As income trusts, Ottawa would have collected $3.8 billion more in taxes from BCE and Telus during the first four years of conversion. See http://caiti.info/resources_it_mythbusters.php#myth3

And yet this central truth about the tax revenue impact of BCE and Telus was completely distorted and presented to Canadians in a form that was the OPPOSITE of truth. Numbers don’t lie, but apparently Prime Ministers and Finance Ministers do. The press proved themselves all too willing to parrot these lies. The rationale provided by Jim Flaherty for his punitive double taxation of Canadians RRSPs at the rate of 31.5%, on the day of his Halloween Massacre was:

“You have to either leave it alone or fix it,” Mr. Flaherty shrugged Wednesday. “We were going to see the two largest telecommunications companies in the country not pay corporate taxes. That's a clear and present danger to fairness in the Canadian tax system. I thought we had to act.”

Stephen Harper mouthed the same nonsense.

Why didn’t Michael Sabia simply inform Harper and Flaherty about the truth concerning that taxes that Ottawa would collect from BCE as a trust as opposed to BCE as a corporation, which was some $550 million more per year. See http://caiti.info/resources_it_mythbusters.php#myth3

Source of the faux rationale and Flaherty’s hypocritical beliefs:

So where did the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister ever get such a false notion upon which to base this policy? It is obvious from reading the article referred to above that Michael Sabis, in his capacity as CEO of BCE, and using his experience as former Director General of Tax Policy in the Department of Finance and Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet (Plans) of the Privy Council Office was all over Ottawa in the days following Telus’ announced conversion to a trust, plotting the means and method by which he would prevent such a thing from happening. I will let Michael Sabia describe why he thinks one off tax policies that are inherently destructive should be implemented at his personal behest in order to thwart his completion in Ottawa, even though Michael Sabia was unable to thwart Telus in the marketplace at large (both consumer and stick market). This is taking the M&A strategy of “scorched earth” a little too far, don’t you think, in which the actions of Michael Sabia saw Canadians, many of them seniors and retiress lose $35 billion of their life savings, equal to entire value of BCE.

Something the size of BCE was destroyed in order to save BCE? In that respect Michael Sabia has outdone Jean Monty’s blow up with Teleglobe, by a factor of 5. Meanwhile the destruction caused by Michael Sabia’s action has caused an essential investment choice to be deprived of Canadians and he was responsible for actions that completely corrupted our Parliament and our democracy, since his deceits were at the core of this policy.

It is patently false for Jim Flaherty and Stephen Harper to say that corporate taxes would have been lost from BCE, had it converted..........as they were paying none. Too bad that Canada’s Minister of Finance is unable to read simple financial statements, for if he were he would have realized the following:

“"Bell expects it will have no significant federal cash taxes through 2010, due to organizational simplification enabling accelerated use of Bell's R&D tax credits."

From where did Jim Flaherty form the false impression that corporate taxes would have been lost if BCE had converted to a trust. Surely in the many conversations that took place between BCE’s Michael Sabia and his former colleagues in Ottawa and with the Finance Minister, Michael Sabia might have wanted to correct Jim Flaherty on this essential and pivotal point, given the public misperception that was raging in the press at the time about alleged tax leakage, including in BCE’s own BellGlobeMedia ( as it was thenn known). Surely as the former Director General of Tax Policy, Michael Sabia would have known that the tax leakage numbers bandied about were predicted on a falsehood, since these numbers leave out the taxes paid by the 38% of income trusts held in RRSPs?: Surely as the former Director General of Tax Policy, Michael Sabia would have known (what I knew) and what was confirmed to me that (concerning tax leakage):

“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 is zero.”

This is how the tax leakage conspiracy theorists in the media and in corporate executive offices across the country come up with their bogus argument, by falsifying the analysis and leaving this huge swath of taxes. And yet when BCE was prevented from becoming an income trust, and instead was to become an insolvent junk bond basket case leveraged buyout owned by US private equity and a token Canadians pension fund, and it was pointed out to Jim Flaherty that such an outcome was no different (in fact vastly worse) than an income trust his response was:

"The purpose of the pension funds, ultimately, is to ensure they can honour their pension obligations. And there is taxation, of course, when pensions are paid out," the Finance Minister said.

So for purposes of BCE becoming a tax maximizing income trust, Jim Flaherty IGNORES these deferred taxes, and yet for purposes of a tax eliminating leveraged buyout that creates an insolvent company out of BCE, he includes them?

This isn’t even complete hypocrisy, it is incompetence in the extreme, as was Flaherty’s support for the leveraged buyout of BCE and his total opposition to the income trust conversion of BCE.

In this respect Jim Flaherty and Michael Sabia were both completely out of touch with the world around them and the enormous problem that manifested itself in the globak financiak meltdown that was driven by excessive debt binging at bith the consumer and corporate levels. These guys were two hula hoop salesman, even long after that fad had died.

What were Sabia’s true intentions?

As for what Michael Sabia’s true intentions were, that can be revealed from a variety of sources.

First we can look at what Michael Sabia’s reaction was to the announcement on Halloween 2006 that Jim Flaherty was shutting down income trusts, including the conversions of BCE and Telus:

“At Telus headquarters in Vancouver, where it was still midafternoon, the reaction was disbelief.

In Montreal, the mood was decidedly more upbeat. Sources said BCE's Mr. Sabia was a reluctant convert to the trust model, and “there was dancing in hallways at Bell” after Ottawa's announcement.”

This was not the last time that there was dancing in the halls at BCE, since a similar episode occurred when the Supreme Court ruled that BCE had the right to oppress its bondholders and cause them a multi-billion loss in order that Michael Sabia’s preferred outcome of turning BCE into a tax stripping insolvent junk bond basket case, could occur. In that instance, this was the reaction:

“ The cheering started seconds after the clock hit 4:30 p.m. EDT. On the 38th floor of BCE Inc.'s Montreal head office where chief executive officer Michael Sabia and a dozen executives at the communications giant were huddled around a television.”

None of this should come as a surprise since Michael Sabia and the Board of BCE were clearly involved in a game with Ottawa that was being played from the outset in a way that would force the government’s hand and shut down income trusts. This is made obvious by two event. The revelations contained in the Theresa Tedesco article in the Financial Post and the treatment by BCE of the Catalyst Proposal. It was reported in the September 27, 2008 article entitled: “Debt Ridden: The story of the BCE deal” that:

Inside BCE's boardroom, the blue-ribbon directors weren't enthusiastic about the plan, but gave it their blessing, betting the measure was destined for doom because Ottawa would never allow it.

"Income trusts didn't have much appeal. We weren't particularly interested in doing an income trust but we thought if we announced we were doing one, it would force the government into a decision," said the source close to the company who asked not to be named.

This is pretty much a blanket admission of what took place, but to remove any lingering doubt from your mind about the role that Michael Sabia and the Board of BCE played in shutting down income trusts, and all the devastation that followed, you need only look at BCE’s conduct with respect to the recapitalization proposal I put to them, by the name of the Catalyst Proposal.

The Catalyst Proposal:

Full details on the Catalyst Proposal are available at www.canadiansolution.ca

Suffice it to say that the Catalyst Proposal was a proposal that allowed BCE to achieve all the benefits of its announced income trust conversion with NONE of the detriments of its leveraged buyout. I repeat, NONE of the detriment of its leveraged buyout. This proposal was completely viable as more fully discussed in my letter to BCE’s Strategic Oversight Committee and could in no way have been construed by anyone to have been caught by the new income trust legislation. Furthermore what politician or bureaucrat could credibly argue that it should have been, given that Ottawa would have collected $793 million more per year in taxes under the Catalyst Proposal relative to Teachers’ junk bond insolvency alternative for BCE,..

The highly incriminating aspect of the Catalyst Proposal that condemns BCE in terms of what they were truly up to, is the fact that BCE broke a very fundamental securities rule by not disclosing to its shareholders the existence of the Catalyst Proposal, its relative merits and what the Board’s reasoning was for recommending the Tecahers’ deal in favour of the Catalyst Proposal. Failure to do so was contrary to Canadians securities law, BCE’s own disclosue guidelines as well as Teachers’ own proxy voting guidelines.

Clearly the fix was in. The last thing that BCE’s Michael Sabia and the BCE Board wanted to face when they had successfully gamed Ottawa into killing income trusts on a completely false basis, in order that they could personally profit from an LBO, was to have that very thing resurrect itself when it came time for their highly manipulated so-called “public auction” to occur.

Failure by Autorité des marchés financiers

That’s why I did what I did, in order to keep these people honest, only to learn how dishonest and disreputable they truly could be. Upon learning that BCE’s Bid Circular dated August 11, 2007 failed to contain the necessary and mandatory disclosure of the Catalyst Proposal, I called Louis Morisset the Chairman of the Autorité des marchés financiers , which is the Quebec version of the OSC. I told him that at the very least this document contains an incomplete account of the bids that BCE had received and therefore BCE shareholders are being deprived of this essential piece of information required for them to make a fully informed vote and at the very least the document is a complete record of what transpired that other may make false reliance on in the future. His nonsensical response was that the document was only for “shareholders’ and not others.

My response to him was “Well in that case it should have a warning label to the effect..,,this document contains incomplete inforrmation that can not be relied upon for any other purpose that to railroad BCE shareholders into the desired outcome of management and the Board. All other persons should read at their own risk.”

I could not have been more prescient in my concerns, as BCE and Teachers’ made good use of the fact that the Catalyst Proposal was not disclosed. In fact this absence of disclosure became central to one of BCE’s and Teachers’ main arguments against the bondholders all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where they falsely argued that “all the deals on the table involved a credit downgrade to junk bond status.

Such an argument is patently false m since the Catalyst Proposal was explicitly designed to preserve the investment grade credit of BCE’s existing bonds.....and it did....as confirmed by the bondholders themselves in discussions I had with them and as explicitly addressed in my letter of June 25, 2006 to the Strategic Oversight Committee of BCE and as discussed with BCE’s gaggle of advisors.

Meanwhile the Chairman of the Autorité des marchés financiers did contact BCE with ny complaint and received comfort that all was okay in his mind. Evidently BCE was able to convince the Chairman of the Autorité des marchés financiers, that there was avalid reason why BCE did not want to go with the Catalyst Proposal, and in his mind this absolved them from disclosing it. I told him that was not his job to opine on the merits of one alternative versus another, as that was the job and right of shareholders to do that. His job was striclky one of acting in the name of full disclosure and not one of substituting his judgment for the judgment of shareholders. In that respect the Chairman of the Autorité des marchés financiers failed in his duty to shareholder of BCE and in maintaing full true and plain disclosure of material and relevant facts.

False Cover provided by BCE controlled CTVGlobemedia:

Rather than address the catalyst Proposal in the manner required by securities laws, BCE’s own disclosure guidelines and Teachers’ own proxy voting guidelines, BCE dealt with it through their company controlled enterprise know as CTVGlobeMedia and the organ know as the Globe and Mail. Dutifully, as he did with the constant dissing of income trusts on false arguments , Andy Willis wrote a column on June 22, 2009, the very day that I announced I was going to be submitting the Catalyst Proposal to BCE and the very dayt that Diane Francis wrote a column entitled “Everybody wins with Catalyst Proposal”, of his own entitled: “Latest BCE conversion plan is dead on arrival”. In which Andy used a number of spurious and false arguments to slam the Catalyst Proposal without even aving spoken with me or having taken the time to understand the arguments against what he was writing in the Globe.

This was the last time that the Globe wrote about the Catalyst Proposal, since I have subsequently learned from one of the bankers working for a firm that was advising BCE, that BCE was more than trifle concerned about the catalyst Proposal, as it placed BCE into a complete intellectual corner, which is exactly what I intended. How could BCE have feigned to have wanted to convert to a trust, and not want to pursue the Catalyst Proposal? Impossible to justify, so they buried it.

Another instance where the Globe was employed by BCE to negate the effects of what I was trying to achieve was the reporting of Jackie McNish, when she was reporting on Catalysts’ intervention before the Supreme Court to oppose the BCE LBO by Teachers/. Eventough Jackie McNish was in possession of Catalyst factum, she made up some story about how my intervention before the Supreme Court was going to be some rant about income trusts. This was a clear intent on her part and on behalf of BCE to discredit Catalyst before the court had even been called into session.

Conclusion:

Public policy in Canada must provide for a formal process of transparency and public debate. Falsehoods such as tax leakage should not go unchallenged and subjected to independent third party review. Failure of public policy making in Canada to follow these simple rules of the Scientific Method, will simply mean that persons like Michael Sabia and others will continue ti game Ottawa in the same way that they have learned to game the companies that they run. This is to the profound detriment of all Canadians., our capital markets and our fragile democracy.

Such is the people’s caisse against Michael Sabotage.