Harper is making me a second class citizen in my own country

Now I know what it feels like to be a woman wearing a burka attempting to vote in a federal election and to be placed in the hands of a Stephen Harper rule

I can assure you in the most certain and absolute terms that my father did not put his life on the line for six years during WWII, for which he received an MBE, in order for some simpleton garden variety snake like Stephen Harper to treat his children or the children of any Canadian as second or third class citizens, in the way in which Harper’s Tax Fairness Plan does to me, along with the 75% of Canadians who do not have pensions AND the 86% of Canadian seniors who receive no benefit from Harper’s pension income splitting for seniors.

Apart from being predicated on total falsehoods and patent lies and thereby the total corruption of Parliament, Harper has created at two tiered pension system in Canada, right under the noses of every Canadians and every asleep at the switch journalist in the country, of which there are countless numbers. By depriving me of the right to own profit sharing income trusts in my RRSP by double taxing them at double rates of taxation that exceed 62%, while those with cushy pensions are free to own these profit sharing revenue streams to secure their retirements and lessen the risk of doing so on behalf of their government plan sponsors is an act of gross discrmination as well as self dealing. How kind (and intellectually corrupt) for the Harper federal government to permit its own workers pension (Public Sector Pension Plan) to own Thunder Energy Trust and be reliveved of any obligation to pay this draconian new 31.5% tax, whereas the other 75% of Canadians are not afforded this option when it comes to holding that very same profit sharing investment in their RRSP.

The Liberals should be screaming bloody murder over this very point, as it was under Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent that RRSPs first came into existence in Canada in order to create a level playing field between those Canadians who had pensions and those Canadians who did not. Harper’s actions tear this concept apart and defile the very reason and meaning for why RRSPs exist, which is to level the playing field amongst various classes of INVESTORS and not grossly discriminate against INVESTORS in order to achieve some nefarious end purpose of a bunch of narrow minded and self interested CEOs of ISSUERS and purveyors of lesser investment products that are pumped out by the life insurance industry and which are unable to compete successfully unless the competition is destroyed.

Destroying the competition for nefarious reasons is something this country has witnessed before, and took a nascent made-in-Canada global success story and summarily destroyed it by edict. It is ironic that Louis St. Laurent was followed as Prime Minister bt John Diefenbaker, who at the behest of the Americans destroyed the Avro Arrow program that had put Canada at the forefront of the aerospace game. That execution of a successful Canadian venture was shrouded in secrecy in the same fashion that Harper is concealing his real reasons for killing income trusts behind 18 pages of blacked out documents and his absurd claim that National Security is at risk if this information were to be released, Is that because it would be a National Security matter if the country and the world were to learn that Stephen Harper thinks that 2 + 2 =3, and that he is LYING to Canadians about tax leakage by leaving out the 38% of taxes that income trusts remit to Revenue Canada as his clumsy and fraudulent means to concoct tax leakage, or because he would simply become a National Disgrace for that to he known, and the realization that lie was at the central core of a policy that saw seniors’ nest eggs raided to the tune of $35 billion in permanent loss of value, so that Manulife could sell more of their variable rate annuities and other nefarious ends could be accomplished?

Meanwhile, what person in this country charged with the responsibility of creating policies and looking after the welfare of all of its citizens thinks it is even remotely fair for a tax benefit that has a value of some $12,000 a year, namely pension income splitting, to be shared with only 14% of seniors and not the other 86%. This is gross discrimination and again I am reminded of my father and his service during WWII, but now I am thinking of my aunt, Margaret “Bambie” Thomas, now deceased, who served as a nurse in front line hospitals in Europe during the second world war and devoted her entire life to be a nurse taking care of the sick and elderly. Why is she not the beneficiary of Harper’s grossly discriminatory largesse known as pension income splitting that sees retired civil servants and federal court judges and the like receive this massive benefit for the simple fact that they are the spouse of a stay at home mom, while my aunt devoted her life in the working world performing the work of angels.

I refuse to live in a country that participates and practices acts of gross and unfair discrimination. Be it that handful of Canadians who are women wearing burkas while voting and while other Canadians can simply vote by mail. Or be it the 75% of Canadians without pensions who are denied owning profit sharing income trusts while the other 25% of Canadians can and use the circumstances handed to them by Harper to predatorily prey on the 75% who can not, by ripping then off from their artificially devalued income trusts (eg OMERs buying Teranet, etc etc). Or be it the 86% of seniors who are arbitrarily denied the tax break that accrues to the 14% for no better reason that they are fortunate to have pension income to split and a spouse with whom to split it, and nothing whatsoever to do with any means test or concept that remotely resembles the, untrue but plausible (ie Tom Flanagan) policy that this gross discrimination was packaged under, namely the Tax Fairness Plan, a Plan that I reject categorically for the web or unfairness it is based upon and the second class citizens it is designed to create.

True tax fairness and a true leveling of the playing field needs to be established as soon as possible and before OMERs and others execute their 2010 investment strategy of acquiring more Teranets. This is why the Marshall Savings Plan needs to be adopted in the 2010 Budget and in a manner that will see $1.00 of profit be shared by those who own Teranet in their MSP arrive in exactly the same amount in their hands that had it been washed through OMERs and paid to a pension beneficairy of OMERs.

Anything less than that is a gross unfairness and not something fit to go down in the Canada that so many brave men and women have fought to preserve as the civilized and just society that it once was......before Harper stumbled into town, thinking his experience as a “trained economist” was actually something deserving of respect or anything remotely connected to a real world experience or body of knowledge. I look to the press and the Opposition parties to expose these falsehood and these gross policy unfairnesses, in the name of the millions of Canadians who are being lied to and abused at the hands of Harper. It is nothing less that your professional duty and responsibilty to do so. Anything less is aiding and abetting Stephen Harper. Something that will not look good on your resume going forward.