Thursday, January 7, 2010

My Question for CBC's Question Period


In light of Stephen Harper’s prorogation of Parliament, CBC’s The National is asking Canadians to submit questions to them for a new segment of their show starting next week. Questions that you would ask the Prime Minister if you were an MP and Parliament were in session.

Here is my submission, If you agree with my submission please go to the link at the bottom of this page and vote for it. Thank you in advance. We all need to know the answer to this question, so we can all go about our normal lives, comfortable in the knowledge that Parliament works, in one guise (ie CBC), if not the another:

Mr. Prime Minister:


During the 2006 Election you promised that you would NEVER raid seniors nest eggs by taxing income trusts. Nine months later you did that exact thing arguing that "circumstances had changed" and that, suddenly, income trusts caused tax leakage. The only proof of tax leakage that you provided Canadians for your tax leakage argument was 18 pages of blacked out documents. How does the use of blacked out documents achieve the level of transparency and accountability that your government also promised to Canadians? Why did you subsequently demand these documents be returned to you, resulting in zero transparency? What is your government trying to hide? Meanwhile reputable private sector groups like BMO Capital Markets and PricewaterhouseCoopers are saying that there is no tax leakage from income trusts, and therefore, your policy actions are WITHOUT justification.

When will your government admit to Canadians that they were misled into believing that you would never tax income trusts in exactly the same way that you are attempting to mislead them on your current hoax about tax leakage?

When will your government take off its veil of blacked out documents and release the truth about tax leakage in order that Canadians can better understand why they lost $35 billion of their retirement savings and the loss of an essential investment vehicle for retirement income for the 75% of Canadians, unlike you, who are without pensions, at a time of pension crises?

Supplemental Question: Could the Prime Minister please comment on the rash of foreign takeovers of income trusts like the $4 billion takeover of Harvest Energy Trust by state-owned Korean National Oil Company or the $5 billion takeover of Prime West Energy Income Trust by state-owned Abu Dhabi Energy, to name just 2 of the 51 takeovers to date caused solely by your policy and tell Canadians how much tax revenue is being lost by ALL Canadian taxpayers as a result? Are the estimates by Canadian Association of Income Trust Investors/Taxpayers of an annual tax loss of $1.2 billion a year, rising to as much as $7.5 billion a year, valid or invalid? Please answer this question with hard evidence and analysis, rather than blacked out obfuscations.

Please vote HERE. for my question that was posted: 2010/01/07 at 10:06 PM ET

9 comments:

sassy said...

Got my vote, found your question on page 14 at 2:26AM on the 8th Jan.

Dr Mike said...

Brent

You got a hearty thumbs-up from me as well.

If I would have been smart enough to check sassy`s post , you would have gotten the thumb quite a bit sooner.

Dr Mike Popovich

Dr Mike said...

Almost forgot my question to the Boss:

When you made the income trust decision you did not do any consultation with the small investor like myself yet you consulted with pension funds & gave them a pass to own trusts tax free.

I was punished , they were not.

Why Mr Harper did you do this to me & let them off??

Was I less important in the scheme of things??

Is it because the small guy does not have a voice , aka lobby group??

Next time you make financial decisions that affect the people on the street , would it be possible to include the people who will be most affected??

Why did you not care about us??

Dr Mike Popovich
Rodney Ont

Anonymous said...

It's the right question, but they're looking for brevity, it might be a bit long?

Neville

Fillibluster said...

sassy and Dr. Mike:

Thanks kindly!!!!

Neville:

Peter Mansbridge said to post your question on the site and if it’s selected they will put a reporter on it (who presumably will contact you). Therefore my “question” was meant as an executive brief to “pitch” the CBC on the concept of raising this issue once again...in whatever form, albeit certainly much more brief than this tome-like question.

The issue can be come at so many ways to reveal things that 99% of Canadians are unaware and would be totally "pissed" at learning about.

It will be interesting to see who is more responsive to Canadians, the Liberal Party of Canada or CBC?

This exercise is exactly the same exercise that the Liberals went through with their onprobation.ca website where they asked people want question they most wanted to ask the PM. Some individual posted the "income trust" question, that quickly rose to the NUMBER ONE spot in terms of votes by a large margin.

The result of that exercise? Squat.

The LIberals did NOTHING as a result. No questions were ever asked as result of that sham exercise at democracy. They got their list of people's emails to hound for donations, and those who got duped into playing that game, got dick.

No follow through, whatoever on the implicit promise of the exercise, which was the ACTUALLY ask the question at some point. Lot's of follow through on the donation hounding though. Quite revealing.

Let's hope the CBC isn't so exploitative in their methods and is actually interested in exploring the blatant lies of the Harper government. Something the Liberals only do occasionally and when its to THEIR advantage.

Some representatives? And they are paid no less? Boggles the mind.

Brent Fullard

Anonymous said...

I voted too for Brent, Dr. Mike and a T Gallo - another trust unit investor.

Anonymous said...

Brent:

Do you have a link to your specific question so that I can pass it on to my friends? There are a lot of questions and people are not likely to search over 10+ pages to find the right one.

BTW, Happy, healthy and prosperous New Year to you,

Alan

Fillibluster said...

Alan. Please do that!

Unfortunately there is no direct link. Best thing is to go to the main page with the link that I provided, where you will see this at the top of the list of questions:

Entry comments (229)
Sort: Most recent | First to last | Agreed

You can sort by time of entry (most recent or first to last) and look for mine that was posted at: 2010/01/06 at 6:04 PM ET

Or even better, you can sort by “agreed” which ranks them by popularity. Top to bottom. Mine is currently on page 3 and moving up from where it was at the start of the day on page 15. There are a total of 46 pages.

Please ask your friends to vote. It only takes a minute! This is the best chance we have to circumvent these useless PAID ELECTED members of the House of Ill Repute.

THANKS!

Brent

PS Happy New Year!

daniel said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.