Required reading for David Dodge

David Dodge’s previous pronouncement on income trusts, where he went from being positive before the Flaherty massacre to flip flopping and being supportive of Flaherty’s enormously destructive tax policy (whose effects David Dodge was completely oblivious to) have all been qualified by his disclaimer of “limited evidence suggest”, which is merely another way of saying the the Bank of Canada has never done a study about that canard argument about income trusts somehow being bad for the economy as purveyors of synthetic investment products (eg Manulife) and others would like us to think.

Meanwhile if income trust are bad for the economy , then why are they allowed to persist as private companies and not pay the tax, which has lead to groups like OMERs taking trust private and exploiting the tax arbitrage that Flaherty handed to them in order to placate them and avoid the hassle that Ralph Goodale confronted in 2005?

Meanwhile we don’t have to worry about the lack of research on this topic by the Bank of Canada, as two studies have been compiled, both of which have glowing comments to make about income trusts and their effect on the economy:

HLB Decision Economics: Income Trusts and the National Economy:

PricewaterhouseCoopers Income Trust Report (December 11, 2006)