Stephen Harper pulls a Rahim Jaffer

Canadians are an incredibly simplistic group who possess the necessary sensory skills and thought capabilities to see the inherent injustice in the sentence handed down to Rahim Jaffer, but lack the higher cognitive skills to see the enormous miscarriage of justice concerning Stephen Harper and his fraudulent income trust heist of a policy.

Rahim Jaffer’s crime was a victimless crime, where the only victims were the potential victims like those he could have crippled for life as he recklessly drove the back roads of Ontario at twice the legal speed limit and while under the influence and in possession of cocaine. Stephen Harper’s crime, that of fraud, was far from a victimless crime, as it caused 2.5 million Canadians to experience the permanent loss of $35 billion in the investment value of their life savings, and all Canadian taxpayers to experience (to date) the loss of $1.5 billion in annual tax revenue from the 51 takeovers of income trusts by foreigners and other non taxable entities.

Stephen Harper’s actions constitute a fraud against all Canadians for the simple fact that his actions and his justification for these confiscatory actions are based on a patent and premeditated lie. Income trusts do not cause tax leakage, and this central policy argument was a deliberate ruse cooked up by Mark Carney, Kevin Lynch along with Jim Flaherty in order to provide Stephen Harper with what Tom Flanagan would classify as a “plausible” argument (albeit wholly untrue) in order to completely mislead and therefore defraud Canadians on a policy whose real intents are no less nefarious than Rahim Jaffer’s possession of cocaine, as the real purpose of the income trust tax is to maintain the Canadian capital markets status quo, in which the lax governance and hugely lucrative (for some) compensation schemes of the corporate model are allowed to persist with no competition from the vastly better income trust model.

All of these statements you hear from people like John Manley of the CCCE about “there can’t be two competing forms of business” lay bare who and what was behind the income trust tax, whose only purpose was to destroy competition and coddle the wealthy powerful few from the democratization of the Canadian capital markets that income trusts represents. The whole matter reached a fevered boiling point when Telus announced its conversion to a trusts, since the scale and stature of Telus threatened these powerful people like no other, since gone would be the argument thay had used with their shareholders in the past that conversion to an income trust might be acceptable to smaller companies, but not a company of our (insert name here) stature. The events that soon followed with BCE were a contrived set of circumstances in order to create a faux crisis that those who wanted to kill income trusts (BCE CEO Michael Sabia and his entire Board of Directors) employed to great effect to create conditions that were whipped up by the media (including all the media assets witj CTVglobemedia, controlled by BCE. Including CTV, BNN and the Globe and Mail) into a modern day version of “the sky is falling”, when in fact only a cursory analysis would have revealled that billions more in taxes would have been collected by all levels of government had BCE and Telus been allowed to convert, for the simple fact that income trusts do not cause tax leakage. For more see: CAITI Mythbuster #3

Stephen Harper’s ability to get away with his enormous policy crime against all Canadians is a function of three ingredients. Canadians are too trusting by nature and are prone to being lied to successfully. Canadian media are also too trusting by nature as well as being financially illiterate and often commercially conflicted in the things they are allowed to cover and report on, none more so that the income trust issue. Canadian politicians are not representative of the needs of Canadians but rather are instruments of the parties they belong to and are corralled into positions that align, not with the interests of Canadians per se, but the positions that align with those who control the party and the party’s leadership. Stephen Harper has been successful to date in getting away with this major fraud against all Canadians involving his patent lie about tax leakage because of the negligence of the Canadian media and the Canadians political system to hold Stephen Harper to account which is their responsibility and duty to do. As such Stephen Harper had engaged in a crime that is vastly larger and more devastating than Rahim Jaffers’ but Stephen Harper had yet to even receive a slap on the wrist. The gross injustice in the sentencing of Rahim Jaffer is simply the product of a country whose system of injustice flows from the top down, where Prime Ministers can engage in day light raids on seniors nest eggs and employ patent falsehoods to justify such actions, while the entire country turns a complete blind eye to the matter while all those in the media and senior business leaders concoct and promulgate false arguments to buy him cover, knowing they have virtually all of our elected members of Parliament in their pocket.

If only Rahim Jaffer could be so lucky?