Readers' Comments on Globe's latest Income trust BS

Image: Globe and Mail's Harper government apologist David Parkinson

Readers’ comments here.

This reader comment from Albin for example:

Is the writer out of his bloody mind? Or maybe he was born yesterday and things just look pretty good since then, because he found a lot of financial services flunkies to provide happy talk quotes about future possibilities. Apart from the few REITs, a lot of good people lost a lot of good money solely for trusting this government in what it said in black and white it would not do.

Judy Snake-Eyes

Katz wins third term as Winnipeg mayor

By Bartley Kives, Winnipeg Free Press October 27, 2010 11:03 PM

Sam Katz captured a third term as Winnipeg's mayor Wednesday by fending off a challenge from a New Democrat Member of Parliament, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, known to income trust investors as Judy Wasylycia-Lies, for the lies and deception she participated in as the NDP's Finance Critic in killing income trusts.

It started out as a tight race and at one point challenger Judy Wasylycia-Leis pulled into the lead, but as poll after poll reported Katz began to pull away.

With 62 per cent of the vote in, Katz has amassed 74,611 votes compared to 57,031 for Wasylycia-Leis.


Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Katz+wins+third+term+Winnipeg+mayor/3737246/story.html#ixzz13cTOWR8h

Green Party condemns Harper government over income trust policy

This is from the Green Party’s 130 page Vision Green policy document

Income trusts

Based on the Conservative Party’s 2006 campaign promise to allow income trusts to retain their non-tax status, more than a million Canadians invested in income trusts.  The Conservatives broke their election promise and these investors lost over $30 billion.  Many older Canadians saw their retirement savings disappear within hours.

The reason given for breaking the promise was that the government was losing revenue because the trusts did not pay tax. Finance Canada proceeded as if there was no tax revenue from income trusts.  This was wrong. The trusts made payments to their investors and those payments were taxed.

There are public policy reasons to constrain or even discourage income trusts. If it could be proved that, over time, such arrangements led to a failure to re-invest profits in modernizing and expanding Canadian operations, action would be appropriate. So far this reasoning is intuitive and not empirical. What is clear is that the stated reason for breaking the promise, tax leakage, was not justified.

Our Vision

The Green Party condemns the Harper government for breaking an election promise and leaving citizens and companies in the lurch. The decision to tax income trusts has left Canadian companies more vulnerable to foreign takeover. It will be years before we fully understand the damage caused by this decision.

Green Solutions

Green Party MPs will:

Review and redress the significant damage to Canadians caused by the broken promise and adjust tax rates in light of that error.

Instruct Finance Canada to complete a study sampling full-cost accounting of income trusts, including lost corporate revenues and personal income tax revenues from investors to determine a fair taxation rate on income trust incomes and dividends.

Push government to adopt these fair taxation rates. Ensure foreign holders of trusts are taxed at a higher rate. In the interim, tax trusts at 10 per cent.

Inform both companies and investors of the process to determine fair tax rates on income trusts.

Potash Corp.: PM’s dirty little secret

I wonder to what extent Harper’s position on the takeover of Potash Corp by BHP is being influenced/lobbied by his neo-con soul mate in Australia, John Howard, whose speeches Harper would freely plagiarize from and is the home of BHP, which by the way stands for Broken Hill Properties. Is that Harper’s goal, to turn Canada into a broken hill property, with the killing of income trusts being his first big foray into disenfranchising Canadians from ownership of the country’s resources and business earnings?


Potash Corp.: PM’s dirty little secret
Toronto Star
Mon Oct 25 2010

Prime Minister Stephen Harper last week shrugged off concerns about the looming foreign takeover of Potash Corp., a major Saskatchewan mining company. “This is a proposal for an American-controlled company (Potash Corp.) to be taken over by an Australian-controlled company (BHP Billiton Ltd.),” he said.

The Prime Minister is wrong. Potash Corp. is a widely held company, and 49 per cent of its shareholders are Canadian compared to 38 per cent American. While the Potash Corp. CEO is American and lives in Chicago, the company is headquartered in Saskatoon and a majority of its employees and directors are Canadian.

Once these facts were out, the government abandoned that line of argument in favour of another: that the Potash Corp. takeover will be screened by Investment Canada, a federal agency, to ensure there is a “net benefit” to Canada.

In theory that sounds good. In practice, not so much.

“In every single takeover of a natural resources company in our country of late, promises have been made and promises are broken and Investment Canada has been letting the companies off the hook.” That is not NDP Leader Jack Layton or the Canadian Labour Congress speaking. Rather, it is Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, a small-c conservative and normally a Harper ally.

Wall has effectively torn the cover off a dirty little secret: Investment Canada is a toothless watchdog. Its screenings of takeovers are feel-good exercises, nothing more. As evidence, consider the recent takeovers of Falconbridge and Inco. In both cases, the foreign buyers promised to maintain employment levels. Once in control, they laid off hundreds of workers, while the government stood idly by.

Harper may shrug off concerns about foreign takeovers. But working Canadians have reasons to be worried.

Ken Dryden on Michael Ignatieff

If the Round Tables were Ignatieff’s finest hour, as Dryden claims in his new book, then he is in worse shape than he thinks.

Ignatieff personally invited me to present the Marshall Savings Plan to the Liberals at these round table gatherings only to have the invitation overturned by those in the party like Gerard Kennedy who are interested in pandering to Corporate Canada and kow towing to the Life insurance industry. The Liberals are grossly conflicted on matters like the income trust issue and have proven themselves clearly incapable of doing was is right for 99.9% of Canadians, including the 79.6% of Canadians who supported implementation of the Marshall Savings Plan as determined by an an Environics poll.

The Liberals are no better than the Conservatives on matters such as the trust tax fraud, as their record of total inaction demonstrates.


Goalie-turned-MP Dryden takes a few slapshots at Liberal captain

BY CHRISTINA SPENCER,
POSTMEDIA NEWS
OCTOBER 23, 2010


OTTAWA — In a new book, hockey-great-turned-MP Ken Dryden delivers a blunt analysis not only of his own party's political woes but, more surprisingly, of those he thinks have dogged his boss, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

Becoming Canada, Dryden's fifth book, is meant as a rallying call for a better Canada. But the former Montreal Canadiens goaltender spends much of it analyzing the shortcomings of the federal Liberal party, which he says was bereft of ideas and direction by the time Stephen Harper's Conservatives won the 2006 election.

"It had been a long time since Liberals had acted and felt like Liberals," Dryden writes. "Perhaps the last best time had been in 1982 with the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"Since the 2006 election, the Liberals have seemed always on the edges of the game and never back in it."

Dryden describes Ignatieff, who formally became party leader in 2009 after two lacklustre years of Stephane Dion's helmsmanship, as having yearned for the prime minister's job since his childhood.

What the leader hadn't envisioned, Dryden suggests, were "the tactics and manoeuvrings that make politics function."

Instead, Ignatieff "was more confident in his understandings of the world than of Canada," writes Dryden.

By contrast, he argues, Harper is so politically skilful that the public spotlight has turned mostly on the Liberals since 2006.

"It is Dion and now Ignatieff, who have had their flaws so starkly revealed," he writes.

"Today, Harper seems less worn than Dion did, less worn than Ignatieff does now."

It's unusual for a politician to so bluntly describe his party leader while still working for him. Dryden, MP for York Centre in Ontario, was minister of social development in the Paul Martin government, and is now the party's national outreach adviser for poverty and working families.

"When Ignatieff was only ten years old, he didn't only dream of being Beliveau or even Rocket Richard or Gordie Howe, as other boys did, he dreamed of being prime minister," Dryden writes. "What would a prime minister say? How would he say it?"

Once Ignatieff became leader, he "seemed remarkably comfortable," Dryden wrote. But he says this didn't shield the former international journalist and scholar from Tory attacks that defined him as "just visiting" Canada.

"From his first boyhood imaginings, he had put himself inside the skin of prime ministers and presidents, living out their experiences with them, deciding for himself what he would have done, how he would have looked and sounded in their stead. He arrived in his new role 50 years experienced. But what were not in his boyhood fantasies, or much in his adult observings, were the tactics and manoeuvrings that make politics function," Dryden writes. "Here, he was not experienced."

Nonetheless, Dryden describes early 2010, after Harper prorogued Parliament, as a glimmer of hope for the Liberal leader. During that period, the Liberals held dozens of roundtables on ideas and policies, attended by experts and duly reported by the news media.

"This was Ignatieff at his best — listener, learner, ponderer, sense-maker, meaning-seeker, big-picture-finder. In those three weeks, his confidence growing, he seemed finally to realize: I can be good at this. It might even be fun."


© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

Liberals: Open data comes to Ottawa?

From: Randy Meyer

Hey Brent, I found the link to the Liberal’s prototype portal. The above is what I got when I asked about income trusts.

Open data comes to Ottawa
David Eaves
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 9:28AM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 9:33AM EDT

On Thursday afternoon, the Liberals will announce that, if elected, they will adopt a government-wide directive in which “the default position for all departments and agencies will be for the release of information to the public, both proactively and responsively, after privacy and other legal requirements are met.”

There is much that both ordinary citizens and advocates of greater government transparency will like in the proposal. Not only have the Liberals mirrored the most aggressive parts of Mr. Obama's transparency initiatives, they are also promising some specific and aggressive policies of their. In addition to promising to launch a data portal – opendata.gc.ca – to share government data, the Liberals propose the creation of two other sites: accesstoinformation.gc.ca, where citizens can gain access to past information requests and see response times and accountablespending.gc.ca, where information on all government grants, contributions and contracts can be searched.

The announcement brings to the Canadian political debate an exciting issue that first gained broad appeal in early 2009 when Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, called on governments to share their data . By May of that year the United States launched data.gov and in September, 2009, the British government launched data.gov.uk , both of which garnered significant domestic attention. In addition, dozens of cities around the world – including Vancouver, Edmonton and, most recently, Ottawa – have launched websites where they share information that local charities, non-profits, businesses and ordinary citizens might find useful.

Today, citizens in these jurisdictions enjoy improved access to government information about the economy, government spending, access to information requests, and statistical data. The benefit however, not limited to improved transparency and accountability. An independent British study estimated that open data could contribute as much as £6-billion to British economy. Canada's computer developers, journalists and entrepreneurs have been left wondering when their government will give them access to the data their tax dollars paid to collect?

The Liberals are attempting to reposition themselves at the forefront of a debate around government transparency and accountability. This is ground that has traditionally been Conservative, but with the cancellation of the long-form census, the sole-source jet fighter contract and, more recently, allegations that construction contracts were awarded to Conservative party donors, accountability is once again a contestable issue.

It will be interesting to see the Conservative response. There have been rumours the government has been exploring an open-data portal but to date there has been no announcement. This is one area where, often, there is support across the spectrum. Indeed, in Britain it was Mr. Brown's Labour government that launched data.gov.uk and Mr. Cameron's Conservative government that pursued it more aggressively still, forcing the release of additional and higher value data to the public. Of course, in Canada, between the census debacle and the muzzling of Canadian government scientists, any talk of open data may be frowned upon within government, which would be a shame. Open data and open government shouldn't be a partisan issue.

David Eaves is a public-policy entrepreneur, open government activist and negotiation expert based in Vancouver

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