Author: Linda McQuaig

Privatization lies at the heart of the calamity that turned Ontario’s nursing homes into COVID death traps. Ford’s zeal for privatization runs deep.

If there’s a justification for the needlessly high pile of corpses that accumulated inside profitable nursing homes during the pandemic, it goes something like this: those people were old and were going to die anyway.

That’s probably the best excuse possible if you’re trying to convince yourself it’s OK to vote for Doug Ford — despite his keen support for the privatization of nursing homes, with all its deadly consequences.

Privatization lies at the heart of the calamity that struck Ontario’s nursing homes, turning them into gruesome COVID death traps.

Ford’s zeal for privatization runs deep. Handing over our public services to money-making private operators isn’t just part of his agenda — it permeates his policies. It’s in his DNA.

Under Ford, privatization has ripped through our public programs more rapidly than the Omicron variant would spread through an unvaccinated crowd jammed together in a tiny elevator stuck between floors.

The move toward nursing home privatization really got going under former Conservative premier Mike Harris. Today, 57 per cent of Ontario nursing homes are profit-making operations, mostly as part of corporate chains.

But profit transforms a nursing home. Among profit-making homes In Ontario, the COVID death rate was 7.3 per cent — nearly five times the 1.5 per cent death rate in publicly owned nursing homes, according to a Star investigation last year.

That difference translates into hundreds of extra deaths in profit-making homes.

So, yes, everyone is going to die sometime. But it matters that hundreds of people (also known as Gramma and Grampa) died sooner than their natural expiry date simply because they lived in profit-making homes.

Having learned nothing from this death parade, Ford is charging ahead with yet more privatization as the province sells off a new round of 30,000 nursing-home bed licences, with 16,000 of those allocated to private operators.

Nursing homes have become prized financial assets. Their profitability is ensured because they’re government-subsidized, making them safe investments with reliable income streams — exactly what’s being sought by private equity firms, which are notorious for slashing costs to maximize profits.

Now, any bright 5-year-old might have spotted the problem here with placing fragile seniors in the care of firms known for bare-knuckle capitalism. As a paper published last year by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research pointed out, when private equity firms acquire nursing homes, patients start to die more often.

Ford is also increasing privatization elsewhere in the health-care system. There are currently hundreds of private medical clinics in Ontario, mostly performing diagnostic tests, but Ford plans to allow them to perform surgeries as well — even though “private hospitals” have been banned in the province since 1973.

And then there’s the damage done to public education.

This year, provincial funding of public schools is $800 less per student than it was when Ford took office four years ago, according to Ricardo Tranjan, a political economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Public schools increasingly depend on fundraising to pay for extracurricular activities, creating a huge difference between activity programs in schools in well-to-do neighbourhoods and those in poorer areas.

What makes all this so infuriating is that we’re a fabulously rich province, and this cost-cutting is completely unnecessary. As Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office notes, Ontario spends less per capita on public programs than any other province.

If we simply spent the same as the national average, our public programs would have an extra $28 billion a year! Considering that Ontario currently spends $30 billion on education and $71 billion on health, an extra $28 billion would be a stunning game-changer.

Instead, our public systems are impoverished, with poor kids deprived of after-school sports and field trips, while corpses pile up in nursing homes handed over to corporate sharks.

But Ford wants you to focus on that licence plate rebate, and to rest assured that poor kids and incapacitated old people are perfectly able to fend for themselves.

Originally published in the Toronto Star, May 4, 2022.

Canada, ignoring the plea from the UN’s highest official, continues in the midst of the pandemic to impose sanctions on 20 nations, including Lebanon, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Nicaragua and Yemen.

These days, any national leader not actively urging their citizens to drink disinfectant is managing to look (relatively) good on the world stage.

Certainly, compared to the neurotic leadership south of the border, Justin Trudeau has emerged as a steady hand on the tiller, quickly providing Canadians with a wide economic safety net and behaving like an adult in the crisis.

So it’s all the more disappointing that, out of the limelight, he’s doing a great deal to make the situation worse during this pandemic for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

I’m referring to the prime minister’s decision to ignore a plea last month from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres — and the Pope — for nations to lift sanctions against other nations in order to help some of the weakest and poorest countries cope with the coronavirus crisis.

That sounds like a reasonable request, under the circumstances.

Indeed, even if we don’t care about the world’s vulnerable people, helping them deal with the crisis is in our interests too. As the UN leader noted: “Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world.”

Yet Canada, ignoring the plea from the UN’s highest official, continues in the midst of the pandemic to impose sanctions on 20 nations, including Lebanon, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Nicaragua and Yemen.

While Canada’s sanctions are typically aimed at punishing the regimes running these countries, the impact of the sanctions falls primarily on ordinary citizens, according to Atif Kubursi, professor emeritus of economics at McMaster University.

Kubursi, who also served as a UN under-secretary-general and has extensive UN experience in the Middle East and Asia, says the impact of Canada’s sanctions on the people in these countries is devastating.

While the sanctions often appear to be directed exclusively at military items, they frequently end up being applied to virtually all goods — including spare parts needed to operate machinery in hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, notes Kubursi, who signed a letter from prominent Canadians to Trudeau requesting the lifting of sanctions.

For instance, if a Syrian businessman wants to buy Canadian products, he has to open an account for the transaction. But Kubursi says the Canadian government instructs Canadian banks not to allow such accounts for the purposes of trade with Syria — no matter how benign the Canadian product may be, or how urgently it might be needed in Syria.

For that matter, Ottawa’s sanctions prevent Canadians from using our banks or financial services to transfer money to Syria — for instance, to family members living in Syria.

The impact of sanctions, while always painful, is particularly deadly during the pandemic, when even advanced nations have struggled to obtain life-saving equipment.

While Canada’s sanctions mostly date back to the Harper era or earlier, the Trudeau government has generally maintained them and even added new ones against Venezuela.

Ottawa’s sanctions appear primarily aimed at appeasing the U.S., which ruthlessly enforces sanctions against regimes it wishes to destabilize or overthrow. Washington also punishes countries and companies that don’t co-operate with its sanctions.

Ottawa’s willingness to fall in line behind Washington is reflected in the fact it doesn’t impose sanctions against U.S allies Saudi Arabia or Israel, despite Saudi Arabia’s brutal murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi and Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Even Israel’s announcement that it plans to annex the West Bank in July has produced no sanctions or criticism from Canada.

Trudeau’s decision to continue sanctioning 20 nations seems quite out of sync with the spirit of the times, when it’s hard to find a TV commercial that doesn’t proclaim the sentiment that “we’re all in this together.”

That spirit of international togetherness has been amply demonstrated by Cuba, which sent Cuban doctors to Italy to help its overwhelmed health care system and has offered similar medical help to First Nations in Canada.

When 36 Cuban doctors arrived in Milan last month, a grateful Italy thanked them and Italians at the airport cheered.

Meanwhile, Canada, in the spirit of the international togetherness, rebuffs Cuban doctors, ignores the UN and imposes sanctions on some of the world’s poorest nations.

Originally published in the Toronto Star May 6, 2020.

Canada once had a publicly owned pharmaceutical company that could have made a difference in the current coronavirus crisis — except that we sold it.

Connaught Labs was a superstar in global medicine. For seven decades, this publicly owned Canadian company performed brilliantly on the national and international stage, contributing to medical breakthroughs and developing affordable treatments and vaccines for deadly diseases.

Hated by its corporate competitors, Connaught was unique among pharmaceutical companies in that its focus was on human need, not profit.

It would have come in handy today.

In fact, Connaught got its start amid a diphtheria outbreak in 1913. Toronto doctor John Gerald FitzGerald was outraged that children were dying in large numbers even though there was a diphtheria treatment available from a U.S. manufacturer. But, at $25 a dose, it was unaffordable to all but the rich. FitzGerald set out to change that — and did.

After experimenting on a horse in a downtown Toronto stable, FitzGerald developed an antitoxin that proved effective in treating diphtheria, and made it available to public health outlets across the country. Then, with lab space provided by the University of Toronto, he and his team went on to produce low-cost treatments and vaccines for other common killers, including tetanus, typhoid and meningitis.

Connaught developed an impressive research capacity, with its scientists contributing to some of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century — including penicillin and the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. It also played a central role in the global eradication of smallpox.

“It was a pioneer in a lot of ways,” says Colleen Fuller, a research associate of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “It did things commercial companies wouldn’t do because they weren’t willing to take the financial risks.”

Fuller argues that if a publicly owned Connaught were still operating today, it could be contributing to the development of the coronavirus vaccine — and ensuring a Canadian supply if there was a global shortage.

Yet, tragically it isn’t.

Succumbing to corporate pressure and a misguided belief that the private sector always does things better, Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government privatized Connaught Labs in the 1980s. Today, what remains of this once-dazzling Canadian public enterprise has been taken over by a giant French pharmaceutical company.

The coronavirus outbreak may finally help expose the fallacy of the notion that the private marketplace is innately superior — which has been the guiding principle in Anglo-American countries (including Canada) for the past four decades, leading to the constant denigration of government and its functions.

Fortunately, Canada’s public health care system, established in the 1960s, has been so popular that it has survived, despite attacks of “socialized medicine” — although our political leaders have quietly whittled away funding for the system in recent decades.

If the foolishness of cutting funding for public health care wasn’t already abundantly clear, the coronavirus has driven it home with a sledgehammer — as we’ve witnessed the extra struggles the U.S. faces in containing the virus with its lack of public health care.

Still, our willingness to go along with the privatization cult in recent decades has left us weaker and less protected than we could be.

Not only do we no longer have Connaught Labs, but Canada spends $1 billion a year funding basic medical research at Canadian universities, yet relies on the private marketplace to produce, control — and profit from — the resulting medical innovations.

For instance, the crucial work in developing a vaccine to treat Ebola was done by Canadian scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg — and financed by Canadian taxpayer money. But sole licensing rights to the vaccine were granted to a small U.S. company, which then sublicensed it to pharmaceutical giant Merck for $50 million.

Although Merck is now producing the vaccine, critics have charged that the company did “next to nothing” to rush the vaccine into production during the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Law and Biosciences.

With a surge in future global pandemics expected, it might well be time to rethink Canada’s foolhardy attachment to the notion “the private sector always does things better.”

Always unproven, that theory is looking increasingly far-fetched.

Originally published in the Toronto Star

One can understand the desire to be positive, especially at the end of a pretty grim year. Even so, this headline from the usually thoughtful New York Times left me gasping:

“This has been the best year ever: for humanity over all, life just keeps getting better.”

Images of the increasingly comfy life inside Third World shacks danced in my head.

The New York Times piece recycled the narrative, peddled by the billionaire crowd, that the well-being of the human race has never been better.

Amid growing criticism of extreme inequality, expect to hear lots more about how today’s capitalism is benefiting the world — especially next week when the global elite meets for their annual self-celebration in Davos, Switzerland.

It’s a powerful narrative. If capitalism is working wonders for humanity, maybe it doesn’t matter that a small number of billionaires have an increasing share of the world’s wealth.

But is the narrative true?

The billionaire crowd is correct in arguing that, along with the rise of capitalism in the last five centuries, there have been significant advances in human life expectancy.

But should capitalism get the credit?

No, according to British anthropologist Jason Hickel, who notes that the dawn of capitalism plunged much of humanity into misery, with reduced nutrition. As a result, life expectancy actually fell in Britain, dropping from a lifespan of about 43 years in the 1500s down to the low 30s by the 1700s.

Life expectancy only began to improve towards the end of the 1800s — and only because of the public health movement, which pushed for separating sewage from drinking water. This extremely good idea was vigorously opposed by capitalists, who raged against paying taxes to fund it.

So sanitation, not capitalism, may be humanity’s true elixir.

Indeed, things only truly got better, says British historian Simon Szreter, after ordinary people won the right to vote and to join unions that pushed for higher wages and helped secure public access to health care, education and housing — again over the fierce objections of capitalists.

This suggests that it’s not capitalism but rather the forces fighting to curb capitalism’s worst excesses — unions and progressive political movements — that have improved people’s lives.

Hickel also argues that, when properly measured, global poverty has increased in the last four decades, contrary to the claims of triumphant capitalists.

All this is central to a burning question: is today’s unbridled capitalism serving us all, or just those at the top?

The question is suddenly in play in U.S. politics, with millions of Democrats supporting presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who openly advocate significant new taxes on the superrich.

Public polling — in the U.S. and Canada — show strong support for such taxes.

Even if billionaires are losing public support, they have a fallback threat: Don’t even think of taxing us, because we’ll just move our money offshore.

But this might be changing too, according to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

In their influential new book, “The Triumph of Injustice,” they argue that advanced nations could effectively clamp down on tax havens if they co-ordinated their efforts, just as they do in other areas, like trade policy.

Saez and Zucman point out there’s nothing to prevent advanced nations from simply collecting the corporate taxes that the tax havens don’t.

Recent reporting requirements make this possible. “It has never been easier for big countries to police their own multinationals,” they argue. “Should the G20 countries tomorrow impose a 25 per cent minimum tax on their multinationals, more than 90 per cent of the world’s profits would immediately become effectively taxed at 25 per cent or more.”

One can understand why the corporate crowd resorts to threats and bogus claims. Without them, it’s hard to defend today’s unbridled capitalism.

How does one, for instance, justify this: While most people saw little or no gain last year, the world’s 500 richest people saw their wealth grow by an astonishing 25 per cent, so they’re richer this year by another $1.2 trillion (an average of $2.4 billion each).

It’s hard to argue that money couldn’t have been better directed somewhere else — almost anywhere else.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.

There’s silly. There’s absurd. And then there’s this:

The country’s six largest banks are dishing out $15 billion in bonuses this year. But, in the eyes of some, this isn’t enough.

Indeed, Bill Vlaad, president of Vlaad & Co., which monitors bank compensation trends, described the $15 billion payout to bank executives as bleak, while noticing that it could have been worse: “It could very well have been a bloodbath.”

A bloodbath? The word conjures up the sort of savagery associated with Vlad the Impaler (no relation) in the 15th century.

Certainly, the notion of bankers suffering as they gorge on $15 billion in bonuses highlights the cavernous gap between the world enjoyed by those at the top and the one occupied by the struggling masses, including bodies we step over on sidewalks surrounding our bank towers.

It also reveals how misleading media reports can be, particularly about high finance, with insiders allowed to peddle their self-serving agendas unchallenged.

Of course, “bankers are underpaid,” said nobody ever. Last year, Canada’s big six banks accumulated staggering profits totalling $46.6 billion.

Although banking is a tried-and-true method for making tons of money, banks enjoy a protected position at the top of the Canadian economy. With roots stretching back to before Confederation, the big banks represent the very heart of the Canadian establishment. Over the years, they’ve developed deeply entrenched connections to Ottawa’s governing parties, making it difficult for newcomers to break in.

No matter how enterprising or innovative a Canadian citizen might be, she can’t just go out and open a bank. She needs a charter from the federal government, and these aren’t easy to obtain.

Yet, despite their privileged perch, Canada’s big six banks have gotten away with paying extremely low taxes — the lowest in the G7. Partly by using tax havens, our wildly profitable banks have managed to reduce their taxes to a rate that is about one-third of the rate paid by other Canadian businesses, according to a 2017 Toronto Star investigation.

Some Canadians might wonder whether we are well served by our banks. In recent years, they’ve shut down branches across the country, leaving hundreds of rural and remote communities without a local branch. They’ve also declined to offer banking services to many low-income people, obliging almost two million Canadians a year to pay the hair-raising interest rates charged by payday loan operators.

Yet, proposals that Canada Post offer banking services at its 6,200 outlets across the country have been opposed by the big banks, which insist that they serve Canadians well.

Certainly they serve themselves well, with even a “bleak” year leaving bankers divvying up $15 billion in compensation, on top of their base salaries.

We know the bank CEOs get a generous share — led by the TD Bank’s Bharat Masrani at $15.3 million — but it’s not clear how the rest of that multi-billion-dollar pie is divided, or even how many bankers get a slice.

And the $15 billion doesn’t include stock options, which enjoy special tax privileges.

Stock options can be held and cashed in when a bank’s stock is particularly high. The bankers qualify for a tax break that allows them to pay income tax on these gains at just half the rate that ordinary workers — plumbers, nurses, fast-food servers — pay on their employment income.

This special tax treatment is hard to justify, and has long been controversial. The Trudeau government has pledged to limit the loophole for employee stock options to $200,000 a year — still a lot more than the typical worker makes.

With this limit expected to be imposed soon, bankers holding stock options will likely cash them in this year, according to David Macdonald, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa.

“The actual pay flowing to executives this year might well hit an all-time high as they rush to cash in all their old options — especially since bank stocks are also at an almost-all-time high,” Macdonald notes.

If so, the bankers will no doubt insist that the low-level employees in the office crank up the heat — and that they do so before they dot another “i” or cross another “t.”

This column was originally published in the Toronto Star.

It warms the soul to recall the day last June when Doug Ford was heartily booed by the enormous crowd in Nathan Phillips Square celebrating the Raptors — a crowd so big that it even dwarfed the one at Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Humiliated by this stunning rebuke, the premier retreated from some of his more unpopular cutbacks.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Ford’s destructive austerity agenda has been derailed. On the contrary, it moves forward like a freight train, coming at us slowly but relentlessly, much of it under cover of darkness.

Among the premier’s sweeping cutbacks — aimed at reducing the deficit without tapping the corporate elite for more tax revenues — are a dizzying array of cuts to our public health-care system, the crown jewel of our social programs.

These cuts, totalling about $360 million, will affect everything from mental health care to cancer screening, according to Natalie Mehra, head of the Ontario Health Coalition.

Their impact will likely be profound, since Ontario’s health-care spending is already well below the Canadian average, even though Ontario is one of the richest provinces.

Indeed, Ontario’s health-care spending is only $3,903 per person — the lowest of the ten provinces — and $487 per person lower than the Canadian average, according to Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office.

Even more damaging may be the Ford government’s embrace of further privatization, evident in recent legislation creating a health superagency with vast new privatization powers.

Let’s quickly clarify that there are no savings to be had from such privatization. Quite the contrary.

While government spending on the public portion of health care — doctors and hospitals — has held steady at about 4 per cent of GDP for the past 40 years, the costs of the private parts of the system — drugs, physiotherapy, dentistry, home care, etc. — have risen dramatically.

But Ford seems less concerned about controlling health costs than about pleasing business interests, which have long pushed to open our health care system to more privatization, so they can get in on the spectacular profits reaped in private health care south of the border.

The premier’s support for privatized health care adds new impetus to the well-funded, pro-privatization campaign already well underway.

The public face of this campaign has been B.C. medical entrepreneur Dr. Brian Day, who has spearheaded a 10-year legal battle to strike down Canadian medicare laws restricting private surgical clinics from collecting money through the public system while also charging patients hefty additional fees.

Behind the scenes, Day has had ample financial support from private interests who recognize that his victory would open the floodgates to private medicine in Canada. “If he wins, you can kiss goodbye to medicare as we know it,” says Colleen Fuller, a health policy researcher affiliated with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Astonishingly, much of this anti-Medicare campaign appears to have been waged with tax deductible dollars.

A massive $5-million war chest to support Day’s legal challenge has been amassed by the Canadian Constitutional Foundation (CCF), a right-wing, Calgary-based organization — with charitable status.

The CCF acknowledges that its donors include some very high-net-worth individuals, including Anthony Fell, former chairman of RBC Capital Markets. Indeed, the suggested donation range on the CCF’s website goes all the way up to $250,000. And there’s a link to a form allowing donors to transfer securities from their brokerage accounts. Not your usual lemonade-stand charity.

The CCF is also registered as a U.S. charity with the IRS, suggesting it receives money from wealthy U.S. donors keen to help strike down Canadian laws that restrict their investment opportunities here.

(Might be something for Jason Kenney’s inquiry into foreign influence to investigate.)

Meanwhile, a pro-medicare group called Canadian Doctors for Medicare is denied charitable status in Canada, on the grounds that it’s an advocacy group. So, while you can get a tax deduction for a donation to fight medicare, you can’t get one for a donation to save medicare. Ironic, since most Canadians revere medicare.

Far from the boos that greeted him at Nathan Phillips Square, Ford has now moved to the backrooms where he’s quietly helping financial interests, domestic and foreign, get a chunk of our crown jewel.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.

Claiming that Albertans feel “betrayed” and “unwelcome in our own country,” Jason Kenney had clearly hit the sweet spot of Alberta politics: raging against Ottawa.

Only a day after Monday’s federal election, the Alberta premier was in full battle mode, honing his mission to defend the oil industry, stir up Western resentment and stick it to Justin Trudeau’s freshly wounded Liberal government, now reduced to minority status.

Keen to depict anyone not swearing fealty to the oilsands as a traitor, Kenney will paint Canada as a country plunging towards disintegration if Ottawa fails to expand pipelines and end the carbon tax.

Given the righteous thunder that lies ahead from Kenney and Saskatchewan Conservative Premier Scott Moe, it will be crucial that we not lose sight of what Monday’s election results actually show. In an election in which climate and oil extraction were the central issue, about two-thirds of Canadians revealed they support strong action on climate.

In battling what he calls the “green left,” Kenney is ultimately squaring off against most of the country.

Indeed, Trudeau lost his majority in part because millions of Canadians voted for parties — the NDP, the Greens, the Bloc — that support bolder climate action than Trudeau’s Liberals.

Still, we will be constantly lectured about the need to heal our regional divisions. Certainly, these divisions will be endlessly hyped.

In fact, these divisions, while real, tend to be magnified by our first-past-the-post electoral system, under which Alberta and Saskatchewan look like a solid sea of blue, with every seat (but one) going to the Conservatives.

But 30 per cent of Alberta’s popular vote (and 35 per cent of Saskatchewan’s) went to candidates who weren’t Conservative — which would have resulted in numerous non-Conservative seats under a proportional representation system, which many Canadians thought they would get after Trudeau promised electoral reform in his 2015 campaign.

The appearance of provincial unity helps Alberta’s politicians make the case that they speak for an aggrieved province, unified against Ottawa.

This us-against-them strategy got off to a roaring start with the National Energy Program (NEP), which was introduced by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in 1980.

Aimed at increasing Canadian ownership (both private and public) in the foreign-dominated energy sector, the NEP was initially well received across the country — including in Alberta, according to Gordon Laxer, professor emeritus of political economy at the University of Alberta.

“But the Trudeau government had overreached in grabbing a bigger share of oil revenues for the federal government, and Alberta politicians were quick to spot an opportunity to whip up fury against the program,” says Laxer, author of “After the Sands: Energy and Ecological Security for Canadians.”

Years later, that fury is easily rekindled, especially against someone bearing the name Trudeau, even though Justin Trudeau’s government invested $4.5 billion to keep alive the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, despite fierce resistance from Indigenous and environmental groups.

Certainly, Alberta politicians have found it effective to blame Ottawa, thereby directing any popular resentment away from themselves — for their failure, for instance, to drive a tougher bargain with the multinational oil industry, as Norway has done.

Although Norway and Alberta both have generous oil deposits and small populations, Norway has driven a far tougher bargain with Big Oil, demanding a much larger share of oil revenues for its people.

As a result, while Alberta has built up a heritage fund for Albertans worth $18 billion CAD, Norway’s heritage fund is 60 times larger — worth $1.3 trillion CAD. That translates to about $260,000 CAD per Norwegian, making recent declines in international oil prices — and the world’s eventual transition away from oil — less worrisome in the Nordic country.

Alberta’s politicians have left Albertans much less prepared for the green energy shift ahead. Energy journalist Andrew Nikiforuk describes Alberta’s difficult situation: “The low fruit has been picked and nobody saved anything for the future.”

As the Conservative leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan ramp up their war against the Liberal minority government, we can’t allow Trudeau to cave in to their threats.

Let’s remember that Western alienation is a brew carefully stirred by Alberta politicians eager to ensure that, when Albertans feel they’ve been fleeced, they look outside the province for culprits.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.

After Pearl Harbour, top officials in the U.S. auto industry offered to add armaments to their auto production. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded, in effect: nice, but not nearly enough.

He then issued sweeping orders converting the auto industry to full-time war production, banning the manufacture of private cars, halting highway construction and outlawing pleasure driving.

The Canadian government also mobilized a massive industrial effort during the Second World War, creating 28 Crown corporations to churn out war material and converting auto factories to produce military vehicles.

With climate change as potentially threatening today as the German army was back then, it’s striking that our political leaders seem unable to mount the sort of far-reaching campaigns that characterized the war effort.

Hell, our political leaders don’t seem capable of mustering the most minimal effort — even when an opportunity unfolds, amid cries of anguish, right in front of them.

I’m referring to the anguish of thousands of auto workers scheduled to lose their jobs in a few months when GM Canada proceeds to shut down its Oshawa auto production — after 100 years of operation — while increasing production in Mexico.

A group of local workers and activists, calling themselves Green Jobs Oshawa, has come up with a comprehensive and compelling plan. They’re imploring the federal government to stop standing idly by as the historic plant is mothballed, and instead to nationalize it and turn it into a publicly owned green production facility.

The ambitious project could be the first step toward converting the Canadian economy as part of a massive “Green New Deal” — which a recent Abacus poll shows 61 per cent of Canadians support and only 17 per cent oppose.

A feasibility study commissioned by Green Jobs Oshawa makes a strong case that the plant could be reformatted to produce electric-powered public utility vehicles — such as vans for the post office and hydro, ambulances and school buses.

The study estimates the government would have to invest $1.4 to $1.9 billion in the project — chump change compared to the $4.5 billion it’s invested in the climate-destroying TransMountain pipeline.

Furthermore, there’s a compelling case for Ottawa expropriating the plant without compensation — on the grounds that the Canadian and Ontario governments bailed out GM for almost $11 billion after the 2008 financial crash, and about $3 billion of that was never repaid.

Consider the plant owed to the people of Canada.

But, with or without compensation, none of this apparently interests our political leaders, who seem determined to restrict debate during the election campaign to issues related to politicians wearing blackface.

The government’s refusal to even explore the possibility of nationalizing the GM plant amounts to a truly missed opportunity — to save thousands of skilled jobs, to tackle climate change, and also to advance Canadian technological innovation.

The global market for electric vehicles is expanding at an explosive pace. As the Star’s Jennifer Wells noted last week, the global conversion to electric vehicles – already well underway in China and Germany — has led to opportunities for innovative companies designing zero emission vehicles.

A Canadian green production facility, including a research unit staffed by hundreds of engineers, could open up opportunities for inventive Canadian companies – like Unicell, a medium-sized Toronto-based firm that produces fiberglass van bodies.

In an interview, Unicell president Roger Martin said his company developed a prototype of an electric delivery truck, which Purolator successfully used in an eight-week trial and was prepared to order on a large scale. But Martin said Unicell was too small to handle the order.

He could, however, envision some sort of partnership or sub-contracting arrangement with a publicly owned production facility, such as the Oshawa plant. But vision is sorely lacking in Ottawa. Certainly there seems to be none of the chutzpah with which wartime governments, almost overnight, redesigned the economy for the Second World War.

As Doris Kearns Goodwin notes in her book “No Ordinary Time,” U.S. firms were miraculously converted: a merry-go-round factory started churning out gun mounts, a sparkplug plant produced machine guns, a corset maker was converted to manufacture grenade belts.

If only the Trudeau government was motivated — not just to talk about climate leadership, but to show some.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.

The Onion magazine once sardonically described the gap between rich and poor as the Eighth Wonder of the World — “a tremendous, millennia-old expanse that fills us with both wonder and humility… the most colossal and enduring of mankind’s creations.”

Another aspect of the rich-poor gap that fills me with wonder is the way the rich manage to keep it off the political agenda, although that may be changing.

Prominent U.S. Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are campaigning on taxing the super-rich, with Warren calling for a two per cent annual tax on wealth above $50 million, rising to three per cent on billionaires.

In Canada, where politicians have shied away from even putting their toe in the water when it comes to taxing the rich, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has taken a bold plunge, calling for a version of Warren’s tax — an annual one per cent tax on wealth over $20 million.

This is an excellent idea, and is apparently popular. A new Abacus poll shows that 67 per cent of Canadians support (or somewhat support) a wealth tax, along the lines proposed by Warren, and that even a majority of Conservative voters support it. That’s probably about the same percentage of Canadians who support (or somewhat support) Mother’s Day.

https://ricochet.media/en/2599/poll-over-two-thirds-of-canadians-back-a-wealth-tax

Yet the wealth tax has received little media coverage — beyond denunciations in the National Post, which surely has nothing to do with the fact the media is largely owned by billionaires.

One Post columnist posed the bizarre question: what is the problem to which creating a wealth tax is a solution?

Fortunately, the brilliant French economist Thomas Piketty answered that question at length in his celebrated international best-seller, Capital in the 21st Century, where he made the case for wealth taxes.

Without them, he argued with extensive data, wealth will become ever more concentrated, allowing the mega-rich to swallow up an ever larger share of the world’s resources.

Given that 26 individuals now have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity (3.8 billion people), one wonders at what point conservative commentators might consider this a problem. What if one individual had as much as the rest of humanity — or if she had allthe world’s wealth? Would that cause alarm at the Post?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/26-individuals-are-as-wealthy-as-half-of-all-humanity-combined-oxfam-report-1.4262012

Let’s not forget that the super-rich typically made their fortunes by selling products built by employees we all paid to educate, and shipping those products on roads we all paid to build.

A wealth tax would redirect a tiny fraction of those fortunes back to the community to help ordinary Canadians. I’d call that a good solution to the problem of millions of Canadians working really hard but still struggling to get by.

A wealth tax would also help curb the enormous political power of the super-rich. Fossil fuel billionaires, for instance, have effectively managed to block global efforts against climate change.

Billionaires and their defenders maintain the super-rich would find ways to hide their money from tax authorities. But then why do billionaires resist such taxes? Because they know they would actually pay more — just as they did in the early postwar years, when taxes on the rich were much higher.

Piketty notes that Warren’s wealth tax is in line with historically high U.S. tax rates on the rich. He maintains those higher rates were key to the strong economic growth from 1940 to 1980 — before Republicans gutted taxes on the rich, slowing down growth and swelling family fortunes.

https://boingboing.net/2019/02/12/81-pct-estate-tax-in-1980.html

The Canadian tax system also helps perpetuate dynastic fortunes. Canada is the only G7 country without an inheritance tax.

According to a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, between 2012 and 2016, the net worth of Canada’s wealthiest 87 families grew by more than $800 million — per family.

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/born-win

The study also found that inheritance is growing in importance. Among the wealthiest Canadian families, 45 per cent had passed down wealth at least one generation in 1999, compared to 53 per cent in 2016.

So much for the argument that the super-rich are increasingly self-made entrepreneurs.

Turns out that Canada’s billionaires are mostly winners in what Warren Buffett calls the “ovarian lottery.” They just think they hit a triple.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.

With the exception of Donald Trump’s claim that he’s draining the swamp, it’s hard to imagine a clearer example of gibberish than Jason Kenney’s claim that he’s defending Alberta against “foreign-funded special interests.”

The Alberta premier has launched a public inquiry to expose the foreign funding behind environmental groups opposing his efforts to increase production of Alberta’s carbon-heavy oil.

But Kenney’s claim to be shielding Albertans from foreign “special interests” is absurdly selective; he’s planning to shine the light on a small slice of foreign influence, while keeping the spotlight away from the massive foreign influence exerted by Big Oil.

If there’s ever been a foreign player wielding influence in Canada, it’s been Big Oil, which has exercised a virtual stranglehold over Alberta politics during the past few decades. But that story — and Kenney’s complicity in it — is one the premier is determined to keep under wraps.

“Big Oil was the original special interest meddling in Canadian affairs, ” says Donald Gutstein, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University and author of “The Big Stall: How Big Oil and the Think Tanks are Blocking Action on Climate Change.”

“From the very beginning, Canada’s oil and the tarsands were an American affair, financed by American capital to provide petroleum for the American market. Canadians and the environment be damned. Now Canadians, environmentalists and First Nations are saying ‘enough.'”

Let’s be clear: Enormous amounts of money are being spent in the global battle to lobby governments and sway public opinion on climate change in the roughly dozen years we have left — according to the United Nations’ panel of climate experts — before it’s too late to stop the world’s descent into climate hell.

But the vast majority of this money — by a margin of about 10 to 1 — is spent by the fossil fuel industry, according to research by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle.

What is truly absurd is the notion that the relatively small amounts of foreign money coming from the Rockefeller and Tides foundations are any match for the huge resources unleashed by corporations and wealthy individuals to defend their investments in fossil fuels.

Some of the most powerful U.S. oil interests — including the multibillionaire Koch brothers — have major holdings in Alberta, as the Toronto Star’s Olivia Ward and the Washington Post have documented.

The Kochs have been leading funders of the climate denial movement in the U.S., and a potent force shaping conservative politics.

While foreign interests stay out of the Canadian limelight, allowing Canadian oil advocates to speak for them, their reach into Canadian politics is astonishingly deep and comprehensive, according to Kevin Taft, who served as leader of the opposition in the Alberta legislature from 2004 to 2008.

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed attempted in the 1970s and ’80s to limit the power of foreign oil interests and direct a larger share of oil profits to the people of Alberta, but his successors — particularly Ralph Klein and Jason Kenney — have largely capitulated to Big Oil.

“Jason Kenny is an instrument of the oil industry, full stop,” says Taft, whose book, “Oil’s Deep State,” describes the extraordinary grip Big Oil has on Alberta (and Canadian) politics.

“The biggest oil companies in Canada all depend on foreign investors, and most are majority owned by U.S., Chinese and European interests. These people are smart, ruthless and greedy, and their No. 1 concern is corporate profit. They’ve captured political parties, regulators, and civil servants,” he says.

Ironically, environmental groups tend to be upfront about their foreign donations. The Pembina Institute, one of Kenney’s targets, declares on its website that 15 per cent of its funding is foreign.

Meanwhile, according to Brulle’s research, the climate denial movement is quietly funded by Big Oil and conservative billionaires who funnel enormous resources through secretive networks of charities that don’t disclose funding sources.

Yet it is environmental groups that Kenney wants to harass and hold up to ridicule.

As the debate over climate change intensifies, Kenney’s refusal to shine the spotlight on the real foreign meddlers grows ever more absurd — like investigating the type of weapons used in recent mass killings, but refusing to consider guns.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.