$1 billion paid to top 100 CEOs

$100 million in reduced taxes for these few is the real scandal

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Emboldened by minor corruption scandals entangling their enemies, the far right parties in both BC and Canada have overshot their station. Both the ultra-right extremist BC Liberals and the fundamentalist fringe national Conservatives are guilty of misinterpreting popular disgust in their opponents as popularity for themselves. As a result of this crucial misinterpretation of the public mood, they both risk converting a general ambivalence among the BC and Canadian public toward them into a full-fledged irrelevance.

The BC Liberal government, elected not for their platform in 2001 but as a punishment to the naturally governing left, found itself time and again charging out into its own privatization desert only to find no one behind them. Likewise, the federal Conservative opposition finds itself repeatedly deluded by its own deceptions. As a result, the BC Liberals are having to campaign now in favour of increased spending on all public services, while the federal Conservatives are having to form a coalition with Quebec separatists—in both cases, the very things both parties were created to combat.

This degree of internal, unacknowledged and basic contradiction in the agendas of the right wing in both BC and in Canada cannot be good for the general political health of the province or the country. The right side of the political spectrum is undergoing a serious case of expanding heads and withering legs, and it threatens to unmoor a sizable chunk of the provincial and national polity and send it off into space.

The timing couldn’t be worse. The right wing fringe parties play a critical anchoring role in an essentially socialist country like Canada, and with crises arising on several fronts, the province and the country require them to stay in tune with, and help to ground and control, their potentially flighty constituency. Instead, the right wing parties have themselves gone flighty.

Despite entrenched media mischaracterizations, it is now far more common of right-wing parties than left-wing parties to exhibit symptoms of self-aggrandizing complexes, hair-brained social engineering schemes, and power-at-all-cost self-destructing madness. Most left-wing mistakes these days involve too much honesty, too little demagoguery, or overly democratic consulting. When the left is in power, the biggest knocks on them are missed opportunities, lack of imagination, and poor tactical understanding.

But right-wing mistakes, by comparison, are now typically the kind that bring on wars, risk economic collapses and destroy social fabric. For example, the NDP administration of Glen Clark’s biggest error was the infamous $450 million fast ferry fiasco. By comparison, the Liberal regime supplanting that government has added a crushing $7 billion to government debt over the course of its mandate, the result in part of a give-away of over $1 billion a year in tax cuts to wealthy citizens neither needing them nor calling for them. That misguided policy alone cost the public purse nine times what the fast ferry fiasco cost. Taking into account massive budget cuts and starved services across the board, the overall losses incurred by this regime would build a fleet of 60 scuttled fast ferries.

Likewise, the federal Liberals are currently embroiled in the federal sponsorship scandal involving an alleged $28 million in misspent public funds. However, thanks to Conservative party pressure on tax policies for the rich, just the 100 top-paid CEOS in Canada have this year alone denied the public coffers an estimated $17 million in taxes on the $1 billion they were paid. In the ten years since the $28 million in sponsorship money was misspent, an estimated $100 million in taxes that used to be collected on just this small group of 100 men alone has been lost. The scandal is four times bigger.

This is a global scandal. Over the same period, right-wing business-funded parties operating in secret collusion with each other from their embedded cells lurking in all the major Western capitals have engineered the diversion of $61 billion into the pockets of their masters and out of what would have, at customary corporate tax rates, flowed into all our public services instead—hospitals, schools, and so on.

A portion—perhaps as much as $300,000—of the misspent $28 million in federal sponsorship funds was kicked back to the Liberal Party, bringing on the most damning of condemnations of the Liberals by the Conservatives. The companies the 100 top-paid executives work for, and the executives themselves, also kicked back to Conservative party coffers a portion of the monies they have received from the government in traditionally uncollected taxes—as much as $5 million. Still, they are a stingy bunch: the criminals in Montreal soaking the government kicked back to the Liberal Party perhaps 1% of their take. The best-paid 100 CEOS together with their companies have shared only 0.05% of their take with the boys who did their dirty deeds.

It is not illegal, of course, to finance a political party that then successfully agitates for lower tax rates for the rich. But while public schools use decade-old textbooks, patients line hallways of hospitals awaiting medical attention, homeless hordes dwell in cardboard boxes for lack of adequate social housing, transit infrastructure disintegrates, and the whole economy heads for a cliff because of inadequate preparations for expiring commodities, it is certainly immoral of the rich to use their disproportionate power and influence to keep still more of their vulgar pay packets. Last year, Robert Gratton, CEO of Power Financial, was paid $173 million. Gerry Schwatz of Onex, $76 million. Because their taxes have been drastically reduced as a result of the political pressure these men have exercised, the federal government has drastically cut the transfer funds it makes to provinces in support of their health care systems, amongst other cuts, putting countless Canadians at increased health risk. It is murder, but it’s legalized and sanitized by a couple of degrees of separation.

For 32 million Canadians, quality of life has been markedly reduced. But for the 100 members of the billion-dollar club, quality of life has become notably obscene. The federal Conservatives will try to topple the Liberal government over the illegal $28 million scandal. Should we not instead be talking about toppling the government over the immoral $100 million scandal? After all, the only difference between the two, besides the 350% difference in scale, is that the real thieves planned ahead and bought the politicians who would lay a veneer of legality on top of their massive tax evasion scheme, while the ones feeling the heat today were not nearly as conniving.

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