Me, the CBC and the CTF
Why would the Canadian Taxpayers Foundation make a mountain out of the minuscule? Why indeed?
So the sleuths at the Canadian (sic) Taxpayers Federation have uncovered the startling (to me, at least) fact I’m “on the CBC payroll.”
They appear to believe this is the only possible explanation why I—and other members of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting—could support public broadcasting in this country.
Perhaps that’s because the CTF assumes everyone else who supports a cause must be on the payroll of those with a vested interest in the outcome of the causes they support because… well, we’ll come back to that.
First some background.
I’m a volunteer—which is to say unpaid—member of the steering committee of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. It’s an independent watchdog group whose mission is “to defend and enhance the quality and quantity of Canadian programming in the Canadian audio-visual system.”
We do support public funding for the CBC, but we also often criticize the CBC for what we see as its failures to live up to its responsibilities as a public broadcaster. We criticize—and sometimes praise—private broadcasters for their roles in providing quality Canadian content to viewers. And we make presentations to the CRTC and parliamentary committees, arguing for more and better Canadian content.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation calls itself a “citizen’s advocacy group dedicated to lower taxes, less waste and accountable government.” It’s mostly run by ex-(or not so ex)Tory hacks and right-wing zealots who have never encountered a government expenditure (other than prisons and bombs) they wouldn’t bulldoze out of existence.
On its blog last week, the CTF wrote:
“Amongst the many Access to Information (ATI) enquiries we make each year was this tidbit relating to the CBC. Our National Research Director, Derek Fildebrandt got to thinking about the leadership of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, the group that advocates for more funding for the CBC. ‘What if these people are actually on the CBC’s payroll?’ thought Derek. If it were true, it would go a long way to explaining their passion for public broadcasting. And it would be very, very funny.”
So they went fishing, filing a request to the CBC for records, “in Excel format, if possible” of all payments— “regardless of the reasons they were paid”— to the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, its spokesperson, Ian Morrison, or any of its 11-member steering committee, including me.
“As it turns out,” the CTF breathlessly reported last week in a post entitled “Friends With Benefits,” Access to Information documents had revealed that “three members of the ‘Friends’ Steering Committee actually were on the CBC payroll.”
Including me!
“Stephen Kimber was paid $675 as a ‘freelance[r].’”
Whoah. Be still my beating heart.
I earn part of my annual income as a freelance journalist, and have done so for the last 40 years. I’ve written newspaper columns, magazine articles, books, commissioned books, occasional government reports (for Tory governments, I might add) and even the 1989 Report of the Royal Commission into the Wrongful Conviction of Donald Marshall, Jr.. I’ve also worked on occasion for the CBC—and for CTV, and for what is now Global TV.
What is interesting about the $675 figure the CTF touts on its blog—and which even it behind-the-hand mumblingly admits involved “quite small sums of money”—is what the CTF didn’t say about its initial request for information.
The CTF didn’t mention that it had asked the CBC for records of all payments made “from 2001 to present” because including that inconvenient fact would make those small sums reported seem even more minuscule, and its argument even more ridiculous.
The $675, therefore, represents all of the income I received from the CBC for 10 years! That works out to $1.30 a week.
I may be buyable, but even I’m not that cheap.
Speaking of being bought, what—aside from the usual ideological zealotry—would prompt the CTF to attempt to turn this molehill of non-information into the mountainous revelation that I was “actually… on the CBC payroll?”
Who foots the bill for the CTF’s federal office in Ottawa and its regional offices in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Altantic Canada not to mention its seven apparently fulltime spokespeople?
Whose interests does the CTF really represent?
One might answer that question by asking who else has a vested interest in getting rid of the CBC? Can you say Quebecor? Sun Media?
Surprise, surprise. Quebecor has created its own not so mini-industry churning out similar access to information requests of the CBC, desperately seeking ammunition for its goal of convincing a too-easily-convinced Harper government to shutter the CBC screens.
Do Quebecor, Sun Media, their executives or board members contribute to the Canadian (sic) Taxpayers Federation?
If so, how much?
Is the CTF… ahem.. “actually on the payroll” of those vested interests.
I don’t know. The CTF doesn’t disclose the names of its donors or how much they give.
But I’m guessing those corporate interests would be far more generous in putting CTF on their payrolls than the CBC has been with me.
Copyright 2012 Stephen Kimber
The Occupy Movement for business… in 15 minutes, more or less
My assignment: “Explain the Occupy Wherever Movement in 15 Minutes.”
The occasion was a recent luncheon at the Halifax Club to mark Global Ivey Day, an annual opportunity for alumni of the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business to come together to celebrate their Iveyness. I’d been invited as the post-lunch speaker, even though I’m neither an Ivey graduate nor a business person. (I did once pile-drive a business into the ground, but I’m sure that’s not why they invited me. Besides, that’s a story for another day.)
My guess is the organizer, a thoughtful Windsor, N.S., lawyer-politician-businessman named Jim White, had been reading about the Occupy movement, fretting those Wall Street tenters were on to something important and wanted someone else—me—to jolt his fellow Iveys into confronting the question too.
I was happy to oblige. But I wasn’t sure I would require 15 minutes.
Just as Bill Clinton had used his it’s-the-economy-stupid mantra to become U.S. President in 1992, the essence of Occupy boils down to four words: It’s the Inequality, Stupid.
Thanks to the three g’s—go-go globalization, government de-regulation and corporate greed—the traditional gulf between rich and poor is becoming an unbridgeable chasm.
Consider. The Conference Board of Canada—hardly a hotbed of socialist radicalism—reports the top 10 per cent of the world’s population now gobble up 42 per cent of its income, leaving the bottom 10 per cent with one per cent of their crumbs. That gap has widened dramatically since the mid-1980s. In Canada, the divide is growing even faster than in the United States.
If you made $3 million in 2005—lucky you!—you paid, on average, 25 per cent less in taxes than you did in 1990. Luckier you! The poorest 20 per cent of Canadians, by contrast, paid a higher percentage of their income in tax in 2005 than they did in 1990. Unlucky them.
Luck, in fact, has little to do with it. Capital gains, the mother’s milk of the better-off, is taxed at just 50-cents on the dollar. Why is a dollar earned speculating on the stock market taxed less than income earned educating children or caring for the sick? A hint. Child care workers and nurses don’t have powerful lobbyists to write tax rules for them.
Governments tell us we’re in a fiscal mess. We can no longer afford basic, opportunity-leveling services like health and education.
Meanwhile, those same governments slashed corporate taxes from 28 per cent to 15 per cent between 2000 and 2012, and promise more to come.
No wonder we can’t afford public services. The rich can pay for their own health and education, thanks. And their legacies.
A few days before I spoke at Ivey Day—the business school is named for Richard Ivey, who was rich enough to give enough to get the place named after him—Nova Scotia businessman Ken Rowe donated $15 million to Dalhousie University’s business school.
I respect Rowe. He’s a business builder and signifcant employment generator. But let’s look at his generosity through other lenses.
How many years would it take the average Nova Scotia worker to earn what Ken Rowe chose to give away in an instant?
Three-hundred-and-nineteen plus!
How much of that $15 million—thanks to tax benefits the giver gets—will ultimately be paid by the rest of us?
More than you’d probably guess.
So why does Rowe alone get to choose which good is greater? There are 59, mostly generously endowed business schools in Canada. Why a Ken Rowe School of Management, but no Ken Rowe School of Social Work, or Education, or Child Care?
No wonder people are frustrated and angry—and not just the Occupy tenters. Look around. At the race to the bottom that only benefits those at the top. At skyrocketing education debts and youth unemployment that is robbing the next generation of a future...
Even if the Occupy Movement’s tents get flattened, the issue they raise will not go away. And the consequences of not righting that balance will only get worse.
It really is the inequality, stupid.
(From the January-February 2012 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine.)
Copyright 2012 Stephen Kimber
City Council by Facebook? Why not
Government by Facebook post? We could do worse. We do. Read any report of any Halifax council meeting.
And then consider this.
On Thursday afternoon, Bedford Councilor Tim Outhit posted on his Facebook wall: “$20 million to widen Bayers Road, or $25 million to launch an initial commuter rail service?”
He invited his Facebook friends to weigh in. By Saturday morning, he’d had 67 responses.
Most—perhaps no surprise—favoured rail. Far more interesting—and perhaps surprising—was the quality of the discussion.
Outhit’s question followed a February staff report he’d asked for on the scheme’s feasibility. Staff estimated a five-stop service between Windsor Junction and the VIA station through existing rail corridors would cost $31 million to launch plus $6.5-million annually.
Starting the service initially at Bedford, of course, would make it cheaper—and therefore comparable to the controversial scheme to widen Bayers Road to accommodate more gas-guzzling, on-the-road-to-no-place-to-park, one-rider automobiles.
During the Facebook exchanges, official reports and blog posts were referenced and linked, significant questions asked and answered.
John Wesley Chisholm posted a link on the history of a Truro-Halifax commuter rail system that operated until the Halifax Explosion. “This is not a dream or fantasy,” he wrote. “This is Halifax as it was planned and intended to work… We could make it happen.”
“Start with Bedford to Halifax,” allowed Waye Mason, but then add more stops “and a huge park-and-ride terminal at Duke... Let’s get low-floor rail that can operate as streetcars, like Austin, Texas, but can go on freight rails, and then drive a rail down Hollis, all the way to and through [the] dockyard.”
Even those, like Mike Flemming, who argued “we do not have the population base to make [commuter rail] service economically viable,” pushed for a more “efficient transit system that brings commuters from the outskirts to transit hubs.”
“Let’s invest in the future of transportation instead of extending the agony of the current inefficient and doomed mode of transportation that is the single-commuter car (or SUV),” summed up Tom Servaes, adding wistfully: “I’d love to zip along the Basin reading my email on the way into the city.”
Would that city council sessions sounded so sensible.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Peter Kelly: The joke’s on us… still
Peter Kelly has become the journalistic gift that keeps on giving, our local, 21st century version of those famous “Franco-is-still-dead” Saturday Night Live sketches from the mid-1970s.
Breaking News just in. Peter Kelly is still the mayor.
And will be for at least another year. If not for life. And perhaps after death…
So is it time—as the mayor’s defenders (and there are, inexplicably, still too many of them) would argue—to get over it? Or is it past time, as the columnist spinners, Facebook fulminators, talk-show talkers and letters-to-the-editor writers insist, to get on with getting him gone?
None of this would likely even be a matter for discussion today if the mayor—when the news broke in February he was up to his eyeballs in a City Charter-violating decision to secretly front cash to a concert promoter whose shows were so singularly unsuccessful he couldn’t pay it back—had acknowledged his wrongdoing and apologized.
Peter Kelly
I blew it. I got so caught up in competing with Moncton for big concerts I went too far. I was sure the concerts would be a success, the advances would be paid back and we would all benefit. But I violated the Charter and kept council in the dark. I was wrong. I’ve learned my lesson. I apologize.
Genuine mayoral apologies being as common as common sense at a city council meeting, of course, that didn’t happen.
And Concertgate has assumed a larger-than life of its own, puffed up beyond bursting after each new mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded non-apology from the mayor.
In the last week alone, Kelly has faced—and faced down: the embarrassing council vote on calling in the cops to investigate his actions; the spectacle of an ex-cop personally filing a criminal complaint against him; the slap-in-the-face of a retired provincial auditor-general publicly asking him to resign; the salt-in-the-wound declaration by the I-don’t-owe-the-city-a-penny concert promoter that the mayor was a “professional;” and, of course, the modern ignominy of a “Peter Kelly—Resign Now” Facebook group.
This still in… Peter Kelly is still the mayor.
The real joke will be if we have to keep saying that after the October 2012 mayoral election.
It just won’t be funny.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Election 2011: a strange sweet trip that may not be over
What a short, strange, sweet trip it’s been—made all the sweeter because not a single politician, party insider, pollster, pundit or person predicted it. Including me. My first post-election-call column was a lament that—in a campaign focused so tightly on just 50 swing ridings—the votes of the rest of us wouldn’t count.
Uh, right…
What happened? The short answer is Canadians took back their politics—on social media, in vote mobs, in their own minds. They rose up—though not the way Michael Ignatieff hoped—and told pollsters they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore.
“It” was Stephen Harper and his smarmy, controlling politics of fear and loathing of any other. But it was also the Bloc Quebecois and the Gilles-one-note clanking call to non. And Michael Ignatieff, who ran a mostly solid campaign but couldn’t escape his pre-election Tory tarring as the outsider-other, or the reality his so-recently-discredited Liberals represented a tired alternative that wasn’t.
This negative, none-of-the-above frustration almost certainly fed the tsnunami that has swept the NDP from its nadir of 13.2 per cent in polls two weeks into the campaign to the giddying heights of official opposition, perhaps even minority government territory today.
But if the NDP surge is, in part, a negative response, it is also—in perhaps larger part—a reflection of voters’ hope for better.
Jack Layton isn’t new, and neither is the NDP platform.
But after 4.6 million of us watched his performance in the leaders’ debate, the ground under this election began to shift seismically.
Why?
The NDP engaged Canadians in discussions about their issues, and the avuncular, unflappable Layton steered clear of the personal negatives—our attack ads, he joked, are about attacking poverty—that were other parties’ staples.
The NDP’s sudden surge, of course, means its platform—and how it gets paid for—hasn’t been scrutinized nearly carefully enough (although the Globe Friday trotted out 10 bank and business economists who concluded “no one appears to be shaking” at the prospect of an NDP government).
However it all turns out, Canadians have already shaken conventional political assumptions. That is reason enough to hope.
But stay tuned. This trip may not be over yet.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Beware taxpayers defenders defending corporate rip-offs
So let me see if I have this straight.
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, which prides itself on being the fists-up, fang-baring defender of downtrodden taxpayers, has its knickers righteously twisted because the province says it can save taxpayers $4.7-million a year…
Uh… this does not compute.
Or perhaps it does.
Some background. Nova Scotia’s Transportation Department believes private companies are over-charging—by up to 50 per cent—for roadwork in some rural areas because there was no, or little competition.
The short version: they were profiteering because they could.
So the Transportation Department decided to get back into the business—to provide competition in places where there wasn’t any, save taxpayer bucks and have more funds to do more roadwork on more roads.
The wounded howls from the Nova Scotia Road Builders Association—some of whose members, one would assume, had happily licked that honey pot—were predictable.
So too was the predictably Pavlovian, “government-bad” response of the so-called Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.
Instead of upbraiding the road builders for ripping off taxpayers, the Federation hopped into bed with them, then snuggled up close.
It accused government of “colluding” with its highway workers’ union because the department had asked the union in advance how its new public paving scheme might affect the collective agreement. Sounds prudent to me. (When government talks with corporate lobbyists, the Federation calls it “consulting,” and thinks it’s a fine idea.)
It also attacked highway workers personally. The Federation claimed private sector flag workers earn $12 an hour—probably even if their employer has inflated a bid—while a public sector flag person sucks up a bloated $16 an hour from the public teat.
But let’s ask ourselves: what’s so bad about that?
Perhaps the still-hardly-rich flag worker will use her extra $4 extra to buy groceries or school supplies locally, not to forget contributing a few thousand extra in taxes to the public good.
Compare that with what might happen to the bloated profits a paving company can skim from uncompetitive bidding, which is as likely to be spent on a Caribbean cruise as school supplies, and more likely to be sheltered from the tax man.
Thanks for nothing, Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.