the Walnut Diary

Columnists have looked around for a cultural figure to whom to compare Justin Trudeau in this campaign. I would suggest the former Chinese teacher Mao Tse Tung provides the most useful exemplar. Mao’s long march occurred as a defensive measure to avoid Deng Xia Ping’s Amercian-supplied air force. Mao took to the countryside in the north of China and spent two years staying alive and growing support among the Chinese peasantry. The harder Deng tried to destroy him, the larger the crowd on Mao’s long march.

Mao’s early story stands with the other heroic epics as an archetype of intelligent strategy in the face of overwhelming opposition. Critics called Trudeau’s comment about his admiration of Chinese leadership an unplanned gaffe. They may have been wrong.

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I’m looking forward to Trudeau’s battle with the companies which administer the offshore tax havens. I think he’s looking to harvest income tax from the offshore tax cheats whom Harper has gone to considerable lengths to protect.

Trudeau’s “make the richest 1% pay a bit more” is code for going after tax cheats, and it is resonating with salaried Canadians (with no way to avoid taxes) every bit as much as Harper’s coded racism appeals to the xenophobes among us.

Harper originally invoked “Greece” to put down Trudeau’s deficit projections, but has eased off that gambit. The biggest cause of Greece’s bankruptcy has been its culture of tax avoidance, and as Uber driver and Angry Conservative Earl Cowan says, “You idiot! Stephen Harper doesn’t read income tax forms!”

Stephen Harper has entered the final two weeks of the federal election campaign slightly ahead of, tied with, or slightly trailing Justin Trudeau, depending upon the poll. Contrary to expectations “Justin” has refused to give up despite withering air attacks over the last two years, and like another former teacher, a guy named Mao, he just keeps growing stronger and picking up support in spite of the relentless propaganda barrage during his long march to 24 Sussex.

But all is not lost. Harper has hired political fixer extraordinaire Lynton Crosby to revitalize his floundering campaign. With elephants in the room like Duffy, Carson, Del Mastro, Cadman, murdered aboriginal women and the Senate, he definitely needs a distraction from pointed questions about his record over the last 9½ years.

Crosby has thrown a dead cat onto the table. It is the niqab dispute, and everybody has instantly become obsessed with the issue. That’s the genius of the dead cat move: everybody hates it, but nobody can think of anything else while the dead cat’s lying there on the dinner table, offending everyone. Dead cats are Crosby’s stock-in-trade. Most have to do with racism. In Australia Crosby went after immigrants with the slogan, We get to determine who comes to our country. John Howard won the election.

In the last week in Canada we’ve seen how Mulcair and Trudeau have offered conventional positions on the wearing of the niqab at citizenship ceremonies and have been shouted down by the loudest and the stupidest of the mob in Quebec.

That’s Crosby’s specialty, bringing out the worst in voters using dog whistle politics. Crosby’s anti-Muslim bent also comes out in Harper’s reaction to the Syrian refugee problem. After weeks of dithering, Harper is receiving plaudits from a significant percentage of voters for doing nothing to help Syrian refugees, even over the pleas of Christian churches, NATO allies, and the U.N.

But perhaps Harper could have selected a better distraction, as this particular dead cat can scratch back. On Monday the “dead cat” herself, Zunera Ishaq, was cleared by the Federal Court of Appeals to take her citizenship oath while wearing a niqab (CBC). The Court ruled that The minister acted illegally in creating a policy that went contrary to the legislation.

In an accompanying story, the CBC series Baloney Meter judged that the following statement by Conservative MP Costas Menegakis, parliamentary secretary to the minister of citizenship and immigration, is “full of baloney.”

I think for the citizenship ceremony, someone needs to identify themselves. We need to know who they are.

As an English teacher I find it hard to believe that a man with responsibility for Canadian citizenship and immigration would have so much difficulty with the very pronouns which allow precise distinctions between the one and the many. No wonder Menegakis wants to have a peek, just to be sure. Language has utterly failed him.

Harper/Crosby have also come up with an anti-Muslim snitch line to the RCMP for neighbours suspected of barbaric acts. That’s McCarthyism in all but name.

Then Monday morning the dead-cat distraction campaign had to give way to the “dead rat” in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

Globe and Mail reporter Alexander Panetta quoted Tim Groser, New Zealand’s trade minister, on the subject of the compromises necessary to achieve a 12-country trade agreement:

And when we say ugly, we mean ugly from each perspective — it doesn’t mean ‘I’ve got to swallow a dead rat and you’re swallowing foie gras.’ It means both of us are swallowing dead rats on three or four issues to get this deal across the line.

Dead rat or not, it sounds as though the TPP is a victory for the Conservatives. Dairy farmers should be happy. Auto workers don’t vote for Harper, anyway. Let them eat the dead rats.

And the timing of the TPP announcement couldn’t have suited Harper better. Buoyant from the massive Liberal rally in Brampton on Sunday, Justin Trudeau had just begun to unveil the Liberal Platform at the University of Waterloo when the CBC cut away from the live announcement to catch Stephen Harper’s triumphal introduction of the TPP agreement to Canadians.

So no unicorns today, Justin.

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The Munk Debate on foreign policy Monday night turned into a battle of mythologies between Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.

As Trudeau suggested, Stephen Harper would have you believe that there is a terrorist behind every leaf. But Trudeau spun his own myth of a warm, accommodating Canada made strong by its refugee population.

Trudeau made the case that immigrants have greatly strengthened Canada. The 30,000 American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War undoubtedly did that. These young men and women were the cream of the crop and Uncle Sam’s loss was Canada’s gain.

In contrast Stephen Harper sounded very much like William Lyon Mackenzie King in his statements about refugees. Ever the bureaucrat, Harper repeated the words “generous” and “careful” but moved the chains no further toward the goal of lessening the human suffering among refugees from Syria.

The largest blot on Mackenzie King’s reputation was his refusal to admit Jewish refugees in the period leading up to WWII. King once asked an official in his immigration department how many Jews he should admit. “None is too many” was the infamous response.

In 1939 the SS St. Louis, a German tour ship, was turned away from Quebec City with over 900 Jewish refugees aboard. They returned to Europe, having failed to find refuge in North America, and many were murdered at Auschwitz.

In the most heated exchange of the debate, Trudeau and Harper clashed over the revocation of the Canadian citizenship of convicted terrorist Zakaria Amara. Trudeau stood by his belief that citizenship is a basic human right, and to countenance its removal, regardless of the provocation, is to devalue the citizenship of every other Canadian.

History is on Harper’s side. After the attack on Pearl Harbour Mackenzie King took advantage of a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment to pass a series of orders displacing those of Japanese ancestry from the B.C. coast to road camps in the interior. Then the Japanese-Canadians’ ships, land, houses and bank accounts were confiscated by the government.

Confinement in the internment camps transformed the citizenship of many Japanese Canadians into an empty status and revoked their right to work. Regardless of Trudeau’s protestations, citizenship revocation has happened before in Canada.

King’s reputation as a racist solidified when publication of his diary revealed the following: August 6, 1945, “It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe.”

The Niqab scuffle in the French debate has resulted in a boost for Harper in the polls.

If history is on Harper’s side in his politics regarding terrorism and the Niqab, should we support him when he channels William Lyon Mackenzie King?

If Trudeau’s vision of Canada as a beacon of hope to refugees is a product of a selective reading of Canadian history, should we support him when he channels the human rights policies of his father?

I remember vividly an interview with Bindee, an OAC English student in Carleton Place who chose to do a research project on Canada’s immigration policy. When she read about the Japanese internment and confiscations she exploded: “Yes, but this is CANADA!”

Google reports that Dr. Bindee Kuriya is now a physician associated with the University of Toronto with 23 publications on her specialty of rheumatology to her credit. I don’t think there’s much doubt as to which Canada Bindee will select in the coming election, but it will be up to all Canadians to choose their myth.

In the recent French language debate Justin Trudeau baited Thomas Mulcair with the latter’s proposal to sell water to the United States. Mulcair responded with an angry snarl. I wondered why, so I looked around on Google and a couple of blogs.

JT was deliberately baiting Mulcair with the reference to water exports, and he even got the response he was seeking, with Mulcair’s protest running along the lines of can’t-anybody-simply-discuss-something?

Both know water isn’t the issue. The real killer of Mulcair’s hopes of victory is likely to be the 2006 revelation of the Quebec government’s plans to privatize 650 hectares of Mount Orford Park, an idea Mulcair initially proposed to cabinet while Quebec Environment Minister, and then to developers, and then signed into law.

Then the story goes he turned on Charest and tried to use the illegal development as a lever to push his boss from power. The ensuing battle left Mulcair out of cabinet and soon in search of a new political home, first with the Harper Conservatives, and then with the NDP.

The whole Mount Orford Park debacle began with Mulcair proposing a debate in caucus about the privatization of public land. One thing led to another. The water debate videos show Mulcair’s M.O., his method of operation, when he has a scheme in his head.

The Mount Orford Park story further provides a more detailed context to Mulcair’s claim that he resigned from the Charest cabinet on a question of “principle.”

This story may well be why the Conservatives aren’t taking Mulcair seriously, and why they continued to attack Trudeau with an ad campaign even when his polls were in the twenties. They knew Mount Orford Park would come out later in Mulcair’s campaign.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mulcair-charest-squabble-may-be-settled-but-still-sketchy-1.612259
http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=c82f8cf8-3279-4a26-8351-1d44577c7ef1

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/08/mulcair-bulk-water-exports-liberals_n_8106742.html

This afternoon I watched a live stream from CBC of Justin Trudeau’s speech in Halifax before an enthusiastic crowd on Pier 21. Initially I was worried if he could follow his warm-up act, Premier Stephen McNeil, who gave a barn-burner of a speech in the old evangelical style. Great big guy, excellent speaker, quite appealing. Would JT look pale by comparison?

Not to worry. Trudeau began quite formally, riffing on Halifax’s history as a destination for a million immigrants to Canada and the port of departure for a half million military personnel during the two world wars. Then came a segue into his announcements of day, commitments to military renewal and the accommodation of twenty-five thousand Syrian refugees.

The backdrop of supporters ranged from a babe in arms to old codgers like me, but the one individual who drew my attention away from JT’s speech was an attractive young woman in the front row on my right. She was absolutely chomping on a mouthful of gum.

This wouldn’t do, because this was a serious speech and nobody watching on TV would be able to pay attention. I wondered how well organized Trudeau’s staff was, and how they would deal with this distraction.

Unaware, JT responded to the Premier’s fulsome introduction and then went on into his speech, but McNeil strangely didn’t leave the stage. In fact, he took a position directly in front of the gum-chewing belle, blocking her with his bulk.

My attention returned to the speech. By the time McNeil eventually drifted away during a simultaneous translation, the gum chewer had been replaced by a young guy with a slightly restless toddler in his arms. Crisis averted.

My questions: 1. Was McNeil wearing an earbud and received instructions to stay on stage, or was his move just dumb luck? 2. Did anybody think to remind the members of the backdrop not to chew gum or make other distracting moves during the speech?

Anyway, Trudeau ran through the speech and then welcomed questions from the national media for about another half-hour and everybody seemed happy when the broadcast ended.

http://www.burnabynow.com/opinion/blogs/community-conversations-1.752422/a-conversation-with-meagan-murdoch-communications-staffer-with-conservative-party-headquarters-1.2063283

When I retired from a career in education I knew very little about taxes: the provincial and federal governments helped themselves to my salary, followed by the pension plans. Whatever remained, most years about 54%, went toward the costs of running a family.
The only part which really offended me was the paltry tax deduction for a kid at university. For all Jean Chretien’s rhetoric about helping Canadian students through post-secondary schooling, the only fund available was the personal line of credit at the local bank.

The largest tax deduction I managed in a year during our son’s university career was 16% of $1500, or $240.

Thus imagine my surprise when, in the reaction to Justin Trudeau’s comment about small business tax rates in the Peter Mansbridge interview, journalists postulated that a doctor or a lawyer who is incorporated can easily pass along a tax-free $40,000 dividend to a family member at university!

I googled small business taxes in Canada and quickly ran across the work of Dr. Jack Mintz at the University of Calgary and Dr. Michael Wolfson at Ottawa U.

Mintz doesn’t seem to agree with Harper’s fervent declarations that the small businessman is the life and soul of the Canadian economy. He points out in various articles that while small businesses create many jobs, they also destroy almost as many when the businesses close.

According to Mintz, small business jobs are inherently precarious, and usually without benefits or pension plans. He suggests that the net employment of larger corporations is of vastly more importance to the Canadian economy.

He suggests as well that a low small business tax rate may well keep businesses from growing to avoid higher corporate tax rates.

I found in a May 25, 2015 Globe and Mail article by Janet McFarland an interview with Dr. Michael Wolfson of the University of Ottawa. Wolfson commented that most people don’t realize income splitting has long existed for thousands of professionals such as doctors and lawyers who have been able to funnel their incomes through private companies (small businesses) they create to hold their income.

He said both the Conservatives and NDP are proposing to lower the tax for small-business owners in the future, but said they should understand that this would benefit many well-paid professionals who use small private companies to incorporate their operations, which may not be the intent of their tax proposals (Globe and Mail, 2015).

Stephen Harper and Charlie Angus have both attacked Justin Trudeau in the last week for his comment on examining small business tax rates before lowering them, Harper saying that he is calling the owners of small businesses “tax cheats.”

While I was the class dunce in Economics 110 at Queen’s in 1969, it certainly seems to me that if the evidence shows that a tax reduction to a certain sector of the economy does more harm than good, a sensible leader takes that fact into account in preparing a budget.

Fellow English major Justin Trudeau has much better economic advisors than I have had, and he apparently listens to them. His team approach seems to be at the heart of a Liberal platform which is becoming increasingly realistic and responsible.

*Professor Brian Sharples taught me The Economic Context of Education in the Queen’s M.Ed. Program. Sharples maintained that this is the only valid principle of taxation:

That tax is best which gets the most feathers for the least amount of squawking.

UPDATE: 15 September, 2015

I guess I’m not the only one with this idea: http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2015/09/15/tax-expert-says-canada-needs-to-change-corporate-tax-system-to-prod-investment/#.Vfi932RVikp