When Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks write their sequel to The Trouble With Billionaires, let’s hope they’ll help us understand why the 1 per cent whine even when they win.

Take Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of one of the world’s largest private equity firms, the Blackstone Group; worth $4.7 billion, Mr. Schwarzman is the 52nd richest person in America. He describes his business philosophy candidly: “I want war, not a series of skirmishes. … I always think about what will kill the other bidder.” He sees Wall Street locked in fierce battle with President Barack Obama which he once described, yes, as a war: “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Mr. Schwarzman eventually apologized for his language – but not for the sentiment behind it. The heinous act that provoked him to compare the U.S. President to Hitler? Mr. Obama’s attempt to prevent billionaires like Mr. Schwarzman from paying tax at a lower rate than Warren Buffett’s secretary.

What’s particularly noteworthy here is that despite the success of the Occupy movement in putting inequality on the international agenda, it can safely be reported that just about everywhere, the 1 per cent are still laughing all the way to the bank. In fact they own the bank. Just a little south of here, the Bank of America was bailed out by American taxpayers to the tune of $45-billion. It claimed a pre-tax loss of $5.4-billion and so paid no taxes for the past two years. In one of those years, it dished out executive bonuses and compensation worth $35-billion. Could I make this stuff up?

The bargain between the 1 per cent and the governments of the 1 per cent is clear: huge tax breaks for the big boys, austerity for the 99 per cent. Can you handle more figures? Since the geniuses on Wall Street gave us the great crash of 2008, American banks received $7.7-trillion in bailout money and British banks $1.3-trillion. Yes, trillion, in both cases. To offset those losses to the public purse, the United States will cut public spending by $2.4-trillion in the next decade and Britain $128-billion. In Britain this will include almost half-a-million lost public sector jobs.

It’s time to resurrect the biting formula given us years ago by John Kenneth Galbraith, an earlier generation’s Paul Krugman: private affluence, public squalor.

Canada merely proves the rule. Despite our ever-receding kinder/gentler reputation, Canada is actually becoming more unequal faster than most other countries. There’s an elephant in the room here (as elsewhere) that’s almost always ignored. As economists Sam Gindin and Paul Kahnert report in the April CCPA Monitor, there’s far more wealth in Canada today than ever before. Per capita GDP is 50 per cent higher (adjusting for inflation) than 30 years ago. Yet most of that wealth has been transferred to the richest Canadians through tax cuts and government subsidies.

Since 1980, the ultra-rich have increased their share of the national income from 8.1 per cent to 13 per cent, a shift of $67-billion. Here’s a strange coincidence. The combined federal and provincial deficits now run at about $65-billion annually. So let’s see now. If taxes on the super-rich had stayed at their 1980 level – when no well-heeled Canadian was exactly suffering from cruel and unusual tax torture – there’d be no federal or provincial deficits today. Interesting.

Privileging the few and hurting the less privileged has been very much a non-partisan tradition in Canada, from Bran Mulroney through Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin to Stephen Harper. Between 2000 (Chrétien-Martin) and today, corporate taxes have been reduced to 15 per cent from 29 per cent, but instead of putting their extra profits into productive business investments Canadian corporate leaders have engorged themselves on their $500-billion windfall. Looking at the Harper government record alone, from its first year in office in 2006 to 2013-14, tax cuts will cost the government – that’s us, the citizenry – $220-billion, creating the very deficits that are now used to justify government spending cuts. Interesting.

But if the 1 per cent are still winning the brutal class war, the 99 per cent are not yet surrendering. Portents of hope are everywhere. France, of course. Britain, where the austerity-obsessed Tory-Liberal coalition got smashed in municipal elections last week. The United States, where Mr. Obama is framing Mitt Romney as the candidate of the 0.00001 per cent.

And if you sometimes fear that Occupy was just a dream, look hard and you can still find evidence across the United States of its existence. In fact there are mini-Occupies all over the country – Occupy Colleges, Occupy Our Homes, Occupy the Securities and Exchange Commission, even an Occupalooza organized by Occupy Fullerton, which seems to be a town in California.

In Canada too there’s a revival of protest. Of course most controversial are the Quebec students. But whatever you think of them – and I for one believe their protests have become counter-productive – it’s obvious these young people are amazingly committed and tenacious; that’s the spirit that the 99 per cent need.

Voices-Voix, a non-partisan coalition of civil society groups and NGOs disappointed by the Harper government, is revving up its collective clout against the government. Canada can also now boast of Doctors for Fair Taxation, Lawyers for Fair Taxation and Faith Leaders for Fair Taxation. (Anyone who needs extra motivation should take a gander at Kevin O’Leary’s treatment on CBC TV not long ago of a serene and knowledgeable Tanya Zakrison, a surgeon representing Doctors for Fair Taxation.)

A couple of weeks ago 15,000 protestors demonstrated in Toronto against the McGuinty government’s attack on Ontario’s public-sector workers. Along with ever-lower taxes and an end to government regulation of the corporate world, destroying the trade-union movement has for decades been a key objective of the 1 per cent.

Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath has now accomplished what the majority everywhere are fighting for. She actually forced the minority Liberal government, anxious to avoid an election, to agree to a small surtax for the 23,000 Ontarians who declare earnings of more than $500,000 a year. If I were advising Ms. Horwath, I would mobilize those crusading doctors and lawyers for fair taxation and make equality and fairness my campaign cry in the forthcoming Kitchener-Waterloo by-election.

I don’t think either American or Canadian billionaires have to sell off too many of their private jets just yet. But they shouldn’t be too complacent, either. The rich world is due its Spring Revolutions too.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/gerald-caplan/update-on-the-class-war-1-winning-99-regrouping/article2430024/singlepage/#articlecontent >

Imagine being refused a job, an apartment or public service due to your race, disability or sex. How hard is it to enforce your human rights? Six years ago, the McGuinty government’s Bill 107 made controversial changes to human rights enforcement. You likely don’t know that a poorly publicized government-appointed independent review has asked the public if these changes make things better or worse.

Before Bill 107, you could take your case to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Its job was to enforce the Human Rights Code, to investigate human rights complaints, to screen out frivolous or meritless cases and to try to negotiate settlements. If it decided a complaint had merit and couldn’t settle it voluntarily, its job was to publicly prosecute the case at theHuman Rights Tribunal.

Six years ago, to speed up a slow, backlogged system that needed reform, Bill 107 privatized human rights enforcement. It took the Human Rights Commission out of screening, investigating and prosecuting individual discrimination cases. It makes discrimination victims investigate and litigate their cases at the tribunal without the commission’s help.

Does Bill 107 make lives better for victims of discrimination? Far from it.

It created a huge void for discrimination victims by taking the Human Rights Commission out of individual cases. The government promised free lawyers for all claimants. Yet its new Human Rights Legal Support Centre only represents a fraction. Far too many unrepresented claimants encounter respondents (those accused of discrimination) armed with lawyers. The tribunal reports that 81 per cent of respondents have a lawyer at mediation but only 32.9 per cent of claimants have any representative when filing a claim.

The Liberal government promised human rights hearings within one year. The tribunal set a goal to achieve this in only 75 per cent of cases. Its average time to complete cases is 372 days, but most of those never have a hearing.

Individuals can’t themselves investigate and litigate complex systemic discrimination cases. The Liberals pledged that the stripped-down Human Rights Commission would effectively combat systemic discrimination by bringing public interest cases to the tribunal and intervening in individual cases. To date the commission has brought only one public interest case and intervened in only 73 of the thousands of individual cases. Also, the government hasn’t established the promised anti-racism and disability secretariats, ignoring its own legislation.

Liberals also promised more accessible human rights but instead created new barriers. A discrimination victim who wins at the tribunal risks having to pay thousands of dollars in legal costs if their win gets overturned by the court due to the tribunal’s own legal errors. Would a blind person likely take on the TTC today, to force it to call out bus stops, when the new Legal Support Centre is statistically unlikely to take their case, the TTC is ready to spend $450,000 on lawyers, and the applicant could be stuck with a huge court cost order because a win at the tribunal was based on the tribunal making legal errors?

The government said Bill 107 would address the backlog. Yet its transition process unfairly led 885 cases to vanish in the system.

Liberals promised fair hearings. Yet they gave the tribunal power to override legislation designed to ensure fair hearings and allowing it to pass controversial and complicated rules.

We hope this current Human Rights Code Review will recognize these amply-documented problems, and make strong recommendations to improve Ontario’s troubled human rights system. Many from equality-seeking communities want the government to keep its broken promises about Bill 107. They want the government to require the tribunal to obey legislation designed to foster fair hearings, and to restore the Human Rights Commission as a stronger public interest voice at the tribunal. Discrimination victims should be given the option of asking the Human Rights Commission to investigate and publicly prosecute their case if there’s enough evidence. Discrimination victims want results. They don’t care if they get it through hearings or through mediations.

Do you like the TTC announcing bus and subway stops, even if you’re sighted? Imagine if under this new human rights system, no one wanted to risk taking on big organizations like the TTC without the backing of a public prosecutor to win that and other accessibility measures. Is that the human rights enforcement system we really want?

David Lepofsky is a blind Toronto lawyer, activist for reforms for the rights of persons with disabilities, and twice successfully won human rights cases before Bill 107 to force the TTC to announce bus and subway stop announcements.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1175822–it-s-tougher-than-ever-to-enforce-your-human-rights-in-ontario >

High earners who are worried that this year’s Tax Day will be the last one before their rates rise have more than just the White House and Washington to blame. They can also look to two academically revered, if publicly obscure, left-leaning French economists whose work is the subtext for the battle over tax fairness.

Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have spent the last decade tracking the incomes of the poor, the middle class and the rich in countries across the world. More than anything else, their work shows that the top earners in the United States have taken a bigger and bigger share of overall income over the last three decades, with inequality nearly as acute as it was before the Great Depression.

Known in Washington and the economics profession by the of-course-you-know shorthand “Piketty-Saez,” the two have been denounced on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and won mention in White House budget documents.

Mr. Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has won the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship grant.Mr. Piketty, 40, of the Paris School of Economics, has won Le Monde’s prize for best young economist, among other awards.

Both admire, even adore, the United States, they say, for its entrepreneurial drive, innovative spirit and, not least, its academic excellence: the two met while re-searchers in Cambridge, Mass. But both also express bewilderment over the current conversation about whether the wealthy, who have taken most of America’s income gains over the last 30 years, should be paying higher taxes.

“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,” Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder. “People say that reducing inequality is radical. I think that tolerating the level of inequality the United States tolerates is radical.”

As much as Mr. Piketty’s and Mr. Saez’s work has informed the national debate over earnings and fairness, their proposed corrective remains far outside the bounds of polite political conversation: much, much higher top marginal tax rates on the rich, up to 50 percent, or 70 percent or even 90 percent, from the current top rate of 35 percent.

The two economists argue that even Democrats’ boldest plan to increase taxes on the wealthy — theBuffett Rule, a 30 percent minimum tax on earnings over $1 million — would do little to reverse the rich’s gains. Many of the Republican tax proposals on the table might increase income inequality, at least in the short term, according to William G. Gale of the Tax Policy Center and many other left-leaning and centrist economists.

Conservatives respond that high tax rates would stifle economic growth, at a minimum, and cause some businesses and high-income workers to flee to other countries. When top American tax rates were much higher, from the 1940s through the 1970s, businesses could not relocate as easily as they can now, say critics of Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez.

“I materially disagree with the idea you can raise a marginal tax rate to 70 percent and not have an impact on economic growth,” said Ike Brannon, an economist at the American Action Forum. “It’s absurd on its face.”

But Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez argue that history is on their side: Many countries have higher tax rates — and the United States has had higher tax rates — without stifling growth or encouraging the concentration of income in the hands of the very rich.

“In a way, the United States is becoming like Old Europe, which is very strange in historical perspective,” Mr. Piketty said. “The United States used to be very egalitarian, not just in spirit but in actuality. Inequality of wealth and income used to be much larger in France. And very high taxes on the very rich — that was invented in the United States,” he said.

Mr. Saez added, “Absent drastic policy changes, I doubt that income inequality will decline on its own.”

The two economists’ project of mapping income inequality started two decades ago, when Mr. Saez was teaching at Harvard and Mr. Piketty teaching down the road at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Their innovation was to measure American income inequality historically. Existing data went back only to the 1970s. Tedious archival research at the Internal Revenue Service allowed them to stretch the data all the way back to 1913.

Once they had collected the data, the computation was easy. They figured out the benchmark for various income levels — the top 10 percent, top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of earners, for instance — and calculated what share of income each group took each year.

What they found startled them. As in other industrially advanced countries, income inequality in the United States fell after World War II, a period that economic historians call the “Great Compression,” and remained stable through much of the 1970s.

But then inequality started increasing again, with the top 1 percent of earners drawing a bigger and bigger share of overall income. Their graph showing the trend became well-known: a deep U, with inequality as acute today as it was just before the depression.

When they first published their work, income inequality was mostly off the political radar screen, thanks to the 1990s boom, Mr. Saez said.

“Growing inequality was not perceived to be an issue because the economy was growing fast and even the incomes of the 99 percent were growing significantly,” he said.

But the deep downturn of the last few years, and Mr. Obama’s election, brought the issue back to the fore. Peter R. Orszag, the former Obama budget director, has said the Piketty-Saez work “helped to point the way for the administration in its pledge to rebalance the tax code.”

Now living many time zones apart, Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez update their work with frequent e-mails, Skype conversations and data-sharing through Dropbox.

They have found that the trends have mostly continued. From 2000 to 2007, incomes for the bottom 90 percent of earners rose only about 4 percent, once adjusted for inflation. For the top 0.1 percent, incomes climbed about 94 percent.

The recessioninterrupted the trend, with the sharp decline in stock prices hitting the pocketbooks of the rich. But the income share of 1 percent has since rebounded. Data that the two economists released in March showed that the top 1 percent of earners got nearly every dollar of the income gains eked out in the first full year of the recovery. In 2010, the top 10 percent of earners took about half of overall income.

That has led the two economists to renew their calls for higher rates on the rich. Along with Peter Diamond, an emeritus professor at M.I.T. and a Nobel laureate, Mr. Saez has estimated the “optimal” top tax rates for the wealthy — getting the most revenue from those most able to surrender it — to be between 45 and 70 percent.

In France, François Hollande, the Socialist who may well succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as president, wants to raise the top marginal income tax rate to 75 percent, calling earnings over a million euros “impossible.” A candidate yet farther on the left suggests a top rate of 100 percent.“The debate in Washington is between the Bush-era and Clinton-era tax rates,” said Mr. Diamond, whom Mr. Obama nominated to the Federal Reserve and Republicans blocked. “Our finding is that the debate should be between the pre-1986 Reagan tax rate, which was 50 percent, and the rates that existed from Johnson until Reagan,” which were higher.

“Thirty percent is three times smaller than the 91 percent of Roosevelt,” Mr. Piketty said, responding to the Buffett Rule proposal and referring to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who engineered the New Deal. “And inequality is greater than in the time of Roosevelt.”

< http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/business/for-economists-saez-and-piketty-the-buffett-rule-is-just-a-start.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=annielowrey >

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The protests today from Occupy Wall Streeters to redistribute income from the rich to the poor are generally based on faulty, convenient and largely undisclosed assumptions about Canadians being stuck in inequality. That is, occupiers and others tend to offer policies that assume the people who face low income today are the same ones who encounter it tomorrow. Thankfully, the reality of Canadian society is that people move up (and down) the income ladder over time as their circumstances change.

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The concept of mobility is fairly straightforward. It suggests that people’s earnings increase and decrease over the course of their lives in natural fluctuations. For example, all current workers were students at one point who likely earned at the low end of the range from a lack of skills and part-time work. However, their earnings increased as they completed their education and began working full time. Their earnings increased further as they gained experience and hopefully promotions.

There are also natural declines in income over one’s life. A spouse may take time away from the labour force to raise children. Workers may experience bouts of unemployment as they move from one firm to another. Workers also reduce their hours of work and their income as they transition to ­retirement. Again, all of these ­fluctuations are ­naturally part of one’s life.

Statistics Canada monitors such fluctuations in order to better measure and understand the economic well-being of Canadians over time. Specifically, Statistics Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) follow 17,000 households over rotating six-year periods. Such data provides researchers and policymakers with powerful information about how Canadians’ income and labour market participation varies over time.

There are a number of ways to analyze mobility. A recent study by Statistics Canada divided the population into five equal groups (quintiles) based on income. Statistics Canada then followed these individuals over time to assess how their incomes changed relative to the initial income thresholds used to divide the population.

To get a sense of the income levels for these five groups, the average income (after tax) for individuals in 2005 was: $14,100, $25,400, $34,700, $46,100, and $76,600.

The latest one-year data, 2008-09, shows quite a bit of mobility, despite the marked economic slowdown of the period. For example, 25% of those who started in the bottom 20% had moved up at least one group within a year. Similar upward movement is observed for the second quintile (26%) and the third quintile (24%). Put differently, for each of the bottom three income groups (each composing 20% of the population), roughly one in four people moved up at least one group in just one year.

The rates of mobility increase when the period is extended to five years, covering 2005 to 2009. Forty-three percent of those who started in the bottom 20% moved up at least one grouping over five years. Rates of upward mobility were again strongest for the bottom 60% of earners over this period. These results are also remarkably similar to analyses completed in the 1990s.

In both the annual as well as the five-year data, Canadians also moved down income groups. However, the net effect over time was an increase in earnings — more people moved up than down. Contrary to the conception offered by the occupiers, it’s a not a zero-sum game where someone has to lose for someone else to win.

Mobility data can also examine the degree to which Canadians experience low income. Over the period 2002 to 2007, which is the latest available data, 80% of Canadians did not experience low income, defined as falling below Statistics Canada’s low-income cutoff. Roughly 8% experienced low income for one of the six years covered in the period. Only 2.1% of Canadians experienced low income for each of the six years.

Explaining the persistency of low income for this 2.1% is an important goal. We know it includes, to some degree, the attainment of education and family composition. Specifically, the data tell us that single parents and those who didn’t complete high school have a much higher chance of experiencing low income.

Canada is a mobile society characterized by both increases and decreases in income that are largely connected with natural changes in one’s life. Thankfully, the data have consistently shown an upward path for incomes and increasing opportunity for workers.

This is not to say that inequality should be discarded as an issue, but rather that it needs to be fully and completely understood. Simplistically presenting the data to support pre-existing preferences for more taxes and redistribution would likely impede the very mobility that is so critical to overcoming low income.

Financial Post
Jason Clemens is the director of research at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the author of the recently released “Income Inequality: Oversimplifying a Complicated Issue,” available atwww.macdonaldlaurier.ca.

< http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/04/30/few-people-stay-poor/ >

Dear Prime Minister:

When I heard your words in the House of Commons that were deemed an apology for the debacle of Canada’s residential school system, I was heartened. At that time, it was nothing short of amazing to hear a prime minister use the word “wrong” in reference to Canada’s treatment of aboriginal people. Now, nearly four years later, I look at the astoundingly hurtful cuts to organizations whose sole purposes are the re-empowerment and well-being of aboriginal people, and I am disheartened. Hell, Mr. Harper, I am downright angry.

You said “sorry” and you were not. In aboriginal context, an apology means that you recognize the flaw within yourself that made the offence possible and you offer reconciliation based on understanding the nature of that flaw. That reconciliation takes the form of living and behaving in the opposite manner. You have not done this. In fact, you have continued in the same vein that made the original apology necessary.

Residential schools effectively separated aboriginal children from the influence of everything that could sustain, perpetuate and define them. When you cut funding for the National Aboriginal Health Organization and the Native Women’s Association of Canada’s health program and ended the mandate of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, you did the same thing.

Your apology and any actions you have undertaken since have only been the expedient motions demanded by tragedy, catastrophe or the public outing of your government’s callous indifference to the needs of Canada and her people.

Because it’s not just aboriginal people you harm when you deign to disengage us from vehicles of healing. You harm Canada. You make the entire country less.

As someone graced with a chief’s headdress and a native name, as you were by the Blood people, it is incumbent on you to learn the teachings those honours arise from. One of them is that the honour of one thing is the honour of all. Similarly, the dishonour of one is the dishonour of all. So when you dishonour us, you dishonour the country. You dishonour that headdress and the ceremony attached to it. You dishonour protocol, tradition, spirituality and the foundational principle of both the headdress and Canada – equality.

Residential schools left deep and grievous wounds on our national consciousness. Your actions only continue that legacy.

As individuals, we seek to heal through a process of learning to embrace our hurts, to hold them, so we can learn to let them go with grace. We learn to embrace our hurts by coming to understand and accept our whole story, our whole history. We leave out nothing. Only when we can accept our whole story can we move on as enlightened, empowered and whole people.

It’s the same for a community, a municipality, a province, a society and a nation. Aboriginal people understand this, and our health and healing organizations are geared toward the perpetuation of that process. We seek to build strong people within the context of Canada, to integrate whole people into the flux and flow of our homeland. But you choose to disallow us that and we can only feel the hurt of yet another wound and ask why.

I, for one, believe in the idea of Canada. I believe in the incredible potential for social greatness that resides here. I believe there is nothing we can’t accomplish as a country if we all work together to make it happen. For the most part, aboriginal people believe that, too. Every political motion we undertake is a step toward the vision of Canada we carry – of a homeland built on equality, harmony and unity.

But those things cannot occur when exclusion is allowed to happen. This is what we know. We seek to be a fully functioning part of this nation’s march toward a shining common future. We strive to be whole and well. We seek personal, community, tribal and collective fulfilment. We seek to be good citizens. In this, we are no different from our non-native neighbours.

I hope you have it in you to hear this. I hope you know that, of the one million aboriginal people in Canada, a significant number of us are potential voters and that our numbers can influence hundreds of ridings. I hope you know that three years is not a long time and that, if your hope is that Canada forgets your missteps before then, we as aboriginal people will not come election time.

Richard Wagamese, a B.C.-based columnist and author, is the recipient of the 2012 National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Media and Communications. His latest novel is Indian Horse.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/aboriginal-reconciliation-an-open-letter-to-stephen-harper/article2416077/ >

Cindy Blackstock says the only thing public school taught her about Aboriginal people was that in the days of the fur trade, the Hudson’s Bay Company would give Aboriginal people “cool stuff” in exchange for skins. Growing up Gitxsan in Northern British Columbia during the 1960s and ’70s, racism and stereotypes about stupid, lazy, alcoholic Aboriginal people were, at best, unchecked.

Now executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society (FNCFCS), Blackstock says Aboriginal students growing up, and going to school, on reserves today have it a lot tougher than she did: funding for reserve schools is roughly 25 per cent less than funding for public schools, the on-reserve graduation rate is just 40 per cent, and more Aboriginal youth are in government care today than were during the height of residential schools.

Ten years ago she led FNCFCS on a mission to work with the government of Canada to bring equality to all Aboriginal people. But after five years of government rejecting proposal after proposal for fair education, safe housing and clean drinking water on reserves, FNCFCS took them to court. On April 18, FNCFCS won their case in Federal Court, and will head back to the Canada Human Rights Tribunal for another hearing.

Blackstock’s work has attracted the special notice of officials. Late last year, she learned she was a target of government surveillance, with employees monitoring her making speeches and photographing her Facebook page. According to reporting by the APTN, officials from the department involved, Aboriginal Affairs, declined comment and instead issued a statement stating it “routinely monitors and analyses the public environment as it relates to the department’s policies programs, services and initiatives… social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are public forums, accessible to all.”

The Tyee spoke with Blackstock the day before the April 18 ruling, to ask why a case about equal rights for Canadian children was meeting so much resistance from the Canadian government, and how it feels to know that same government has spent time and resources spying on her.

On April 24, Blackstock will speak at a Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada event in Vancouver, but for those who can’t make it, here’s the story of how one of the most important human rights cases in recent history reached this point

From co-workers to combatants

Beginning in 2002, FNCFCS worked side-by-side with the feds to develop a strategy for bringing on-reserve services like water, housing and education up to par with public provincial systems. But after government walked away from two solutions they helped develop, FNCFCS took them to court.

“We filed a court case against the government of Canada in 2007 alleging that they are discriminating against First Nations children by underfunding child welfare services,” Blackstock told The Tyee.

“And since it’s been filed, Canada has done everything in its power to avoid a hearing on the merits of that case, that being the central question of whether they’re discriminating or not, and they’re trying to get off it on legal loopholes.”

Blackstock, FNCFCS, and the Assembly of First Nations took the case to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which was ideal for FNCFCS because they have the power to order a specific solution.

“What we didn’t want was a court order that was very vague, that Canada could then drag its feet over for decades or more before providing the right thing for kids. We had these solutions, we jointly developed them, we wanted them ordered to implement them,” Blackstock explains.

But when the ruling came down in 2010, Tribunal Chair Shirish Chotalia dismissed the case, arguing that to compare federal and provincial services was to compare ”apples and oranges.”

Blackstock was shocked. To her mind, the ruling not only ignored a previous Supreme Court decision that found discrimination cases do not require a comparison group, but that Chotalia was essentially saying racial discrimination by the government was okay.

“The implications of that ruling would really be to immunize Canada against any human rights application made by First Nations, because, of course, they only fund on-reserve services,” she says.

Target of surveillance

FNCFCS and the Assembly of First Nations took the case to Federal Court for their right to present evidence of unequal treatment for Aboriginals at the Tribunal. This time, however, they had witnesses to the proceedings. When the case had its time in court Feb. 12-15, 2012, hundreds of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, mostly children, sat in the courtroom to watch.

“We had just about 200 people show up every single day just to witness this case firsthand,” says Blackstock, adding some of the adults in attendance included legal scholars from as far away as Australia.

“We had so many children coming that we had to book them in shifts. We could have well had a courtroom that held 500-600 people if we were able to accommodate everyone that wanted to come.”

Most of the kids learned about the court case by signing up for FNCFCs I Am A Witness campaign, which posted court documents from both sides online, inviting people to monitor the proceedings as impartial witnesses. But although they didn’t ask people to choose sides, Blackstock says most of the people she spoke with, young and old, were upset with the government’s treatment of Aboriginal people.

“They just could not figure out why they were trying to worm out of providing equitable and culturally-based treatment for children,” she says.

All the action didn’t take place in the courtroom, however. Last November, Blackstock revealed a file she received through Access to Information showing both the departments of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development and Justice were spying on her, with as many as 165 government employees involved.

Blackstock told The Tyee she has not let the revelation deter her or change how she lives her life. Instead, she says it reveals a lot about the insecurity of the federal government.

“Canada is becoming a place where we’re only democratic once every four years when the government wants to hear from us, and the rest of the time they’re trying to protect themselves from viewpoints from the public that raise critical issues,” she says.

“That should be welcomed by a competent government, they should be welcoming dissent because it helps us create a better society, helps us create the discourse that’s necessary to raise us all up.”

Equality’s ‘the floor, not the ceiling’

She will not be grateful, either, for the $275 million the government is putting into Aboriginal education this year. It is nowhere near enough, she says, and equality is “the floor, not the ceiling” of what Aboriginal people are asking for.

“They described the accounting problems with their fighter jets of $10 billion as simply being an accounting error. If they’ve got that amount of money to play with, $10 billion would have gone a long way to addressing these inequalities that these kids are facing, and there’s absolutely no legitimate reason for racial discrimination to be used as a fiscal restraint measure,” she says.

But Blackstock says the tide is turning for Aboriginal people in Canada, whether the government is leading the way or running to catch up. She says each new generation of Canadians has a chance to right the wrongs of the past, to treat Aboriginal people with the respect and dignity they deserve.

“We’re shifting the climate in Canada so that this type of discrimination against First Nations children, be it in education, child welfare or any other service, is politically and socially unviable,” she says.

Blackstock and FNCFCS still have to make it through the judicial system, however, vowing they will take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if they must, which could take years to settle. A new day Canada’s for Aboriginal people may be dawning, but it could still be a long time before we see the light.

< http://thetyee.ca/News/2012/04/20/Aboriginal-Equality/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=230412 >

Republicans in the Senate have blocked the Buffett Rule — in essence, a fair tax rate for millionaires — from coming to a floor vote. They’re betting that letting the wealthy continue to pay taxes at a lower rate than average working people will not light a fire under voters this fall.

Polling today indicates otherwise.

Warren Buffett, the billionaire critic of U.S. tax policy, started it all by lamenting that his tax rate is lower than his secretary’s. A secretary who has a few hundred or thousand more dollars in disposable income is likely to spend it, whether on food or on sending a kid to college. This spending will stimulate the economy. People who make, say, $5 million a year might use a tax break to splurge on an extra house, but they also will probably invest in financial instruments that are more likely to drive layoffs to increase a company’s profit margin than they are to create jobs.

A variety of polls indicate that moderate and independent voters agree with that argument, in proportions ranging from 50 per cent to 67 per cent. A CNN poll released Tuesday shows more than two-thirds of its sample, with a three-point margin of error, thinks the current tax system is unfair to working men and women. Moderates and independents agree by wide margins. Even Republicans are evenly divided on it.

The creation of wealth in America, whether it accrues to the struggling or to the already rich, relies on a base of public infrastructure — roads, mass transit, schools to prepare the next generation of workers and police agencies to keep communities safe. These all require public planning and investment to create a nation where businesses and individuals can thrive.

The United States needs to cut spending to get the deficit under control, but without increasing investment in key areas, its economy will erode just as badly as if the deficit is ignored. Spending cuts alone will increase that erosion. Some additional revenue is needed.

The Buffett Rule is a simplistic way to reform the tax system. It would be far better to have comprehensive reform that sets truly fair tax rates and starts from scratch to encourage things we value, perhaps home ownership and job creation, and to discourage harmful practices such as creating offshore tax shelters.

Pollyanna optimists, we hope for real reform someday. But expecting it anytime soon is like looking for peace on Earth to break out next week. A step at a time is the way to go, and the Buffett Rule — with its focus on tax fairness — would be as good a place as any to start.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1165614–buffett-rule-a-good-place-to-start >

It’s hard to fight a class war without a billionaire onside. Hence Andrea Horwath’s dilemma.

The Ontario NDP leader has thrown down a gauntlet of sorts — demanding, or at least politely requesting, that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal minority impose a new slightly higher tax rate on Ontarians making more than $500,000 a year.

The move is a small toe-in-the-water toward restoring the progressivity that’s been stripped out of the Canadian tax system. But it’s also a bold unlacing of the stays on the political bodice that has confined mainstream Canadian politicians for the past few decades.

Of course, U.S. President Barack Obama is paving the way.

But it’s easy for Obama; he has a billionaire backing him up. It’s doubtful Obama would have had the audacity to suggest the rich should pay tax rates as high as their secretaries had the idea not been suggested by Warren Buffett, one of the richest men alive.

Obama has even dubbed his proposed new tax the “Buffett Rule” so that it’s clear this isn’t just some idea thought up by the president of the United States; it has the full clout and authority of a billionaire.

Horwath, on the other hand, is out there riding bareback, taking on the most powerful forces in Canada all by herself, showing more boldness than this country has seen in a while.

Actually, she’s showing the kind of boldness that in recent years has largely been confined to the political right.

That boldness — along with enormous financial support from the wealthy — has been key to the phenomenal success of the new conservative movement.

Conservatives have managed to peddle policy changes — notably tax cuts for the rich — that offer no benefit to ordinary citizens and in fact undermine public welfare by depriving government of revenue needed for social programs.

They’ve pulled this off partly by being sneaky, but also by forcefully defending their positions.

This has enabled them to present themselves as tough and principled — even when there’s no principle beyond enriching themselves and their allies — giving them an aura of strong leadership.

By contrast, their opponents have often come across as unable or unwilling to articulate the case for progressive policies.

Take, for instance, the issue of progressive taxation — the notion that tax rates rise as income rises. For decades, it had been accepted by all political parties in both the United States and Canada as central to the postwar “social contract” — the implicit bargain that stipulated the economy would run on capitalist principles, but that capitalism’s harsh effects would be mitigated by social programs protecting the well-being of the citizenry.

Starting in the 1970s, the conservative movement set its sights on eliminating the second part of the bargain. Its method was the demonization of taxes.

As the well-funded anti-tax campaign swept over the political landscape, politicians of all stripes cowered or climbed on board, abandoning the fort of progressive taxation as soon as it came under fire, without even putting up a fight.

The campaign was ostensibly against all taxes, but its real goal was reducing taxes on the rich. (And it succeeded. Statistics Canada numbers show that between 1992 and 2004, the actual tax rates paid by the richest .01 per cent of Canadians dropped by 25 per cent, while the actual tax rates paid by the bottom 95 per cent dropped by a mere 1 percentage point.)

Now, into this abandoned frontier rides mild-mannered Andrea Horwath, daring to go where no mainstream politician has gone in a long while.

The guns are out for her. On CTV, businessman Jim Doak described Horwath’s tax as “ethnic cleansing” of the rich.

Similarly, Wall Street titan Stephen Schwarzman denounced an attempt by Obama to close a tax loophole for hedge funds managers as “war — it’s like when Hitler invaded Poland.”

Another possibility is that higher taxes on the rich aren’t about war or ethnic cleansing, but about restoring the social contract that used to bind society together.

If Horwath can make that point with boldness and conviction, she might even succeed without a billionaire watching her back.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1164806–it-would-help-if-andrea-horwath-had-a-billionaire-onside >

Readers of The Globe and Mail may have been left with the impression, as a result of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent sentencing decision involving two aboriginal offenders, that all aboriginal offenders are receiving automatic discounts from their sentences. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Coverage of the 157-paragraph Supreme Court case involving Manasie Ipeelee in Ontario and Frank Ladue in B.C. paints a distorted picture. It focuses on the criminal history of one of the offenders – Mr. Ipeelee – and suggests that the court’s decision gave him, and will give other aboriginal offenders, undesired leniency because they are aboriginal.

We would do well to acknowledge the important story of Mr. Ladue, the other offender whose sentence was reviewed by the court. Like Mr. Ipeelee, he had a long criminal record, but he was denied the chance to attend a halfway house and rehabilitation program designed for aboriginal offenders, including offenders who – like him – are residential school survivors. Instead, he was sent to downtown Vancouver, against his express wishes, where he breached the condition that he not become intoxicated.

What the court actually decided in these cases was that one-year imprisonment was the appropriate sentence for both individuals for their breach of long-term offender conditions that they abstain from intoxicants. In both cases, the court held that trial judges erred by imposing three-year sentences that were disproportionate to the offence. The offence was not about violence – the offence was becoming intoxicated.

Proportionality between the offence and the punishment is a traditional and, indeed, fundamental purpose of sentencing. It applies to all offenders. Many may have preferred the three-year sentence and that, if errors are made, they be made on the side of public safety. But where does this argument stop? Indeterminate detention would eliminate more risk. But it is fundamental in a democracy that people be sentenced for what they have done – not what they may do.

The Supreme Court is also criticized for favouring rehabilitation over public safety. But this is a false dichotomy. In the case of most offenders, there will not be true public safety unless there is rehabilitation. The court said that the purpose of a long-term supervision order – the order that was breached – is to aid in the rehabilitation and reintegration of an offender. The order was not designed as a tool to keep people who had finished their sentences locked up forever.

Public understanding of the case also has not been helped by subsequent reports of a case in which Del Louie, a 22-year-old man diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, was sentenced to 18 months at an alcohol rehabilitation centre. The impression given, again, is that the judge reached this decision solely because the offender was aboriginal.

The decision does not amount to a lower standard of accountability – the offender was found guilty and given a lengthy sentence – but rather an attempt to deal with the reasons why the offender was before the court and to respond to the causes of his behaviour.

Judges are required to look at the circumstances of aboriginal offenders because Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code requires them to do so. The need for such consideration exists because, as the court found, aboriginal people face direct and systemic discrimination in the criminal justice system.

The section does not require or mandate lower sentences for aboriginal offenders. What is required is that judges take the time to look at the circumstances of the aboriginal offender and the types of sentences available to address the offending behaviour, in order to determine an appropriate and fit sentence. Considered sentences that hold offenders accountable and address the causes of their offending do not jeopardize public safety, they contribute to it.

Kent Roach, a professor at University of Toronto Law School, was counsel for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. Jonathan Rudin, program director of Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, was counsel for Aboriginal Legal Services in the Ipeelee and Ladue appeals at the Supreme Court of Canada.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/special-consideration-for-aboriginals-in-the-courts-is-a-matter-of-fairness/article2408189/ >

A Federal Court judge has opened the door for the federal government to potentially be held legally responsible – and culpable of discrimination – because First Nations residents’ children receive less funding per capita for social services than young Canadians living off reserves.

Justice Anne Mactavish issued a ruling Wednesday that found the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s chair erred when she dismissed a 2007 case from the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations.

As a result, she granted the three applications for judicial review of the decision.

The First Nations groups allege the federal government discriminates against aboriginal children by consistently underfunding services on reserves, leading, they contend, to poverty, poor housing, substance abuse and a vast over-representation of aboriginal children in state care.

At the core of the issue is whether the government can be held legally responsible for the circumstances of native children in the child-welfare system.

Under the Indian Act, the federal government is responsible for funding health, education, police services and child welfare on reserves, all of which fall under provincial jurisdiction off reserves.

Research cited by the assembly and the caring society indicates children on reserve receive 22 per cent less funding for services than those who live off reserve.

That distinction was central to the government’s argument that comparing funding from two different levels of government was both “unreasonable” and nonsensical.

In her decision, Mactavish said the tribunal “erred in failing to consider the significance of the government’s own adoption of provincial child-welfare standards in its programming and funding policies.”

The federal government now has 30 days to appeal the ruling. But First Nations groups say they’re hoping for a quick resolution.

“We must all agree that lengthy and costly legal battles are not the way forward,” Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said in a release.

Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the caring society, had said during the time of the hearing that if the government was allowed to use the comparator argument, “that would basically immunize the government from any discrimination or human rights claim relating to its funding policies and procedures on reserve.”

On Wednesday, she expressed enthusiasm with the ruling. “I’m overjoyed that (Justice Mactavish) looked at the balance of the evidence and saw what many Canadians saw, which is the complete obvious, that what’s happening here is fundamentally wrong.”

Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada was not immediately available for comment.

Native advocates have also pointed out that three times more First Nations children are being removed from their families today than at the peak of the residential school system in 1949. Then, approximately 8,900 aboriginal children were taken from their families Now, more than 27,500 first nations children are in foster care.

< http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Reserve+kids+underfunded+court+decides/6482101/story.html >