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Exclusive: Kenney’s corporate tax cuts are much worse than we thought
59 Plays5 years ago
While Albertans suffer from brutal austerity corporations in Alberta will collectively pocket $4.7 billion dollars from Kenney’s corporate tax cut - at least that’s what the government of Alberta and the media is telling you. But when you dig into what these companies are telling their shareholders you find something else entirely. To help us sort through this we have Angella Macewen, senior economist with the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
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Further reading:
- Labour party video on why corporate tax cuts don’t work
- Darren Gee, CEO of Peyo Exploration on climate change
- Calgary Oil CEO Warns Workers Alberta Could Separate From Canada If Conservatives Lose the Election
- UCP’s Corporate Tax Cuts Could Let Five Companies Alone Reduce Public Revenues $4.3 Billion
- CUPE: The hidden cost of corporate tax cuts
- Spreadsheet – Alberta's Corporate Tax Cut: What they're actually saving
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Transcript
Introduction to Class War in Alberta
00:00:00
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording here in Amiskwichiwa Skygun, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty Six territory. And today on the Pod, we're talking about what we talk on the Pod every week, class war. Specifically, the class war that Jason Kinney is inflicting on the good people of Alberta. And I don't know if you've been paying close attention to Alberta politics, but it's been one of those weeks that Lennon talked about.
00:00:27
Speaker
just this past Black Friday, and Black Friday is a made-up American chopping holiday, but actually became a grim marker in Kenny's austerity agenda when it was announced that around 7,400 unionized public sector workers, most of them in healthcare, would be getting laid off.
Public Sector Layoffs and Pension Controversy
00:00:45
Speaker
While Kenny was conveniently out of the country in Texas trying to scare up foreign funding for his corporate cronies, Kenny pushed through a bill that would see previously arms-length controlled pensions for hundreds of thousands of civil servants and teachers brought in under a crown corp called AIMCO.
00:01:01
Speaker
And it was all done for pretty dodgy reasons that haven't really been fully explained. But what's more alarming than Kenny and AMCO building an empire on the savings of working people is that we have government officials on background with post-media columnists openly speculating about investing those pensions in oil and gas companies.
00:01:20
Speaker
The oil and gas industry could probably be described as a sunset industry at this point, as well as a group of people that you would classify as Kenny's donors and class allies. I think you should keep an eye out on this story. We've got something in the works on this. EMCO is already extremely entangled with the oil and gas industry and not in a good way. They're giving lots of high interest lender of last resort loans to oil and gas companies that are struggling to pay, but I don't want to spoil our future episodes, so I'll leave that there.
Elections Commissioner Firing and Finance Law Changes
00:01:48
Speaker
There was also this undemocratic tin pot dictator shit that the UCP pulled in firing the elections commissioner, a man named Lauren Gibson. He was neck deep in investigating conservative corruption related to the UCP leadership race. And yeah, boy, the UCP really wanted him out of there. They invoked closure. They just ate all the shit that they ate for the week that had happened and they just fucking did it.
00:02:11
Speaker
So that happened, and I feel like we've all kind of already kind of forgot about that. And then one more just for fun. This one kind of really tickles me. We had an Alberta government lawyer swearing up and down to a judge that elections finance law was going to be changed retroactively so that the good Astroturfers at the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation wouldn't have to pay a $6,000 fine for violating elections law.
00:02:34
Speaker
So you look at all this and some polls have come out and Kenny's popularity seems like it's starting to dip. And this could honest to goodness be, you know, an analog to the Bill Six moment that the Notley government faced in their first year. God willing, I think people are starting to wake up and realize the impact that Kenny is starting to have on regular people. But regardless of this electoral horse race stuff, we are still living in the midst of a brutal austerity budget from
Corporate Tax Cuts and Economic Impacts
00:03:00
Speaker
Kenny.
00:03:00
Speaker
And the worst, kind of most sour part about all of this bad economic news is that while all this is happening, Jason Kenney also gave corporations a massive fucking tax cut. While we suffer, while people are being laid off, corporations in Alberta will collectively pocket $4.7 billion. At least that's the number that the government of Alberta and the media is telling you.
00:03:26
Speaker
But when you dig into the actual corporate returns of these companies, you find a much different story. Kenny's massive corporate tax cuts are much bigger than we think. I mean, I don't know about you, but I tend to trust what these corporations tell their shareholders over what the government will tell the public and the media. And what these companies are telling their shareholders is that thanks to Kenny's corporate tax cut, they are saving reams of money, far more than the 4.7 billion number being trotted out.
00:03:54
Speaker
So to help us sort through this, we have Angela McDoohan. Angela is joining us from Ottawa, and she's the senior economist with the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Before that, she was the senior economist at the Canadian Labour Congress, and her whole career, Angela has been pushing back against right-wing narratives around the economy. And we're very lucky to have her on the pod.
00:04:13
Speaker
And just an FYI, the audio quality for the intro versus the interview is a little different. We had to recut the interview because of Black Friday. And I won't bore you with the technical details, but Jim ended up leaving those audio files out on the corner, out on the counter, and we had to scrape a bunch of mold off them. So that's the real technical explanation for why the audio quality is different. But anyways, here's our interview with Angela McEwen.
Corporate Greed and Tax Benefits Analysis
00:04:50
Speaker
Angela is joining us from Ottawa, and she's the senior economist with the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Before that, she was the senior economist at the Canadian Labor Congress, and her whole career, Angela has been pushing back against right-wing narratives around the economy. And we are so very lucky to have her. Angela, welcome to The Progress Report. Thanks for having me. This is a really exciting topic. Well, for me.
00:05:11
Speaker
It is for me too. I think I've stumbled across something here in the corporate returns that I just think the media has missed, but it's also just the underneath all of the shittiness that's happening in Alberta, the worst thing that we have to swallow is just the fact that corporations are just getting giant handout from Kenny and the UCP. Exactly. I was thinking about this and I think it was labor or momentum in the UK did a really great video where they
00:05:40
Speaker
explain how this works and they gave the handout to the corporation and the guy just put it in his pocket and then they gave that money to people in the economy so you know like somebody to go back to school somebody to start a business somebody to I don't know just take care of their kids or their family and then they showed how when you give that money back to people when you create jobs by hiring nurses for example like was more along the strategy of the of the NDP they actually didn't
00:06:08
Speaker
hire that many more people but they at least didn't fire people that then those nurses spend money in the economy and they you know buy a coffee in the morning or they're able to buy clothes for their kids to go back to school and so that's actually better for the economy the health and stability of the economy but when we give these huge tax cuts to corporations they just stick it in their pocket and they don't create jobs they don't build new things they
00:06:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fantastic segue actually because the reason this all started and the reason that my brain clicked that we could go and find all these things in their corporate returns was Husky. Husky is this massive oil company based in Alberta. They're like one of the big five and there was a news breaking that hundreds of people were getting laid off from Husky.
00:06:54
Speaker
And I was like, well, wait a second. This corporate tax cut's been announced. It's been on the books for a while. Can we go and find out and see how much money they're actually saving, how much money they're actually just going to pocket from this corporate tax cut? And lo and behold, in their second quarter management discussion and analysis document, which you can find on Sedera, which I'll explain later, is
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah, like Husky is gonna save a massive amount of money, right? Two hundred and thirty three million dollars over the next four years. That's just going straight into Husky's pockets. And what do they do after they, and this is, these cuts, they fired hundreds of people after they knew they were gonna be able, after they knew they were gonna trouser two hundred and thirty three million dollars. Like it's exactly what you just said, right?
00:07:38
Speaker
debt. Yeah, exactly. So and this is what we've seen happen. So Trump had these big corporate tax cuts in the states that were really high profile, and it just increased shareholder payouts, it increased executive compensation. It didn't create any jobs, because what drives job creation is actually demand in the economy, how healthy is the economy. And so there's no amount of tax cuts that are going to make that better. And so corporations are making the decision to move because
00:08:07
Speaker
That's where they see the demand. That's where they see the market is going. They don't decide to stay in Alberta because of a tax cut. They'll take it. They'll be happy enough to pocket that money, but it doesn't actually ever follow through into the types of job creation that
00:08:24
Speaker
I mean, Jason Kenny and there were economists that backed him up on this saying that this is what they were going to do. They were going to create. Oh, we'll get to them. Don't worry. Yeah, no. But this whole thing with Husky got me thinking, right? And then the whole in Canada debacle happened right where in Canada moved its headquarters from Calgary to
00:08:42
Speaker
to Denver or whatever and I looked up that number as well and these numbers eventually kind of ended up entering the public discourse like the Alberta NDP ended up using them in a lot of their hits around both Husky firing people in and Canada leaving. They're like just hundreds of millions of dollars was being given to these folks in tax cuts and Husky was just firing people in Canada which in Canada which is leaving the country and that got me thinking like okay if we can go out and find these numbers
00:09:07
Speaker
uh, in just in the like documents online that these publicly traded companies have to put out. Well, why don't we go out and find how much, you know, they're actually saying to their shareholders that they're saving in corporate tax cuts. And I went out and did this. It took maybe a few days of kind of downloading PDFs from SADAR.
00:09:25
Speaker
and building a spreadsheet. But at the end of the day, what I found was 30 companies in Alberta, just 30 publicly traded companies say to tell their shareholders that they're going to be saving just under $6 billion over the next four years from these corporate tax cuts. Meanwhile,
00:09:42
Speaker
And that's $6 billion is not chump change. But it's especially galling, especially when you look at what the government is saying that they're just foregoing in revenue in their budget, right? In the last budget here in Alberta, the UCP say they're foregoing $4.7 billion over the next four years because of this corporate tax cut.
00:10:03
Speaker
the number is way, way, way higher than that. That's just the 30 publicly traded companies. That doesn't account for not only like all the other publicly traded companies that I didn't put on the list, but also like the huge private corporations, right? Like Darryl Cates, like billionaire Darryl Cates and Cates Group, or like Coral Holdings, like the Mannix Brothers and whatever, like Nerda, whatever like
00:10:24
Speaker
evil business that they're up to. Or like Jeffrey McCaig, one of the owners of the Calgary Flames, he has a massive logistics company called Trimac that went private a few years ago. These are just black boxes. We have no idea what they're saving in corporate tax code. Yeah, exactly. So what we will see is we'll just see over time how much they're paying and they can do accounting tricks, right? Because they know that it's going down over time so they can move
00:10:51
Speaker
um losses to this year because they'll save more money this year because the corporate tax rate is higher right so they can rearrange things and do accounting tricks to make it more than just the standard percentage of of savings right so i'm sure
00:11:07
Speaker
Didn't they say at the beginning that it was only 1.5? Like they originally downplayed it by a lot and it's already three times higher than they originally said. Yeah, the numbers on this that have come out from the UCP and the government have, yes, they have gone up. And then, I mean, this analysis shows and I will be making this spreadsheet public and it will be available in the show notes. I mean, you can go and check my math. You can go and check out the MD&A documents that I'm citing. You know, I've got quotes, you know, like, let's just go and look, let's go to the tape here, like,
00:11:35
Speaker
In page 10 of the 2019 third quarter MDNA from Suncor, in the second quarter of 2019, the company recorded a $1.116 billion deferred income tax recovery associated with the government's government of Alberta's substantive enacted corporate tax income reduction. Yeah, which is shocking, right? Because that's tax that they had expected to pay.
00:12:03
Speaker
Um, but now we'll have to and so it was a liability on their books that now they can just Write off and which is which is a lot of money for one corporation Yeah, like like cnrel again page four of their 2019 second quarter management discussion and analysis document As a result of these corporate income tax rate reductions the company's deferred corporate income tax liability decreased by 1.618 billion like
00:12:29
Speaker
These are just two companies. I mean, when you look at the big five oil and gas companies in Alberta, Suncor, CNRL, Synovus, Husky, and Imperial Oil, those three come to just to 4.3 billion.
Economic Policies Favoring the Wealthy
00:12:43
Speaker
Those five companies come to just 4.3 billion. There's no way that that 4.7 billion number is actually correct. And that's when you look at how much corporate tax gets paid. It's actually not that much money.
00:12:59
Speaker
So we're eliminating a significant percentage of corporate income taxes, right? So corporations are just funding less and less of the stuff that we do together. So they have less of a stake actually in the economy, in what's good for people. They're not paying their fair share. They're not on the hook for anything.
00:13:24
Speaker
And I think it's fair to call this out for what it is, right? Like fundamentally, this is like class war. The rich are using their power and their ability to control politicians to get what they want out of the tax code and to benefit themselves and their allies, right? Exactly. And they're shameless in saying, you know, this thing that we've tried for the past 30 years of saying, no, no, no, what happens if we do things that are in the benefit of the corporate class?
00:13:53
Speaker
It'll trickle down, right? Trickle down economics. And it hasn't worked. And we know that it hasn't worked. The evidence is there. We can see it. And they're just actually, it seems to be getting bolder and bolder in how they're acting it out. There's no justification for this tax cut. We're seeing immediately people getting laid off. We're seeing the immediate effects on cuts to services, like we're seeing people
00:14:23
Speaker
in healthcare and education that are being laid off, class sizes that are growing, and they're still trying to tell us that really it's what's best for the economy, when it's so clear to everyone on the ground that it's not, and that the people who benefit are the rich, the people that are getting to pocket these profits and walk away when they've kind of let us dry.
00:14:46
Speaker
I thought trickle down economics and kind of laughed out of polite society, you know, a decade or so ago, but I mean, Jason Kenny has brought it back with a vengeance, right? And like, I mean, fundamentally we do just have to take a minute to just say that like, it is horseshit. Like the rich, when you give rich people money, they don't spend it on jobs. They don't give it to poor people. They put it in their offshore bank accounts. They buy another house. They buy another Ferrari and the rest of us can get fucked. Yeah, absolutely. And,
00:15:14
Speaker
If you follow the conversation of when Trump was doing this in the United States, this is now Trump economics that Jason Kenney is trying to, with a straight face, tell us is a reasonable, mature, grown-up thing to do. And it's absolutely not. There were no serious economists in the United States that said this is good for the long-term health of the economy. It's not. And it's really shameful when we do have conservative politicians and some economists
00:15:44
Speaker
trying to justify these corporate tax cuts because it's so discredited. It's not taken seriously at all. We all know that this doesn't work and that we're at the point where we've cut corporate taxes so much, we're also almost at the end of the road, like we couldn't possibly cut them anymore.
00:16:03
Speaker
I mean, we say it's discredited, but Alberta has this class of public intellectual and economist who are overwhelmingly supporting this, right? I mean, I think we have everyone from the, like, just the outright corporate bootlicker and kind of political operative in Jack Mintz to the, like, kind of the numbers guy in Bev Dalby at the Calgary School. And then we have, like, a quasi-useful idiot in Trevor Tomb who makes a lot of graphs and is entirely kind of too credulous about what the government is saying.
00:16:32
Speaker
about what these corporate tax cuts will do. I mean, what's the question here? Where is the economist profession going these days? Why do these people still have platforms? Why do people still treat these theories as if they are credible? Yeah, you can always find the, I think Krugman called them very serious people, right? Who could argue the economic theory, the neutral stance,
00:17:00
Speaker
Um, and if you take an argument and, um, out of its context, uh, and try to make it as neutral as you can with, with numbers and charts and, and things like that, that you can always say something, um, that you can pretend is not partisan. Um, but it's, it's, there are strong men that get, that get built up in a chart, right? Charts that aren't actually related to what's happening or,
00:17:30
Speaker
it's mostly just that they take numbers out of the context of what's happening and who has power. And I find that it's usually that's what's happening is they're saying, oh, you know, no, it doesn't matter that corporations have money and power that doesn't actually influence political decision making when all of the evidence that we see is that it does, right? So, yeah, just their ability to try to be neutral
00:17:58
Speaker
and claim that they're this neutral science, which most economists don't. But you do find that the ones on the right try to more often claim that they're just doing the numbers in the theory, and it doesn't matter that they're not accounting for what are the assumptions that they've made in the theory that aren't relevant to the current context.
00:18:21
Speaker
I mean, that might be the case with Trevor Toome or Bev Dolby, but when it comes to Jack Mintz, I mean, I think you just have to treat him like an out and out political operative at this point. And one who is like financially self-interested, right? Like Jack Mintz sits on the board of Imperial Oil.
00:18:37
Speaker
Imperial Oil, you know how much they clocked in corporate tax cut savings from Jason Kennedy's corporate tax cut?
Insider Benefits and Ethical Concerns
00:18:44
Speaker
$662 million. Like, that is just, I mean, when you look at the value for money he's providing to the Imperial Oil, like, company and board, like, just top-notch service, really. Yeah, well, he's certainly earning his paycheck there. And I do feel like Jack Mintz's credibility has waned over time. He certainly
00:19:07
Speaker
in the past was able to speak on these issues and it was very difficult to push back against him but more and more it is you do see that that he has personal maybe conflicts of interest i'm not sure if that's a legal conflict of interest but definitely it feels like he shouldn't be advising the government on how to cut corporate taxes when he personally benefits from that
00:19:34
Speaker
I mean, as a public figure, anytime you're in the public saying corporate tax cuts are good, even if that's your firmly held belief and you've got reams of data to back it up, whatever, like your company benefits, you have to say out loud, oh yeah, by the way, I sit on the board of Imperial Oil and they just got $662 million.
00:19:51
Speaker
Like, that just should be table stakes for you participating in public life when you comment on these things. But that's not what the media in Alberta is demanding. And it's nice to hear from outside of Alberta that Jack Mintz is kind of being discredited. But in Alberta, he's still treated very seriously. I mean, second of all, we've got Bev Dalby. He's an economist at the University of Calgary. He created an economic analysis and model that the UCP trotted out during the election, in which they've continued to trot out post-election.
00:20:20
Speaker
which is that these corporate tax cuts would create 55,000 jobs. Now, I know you don't have that analysis in front of you. You haven't taken an afternoon to parse its nuances, but come on. Yeah, come on. Again, so they have models. They have statistical models or other models where you make assumptions that are built into the model.
00:20:49
Speaker
If those corporations use that tax cut and invested it in building something that was productive, then it would create jobs. Yes. But what we're actually doing when we cut corporate taxes in this way is that we're changing the incentives for corporations to make those investments. There are so many ways that corporations are being, they get punished in the market
00:21:16
Speaker
if their quarterly shares prices aren't at the right place, right? If they haven't met these goalposts and there's so much information out there that they are focused on really short-term gains, this quarter, next quarter, that kind of thing, not the longer-term investments. And when we cut corporate taxes, cut the rates, then there's actually, there's no tax incentive for sort of longer-term investment either.
00:21:42
Speaker
And so we've removed all of their investment to think in the long term. And so of course they're thinking in the short term. And of course they're thinking in, how much can I personally believe this company for? How much can I get into my pockets before it all disappears? And so they don't create those investments and they don't create those jobs. And we know that they're not going to. So you can put these numbers in the model and it'll kick that out if the companies did what we wanted them to do. But we know that they're not going to.
00:22:11
Speaker
And so it's BS. And it's exactly the same. It's the other side of the coin in terms of minimum wages, right? In Ontario and Alberta, when the minimum wage went up, they had these same models. It's that, oh, it's going to kill this many jobs. And none of those predictions were anywhere close to accurate. So it boggles the mind why journalists, why the media, why the general public keeps taking them seriously when they just fail over and over again.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah. And when I talk about Trevor Toome being a useful idiot, I mean, he's literally quoted in the UCP platform, you know, like here's the quote from Trevor Toome on the corporate tax cut. I think there's a great deal of evidence and analysis suggesting that this can in fact increase investment, employment, and overall economic activity.
00:23:00
Speaker
A move to lower the corporate rate may indeed increase employment in Alberta." This is what he said on AM 770 Radio on March 4th, 2019. Same day on Twitter. Is 50,000 jobs created a credible number? I think so. This is the guy who gets trotted out as the public intellectual, the big brain economist, and this is what he believes. This is what he is saying. Right.
00:23:26
Speaker
And again, I think it's because they lack an analysis of power. They lack an analysis of what the context that these companies are working in, where they can move their money anywhere in the world.
Accessing Corporate Tax Data
00:23:38
Speaker
And because the demand isn't there for where they are and what they're doing right now, they're not going to invest that money in anything productive in Alberta right now. The demand is not there.
00:23:50
Speaker
So this is going to be the second time we're going to reference Lennon on this podcast. The thing I want to get into is who benefits, right? Lennon's famous question. And if you go through this spreadsheet and that I'm going to be making available and you want to go through this, there's still a lot of work to be done. You know, you can go and you can find the salaries of all of these people. And why don't I just take a minute actually to tell you how to do this, if you want to go out and do this kind of work on your own. It's not very difficult.
00:24:18
Speaker
Google SADAR, S-E-D-A-R dot com, and just Google that and go to there. That is where you will find all the documents that publicly traded companies have to put up. Their quarterly reports, their management discussion and analysis documents, their information management circular, their management information circulars, that's usually where you'll find salaries of the executives. These things are all publicly available. It's a pretty clunky interface and you're kind of just trolling through PDFs and kind of building data from there.
00:24:47
Speaker
But it is all publicly available. And if you want to find out what the CEO of Payto Exploration is making, that's publicly available information. And again, there's still work to be done to just find out who the villains are and just how much money they're making. But who benefits? I mean, the one thing I just even want to get out of the way before we get into who benefits is the people who just said, fuck it.
00:25:10
Speaker
And even though we are benefiting from this, we're just going to move to out of the country. And that's in Canada. And Canada was going to clock $55 million in savings over the next four years if they stayed in Alberta. And they just said, thanks, but no thanks. We're going to move to Denver. Yeah.
00:25:31
Speaker
It's just like an immediate refutation of the idea that corporate tax cuts do anything to spur investment or create jobs. All those kind of C-suite jobs just upped and moved to another country, even though they were saving all this money.
00:25:48
Speaker
But again, who benefits? This one is an interesting case, and one that really hasn't been in the media a lot. But there's an oil company named Turmaline Oil. Have you ever heard of this company? No. Angela, I don't think it's super well known. It's like a...
00:26:00
Speaker
large junior mid-cap oil and gas company based in Calgary. I don't know anything about what they actually do, but I do know who their CEO is. Their CEO is a man named Mike Rose. Mike Rose is one of the kind of premier funders of the conservative political action committee
00:26:17
Speaker
There's no other way to put this movement in Alberta. In the last two years, he's dropped $170,000 on political pacts. There was $100,000 to the Alberta Advantage Fund, $50,000 to Shaping Alberta's Future, and $20,000 to Alberta Proud.
00:26:34
Speaker
He personally has given this money. He personally, yes, Mike Rose, the person, was just making these massive financial donations to conservative political action committees. And that's just the publicly available stuff. I mean, the stuff that they have to disclose is the stuff that's related to advertising. There's all sorts of money that can change hands where they're not doing advertising, say they're hiring organizers or doing non-advertising work.
00:27:03
Speaker
But do you want to know what tourmaline oil saved as a result of the tax change? I bet it was a pretty penny. Here's the quote. It's from page 12 of their second quarter management discussion analysis document. The effect of the tax rate change resulted in a deferred income tax recovery of 108.9 billion in the second quarter of 2019. That hires a lot of nurses. It's a hell of an investment. I mean, when you look at it, $170,000 for 108 million.
00:27:31
Speaker
That's a better return than you could get on anything else, I think.
00:27:35
Speaker
even the extremely valuable industry of like pulling, you know, oil out of the ground. You will never get returns like that. I mean, the Atco family, sorry, the Atco company, which is run by the billionaire Southern family, they were able to clock $106 million in savings. A member of the Southern family, Linda Southern Heathcott, just recently was appointed the chair of the board of travel Alberta as well. So that's fun. This is the society that we live in.
00:28:03
Speaker
Um, Maxim Power, which is a company, again, probably a lot of people maybe haven't heard of, but it's a company that, uh, everyone's, uh, least favorite Twitter personality, uh, Brett Wilson owns, uh, or as we like to refer to him in the office, uh, W. Brad Wilson. They saved $2.2 million. Um, which again, not massive, but it just, you just want to point it out because, uh, fuck that guy. Uh, another fun fact about Maxim Power is that Brad Wall is also sits on the board of Maxim Power.
00:28:34
Speaker
Another very interesting case, white cap resources. You may have seen white cap resources because they were in the news prior to the federal election because their CEO, Grant Fagerheim, sent out a chain letter essentially to all the employees asking them to read this letter and send it to their loved ones and their friends and their family and their networks. This chain letter warning of Alberta separation if Justin Trudeau won.
00:29:01
Speaker
White cap resources, they saved $12.5 million, thanks to the corporate tax cut. That worked out very well for them. Again, yeah. I mean, yeah, they didn't get the federal result they wanted, but they're definitely getting what they want out of the provincial government. Payto Exploration. They have a CEO named Darren Gee. He writes a publicly available newsletter that he writes to his employees every month.
00:29:28
Speaker
I'm just going to read it. You can make your own conclusions about it. But this is from the June 2019 newsletter. I guess I would say that I'm not a big fan of the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And it's not because I'm in the hydrocarbon production business. And since we're singularly blamed for causing the Earth's climate to change, I naturally deny all of their conclusions. It's also not because asking climate change to prove the climate is changing is a little like when Warren Buffett says, you should never ask the barber if you need a haircut. Yeah, this guy.
00:29:58
Speaker
I mean, I think he's got that backwards, right? Like he's a barber in this example. In this example. Yeah. He saved 84.8 million. You hate to see it.
00:30:10
Speaker
Um, Altilink. Ah, fucking Altilink. Okay, so Altilink is a bunch of power lines that were privatized under the progressive conservative regime. God knows what, I think under Stelmak. Uh, Altilink ended up being snapped up by Warren Buffett, a man who really needs the extra cash. Altilink
00:30:29
Speaker
over the next four years is gonna end up saving 58 million thanks to the corporate tax cuts. And this is, again, something that should just be public infrastructure anyways. You can't build a competing set of fucking power lines. It's like they never should have been privatized ever.
00:30:48
Speaker
I mean, I've got a lot of these examples. I mean, stop me when you're getting sick of this. I mean, I kind of like doing this, maybe because I hate myself, but Birchcliff Energy, run by a man named, I can't remember his first name, but his last name is Tonkin. He's currently the president of CAP. He was the guy responsible for the
00:31:05
Speaker
Canadians for Canada's future viral video the like It was the the fascist kind of like petro-nationalist video that the Alberta advantage podcast broke down a really good episode I recommend you listen to it That company they saved 19 million dollars. Thanks to the corporate tax cut Yeah, and I mean this is what we see over and over and over again, right? So the people who benefit are But it's not just
00:31:34
Speaker
It's not just these people, then these people, as you say, if you go back to Michael Rose, they do fundraising for Jason Kenny and they do, they hold, you know, lovely little dinners and they collect, they support politicians that are making these decisions in their favor. And so it's this little world that's very, like almost parasitic, right?
00:32:04
Speaker
So where the politicians depend on this money to get reelected and the CEOs convince them, you know, this is the only way that it's going to work. And so the only way to challenge this is for the rest of us to realize, like there's more of us than there are of them. And we would benefit dramatically from changing how the system works because it's just ridiculous how much money governments give to these corporations.
00:32:32
Speaker
And then it just goes in their pockets. And then they drink champagne and take it, as you say, to tax havens. And it doesn't get circulated in our economy doing things that are useful.
00:32:44
Speaker
And yeah, and I think this spreadsheet and what we're talking about today is just evidence, and you see it over and over again, of just the tremendous class solidarity between the rich and conservative politicians, right? Exactly. These guys went to private school together, they vacation together, they, yeah, they have yachts and they invite each other to, you know, say at their mansion and bam for wherever they are. Do you know what I mean? Like they have this,
00:33:12
Speaker
little clique of of leads and they I think managed to convince themselves that they're not as That they're not siphoning wealth from us I think that that you would have to compartmentalize in some way or you wouldn't be able to to live with it, but But yeah, it's it's just so insular and so gross right so
00:33:39
Speaker
And the more insular that they are, I think it makes them bolder in how they talk about it. And then it's easier to poke holes in it. It's easier for us to kind of pull the curtain back and say, no, look who they're helping and who they're in it for. It's so obvious that they're in it for each other, that they're in it for the super wealthy and that they don't care in like not one iota about how this affects regular people.
Class Solidarity and Political Influence
00:34:04
Speaker
They don't even understand what regular people's lives are like anymore.
00:34:07
Speaker
whether transit works, whether schools work, whether, you know, your healthcare system works. They're not affected by it because they live in an entirely different realm. Well, and if we can see the evidence of what class solidarity can get the rich, I mean, I think it's a hell of an example of what working folks can accomplish if there's class solidarity amongst us. Yeah, for sure. And it's, uh, it's been really great. Like the more I talk to people, the more,
00:34:34
Speaker
A wider group of Canadians are actually aware of how this is working. They just don't see a path to changing it. And so the more that we can create a sense of class solidarity, that there is something that we could do to change it, that we can fight back successfully against this, because again, there's more of us than there are of them. We have more power. We just have to use it and figure out how we can use it together.
00:35:00
Speaker
Because in a class where we're gonna win if we realize we're in a class war that's the only reason the rich are winning is because they've tricked us into Not believing that the the war is happening
00:35:13
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I agree.
Advocacy for Democratic Economies
00:35:15
Speaker
One of the things that I think we have to close on here is how do you grow an economy? I think we have an example of how to just make rich people richer, but what's the flip side of this? What's the policy that is the opposite of this? Yeah, a more democratic economy, right? You need more co-ops. You need more local ownership of economic resources.
00:35:41
Speaker
because when that happens, you're more likely to make decisions that benefit the people who are working in those places or being served by those places. A, public ownership of public services, because when you have private ownership of public services, they don't care about the service, they care about the profit. Again, incentives matter. You need to publicly own
00:36:09
Speaker
transit. You need to have transit being free. You need to have public ownership of all aspects of health care, right? Like expanding those universal public services that we rely on. That makes an economy work and it actually makes, it attracts business investment because then they don't have to worry about paying for those things if you care about how that works. That makes your society
00:36:34
Speaker
a more attractive place to try to invest in business.
00:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think that there are lots of things that we know how to do and that we know would work better. For instance, like the $6 billion that, I mean, just from these 30 publicly traded companies that they're getting in corporate tax cuts. Like if we had just, I mean, we could just literally hire people to dig holes and fill them back up again. But imagine if we hired teachers or nurses or paramedics.
00:37:05
Speaker
Librarians, yeah. There's so many actual productive jobs that I would much rather have people doing than to make sure that Darren Pato is able to buy another house in the Okanagan. Exactly. And that goes back to the little video, the labor video that I talked about. And that's how you grow an economy is you get money into the hands of people who need things
00:37:34
Speaker
So because then they're actually spending it on the things that they need. So it makes their life better and it grows the economy. So if you get money into people's hands and then they can afford to go to physiotherapy that hires a physiotherapist, then it makes their lives better because now they're not in constant pain, right? So all of these pieces are really important, but
00:38:03
Speaker
Generally, you want to direct as many resources as you can to the kind of bottom half of the income distribution because they have unmet needs. There are real things that they need to buy that they can't buy right now, whether it's food, shelter, clothing, health care, even if it's just haircuts, right? Because then that employs more hairdressers. Even if it's yoga, that employs more yoga teachers. So if you have more of that,
00:38:32
Speaker
type of economy where more money is circulating that actually creates jobs. And it creates jobs here locally, right? Like you don't fly to a tax haven to get your hair cut or to take a yoga class. No, like those jobs are here and that's where we want, we want to keep the money local. We don't want it leaking out of our communities. So we want to invest it here and create jobs here and make people look better here.
Conclusion: Public Awareness and Solidarity
00:38:58
Speaker
Well, I'm getting really big, we live in a society vibes from this conversation. And I do think that we always do need to bring it back to the fact that yes, we do live in a society and we do want to take care of each other. And I think that's a fantastic way to end it. Angela, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for your time. Now is the time of the show where if people want to follow your work, if you've got anything to plug, I want to know about it. The people who are listening, they should know about it too.
00:39:26
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm on Twitter at A. McEwen, A-M-A-C-E-W-E-N. It's not spelled like the Alberta McEwen. And then at QP, I also put out a quarterly publication called Economy at Work. And the one that's coming out in December, I'm actually looking at how much the federal government has cut taxes over the past 20 years. So we've cut about 3 percentage points of GDP.
00:39:53
Speaker
So in 2000, when it was Jean-Claude Chen and Paul Martin, they were taxing, federal tax revenues were 18 percentage points of GDP. Now it's down to below 15. That works out to $75 billion in revenue every year that the federal government has foregone because of tax cuts, the corporations, to the capital gains inclusion rate.
00:40:15
Speaker
and the GSE. So that's a lot of money that we could be spending building a better society. That we're not that went into corporate pockets. I definitely want to read that please. Yeah, when that comes out, please send it our way. We'd love to to read it distribute it.
00:40:33
Speaker
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00:40:48
Speaker
We need your help to get the word out. So please, you know, you can share it through iTunes, you can share it through Stitcher, whatever your thing is of choice, post it up to your social media networks. Just put it on a cassette tape and mail it to your friend. I don't care how high-fi or low-fi this process is. The more people that hear this message, the better. Another way that we make sure that, another way that we work to make sure that this podcast continues to exist is that we solicit donations.
00:41:17
Speaker
If you like this podcast and you want to join the 300 other people who help keep this little independent media project going, you can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and a small monthly donation anywhere from five to $50 a month, whatever you can afford would really, really help us as we move forward.
00:41:35
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, or comments that you think I need to hear, I'm on Twitter, at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email, at DuncanK, at progressuberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communists for the amazing theme. Thanks again to Angela McKeown for being on the show, and goodbye.