To suggest Ottawa targets charities violates a vital public trust – Griffiths’ Apologetics

2015/04/25 Leave a comment

Griffiths might have a case if the Government and CRA were transparent about the audits underway and the charities targeted. But without even acknowledging this lack of transparency on the Government’s part, his defence has no credibility and ironically mirrors those who only see a conspiracy by not seeing any cause for concern.

It is the Government’s rhetoric and handling of the audits that has damaged the public trust. Groups are simply exercising their democratic rights in raising legitimate concerns regarding the apparent selective choice of charities for audit. Sad:

Yet this we all know: some charities spend far more than 10 per cent of their revenues on political activities and do so flagrantly. This abuse of the public trust by a small group of charities is what Revenue Canada’s “political” audits is cracking down on, and rightly so. The assertion that groups with a “left,” or for that matter, a “right” political orientation are being disproportionally singled out by the Charities Directorate is nonsense. What Revenue Canada is doing is focusing its audits on charities that publicly engage in advocacy (on their websites, in publications, through events, etc.) to determine if they are violating the 10 per cent cap and/or are involved in prohibited activities. Don’t just take my word on it. The director-general of the Charities Directorate, a career public servant, has gone on the record to rule out ideological biases in the audit process: “We are not targeting charities that have particular political leanings.”

And now we get to the deeply damaging part of this debate. The inference, repeated over and over in the media, that Revenue Canada officials are following the political direction of Stephen Harper’s cabinet, right down to the specific charities being selected for “political” audits. Such a contention is oblivious to how the federal civil service actually operates vis-à-vis its political masters.

As is the case thousands of times every day across the government, public servants in the Charities Directorate are setting about interpreting and acting on how best to bring about a specific policy outcome set out by Parliament. In this instance, nothing more and nothing less than ensuring that political activities by the charitable sector are in line with the current law and policy. To obviate the public’s trust in this basic process of governance – especially on the part of a department whose work is as sensitive as Revenue Canada’s – through wild speculation is the height of civic irresponsibility. If there are facts to back up the allegation that Revenue Canada is being partisan or ideological in its auditing of charities then we do indeed have a serious problem; one worthy of a vigorous national debate. But absent such a bombshell we are harming the public’s legitimate belief in the independence and competency of the federal civil service.

The debate we should be having is how charities could be more active participants in public policy discussion and formation. Should we be raising the 10 per cent cap on political activities? Can “think tanks” by virtue of what they do be charities? Are the legal definitions of what is or is not a legitimate charitable purpose too prescriptive for 21st-century Canada? All important questions, the answers to which will most certainly not be found in more conspiratorial parsing of Revenue Canada’s audit of political activities in the charitable sector.

To suggest Ottawa targets charities violates a vital public trust – The Globe and Mail.

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Clement: “I’m here also for the public servant who wants to work hard, who needs sick benefits when they are truly sick.”

2015/04/24 Leave a comment

Really?

When I was truly sick (cancer), I could use my bank of sick days (and it was considerable) as well as drawing upon discretionary sick leave for executives on full salary, before going on long-term disability at 70 percent salary.

So these and related changes impact upon those with catastrophic illnesses in a very material way, not just curbing abuse (of which there is some):

But the government doesn’t necessarily expect to realize the full $900 million in savings, Treasury Board President Tony Clement said Wednesday after the weekly Conservative caucus meeting.

“The budget is the budget, and the savings are the savings,” Clement said. “But there is some breathing room for me recognized in that calculation.”

The government has told civil service unions it expects to eliminate the system that allows public servants to bank sick days and carry them over from year to year.

Ottawa is hoping instead to provide short-term disability benefits through an insurance company.

Talks have been going on for the last year and are expected to last until at least June with 47 meeting days scheduled to take place, on top of the nearly 200 negotiating sessions that have been held so far.

Clement said he wants to bargain in good faith, even though the government is already counting the $900 million in savings from future sick leave liability toward its projected $1.4-billion surplus in 2015-16.

“They clearly want a Liberal or an NDP government to negotiate with, who will roll over and accept their positions,” Clement said of the unions with which he is bargaining.

“I’m here for the taxpayer,” he said. “I’m here also for the public servant who wants to work hard, who needs sick benefits when they are truly sick.”

Clement says public servants’ sick days an easy target for cuts (paywall)

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Bernard Drainville se retire de la course

2015/04/24 Leave a comment

The coronation continues:

« J’y allais pour gagner. Ceux qui me connaissent savent que je joue pour gagner. Toujours. J’ai tout donné, comme mon équipe, mais il faut se rendre à l’évidence: dans les dernières semaines, le vote s’est cristallisé et Pierre-Karl a rassemblé une nette majorité derrière lui », a déclaré M. Drainville lors d’une conférence de presse mercredi après-midi. « Continuer la course en sachant cela n’aurait pas eu de sens. Pour continuer, y’aurait fallu mener une campagne très dure, trop dure. Il ne faut pas être trop égoïste là-dedans. Il faut penser à l’équipe, à notre parti et à la cause qu’on porte », a-t-il ajouté.

À ce moment-ci, cinq des sept députés ayant donné leur appui à sa candidature gagneront aussi le camp de M. Péladeau. Il s’agit de Sylvain Gaudreault (Jonquière), Alain Therrien (Sanguinet), Mathieu Traversy (Terrebonne), Sylvain Roy (Bonaventure) et Guy Leclair (Beauharnois) font partie du lot. Les députes d’Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Carole Poirier, et de Berthier, André Villeneuve, poursuivaient quant à eux leur réflexion mercredi après-midi.

La décision de Bernard Drainville suscite l’étonnement dans les rangs du PQ. L’élu de Marie-Victorin avait recommandé jeudi dernier aux militants péquistes de ne pas céder « à la tentation de s’accrocher à un sauveur », qui pourrait n’être qu’« un mirage », mais plutôt de choisir un chef capable de faire gagner le PQ « au jour un ». M. Drainville a ouvert trois jours plus tard (dimanche) un local de campagne dans l’arrondissement de Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve à Montréal. Pourtant, il songeait déjà à abandonner la course à la chefferie. Ses députés alliés ont été associés à sa réflexion lundi et mardi.

« J’ai rapidement réuni mon équipe et nous avons convenu que notre tâche pour la suite était de continuer à porter nos idées, tout en amorçant dès maintenant le rassemblement. J’ai rencontré Pierre-Karl et nous avons eu des discussions très franches et amicales pour éclaircir certaines questions et préparer la suite. Je dois dire que ça a porté ses fruits », a soutenu M. Drainville, accompagné de sa garde rapprochée.

Bernard Drainville se retire de la course | Le Devoir.

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Silence of the charities – Renzetti

2015/04/21 Leave a comment

Elizabeth Renzetti on what appears to be selective criteria in CRA charity audits:

If you look at the 52 groups that have been targeted for audits since the Harper government’s 2012 crackdown on political activity by charities, it’s not hard to see what joins them: advocacy of causes that the Conservative government thinks are, by its own admission, “radical.” I don’t actually know the full list, because it’s not been revealed, but last year the CBC revealed the names of seven environmental charities, including the David Suzuki Foundation and Tides Canada. The free-speech group PEN Canada and human-rights advocates Amnesty International were also targeted. Some 400 academics signed a letter denouncing the audit into the political activities of the progressive think tank Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The CRA swears up and down that there is no political motivation to the audits, but how is the public to know? The agency doesn’t reveal who is the target of its audits, nor how they’re prepared. Charities live in fear of catching the eye of Sauron.

“Among environmental groups right now there’s a broad reluctance to speak out,” says Calvin Sandborn, director of the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre. “It’s kind of like in Nixon’s America where you didn’t want to be the enemy that he’d sic the IRS on.”

The law students working with Prof. Sandborn recently released a report on the troubling legal underpinnings of the current audit system, and its need for reform. (Mr. Harper’s government may not have been the first to target charities, but it was certainly one of the more vehement, setting aside $13.4-million for audits shortly after adding “environmentalists” to the roster of threats Canada faces.)

Canada’s charities are hobbled in a bunch of ways, the report found. The CRA’s rules around what constitutes “political activity” are murky and confusing; there is little transparency about how those rules are applied; charities subject to audit often have to spend precious resources putting together documents for auditors and providing legal training for staff; and most important, many charities are self-censoring for fear of breaching the 10 per cent rule and facing shutdown by the CRA.

Although the report does not come to any conclusions about whether the current spate of audits are politically motivated, it does find the threat alone has a sinister chilling effect: “The important thing is that the audits themselves – and the mere perception that they may be targeted – are clearly silencing charities that have much to offer society.”

Other countries around the world don’t hobble the political advocacy of their charities the way Canada does. In some countries, like the Netherlands, lobbying by charities is encouraged. In others, like England, the body that oversees charities is an independent entity at arm’s length from government (in Canada, the CRA falls under the remit of the Minister of Revenue.) In the U.S., charities that spend too much on political activities (already set at a far more generous level than here) are taxed rather than shut down.

Silence of the charities – The Globe and Mail.

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Stephen Maher: Can you remind us how you care about your opponents’ rights too, Mr. Harper?

2015/04/21 Leave a comment

Seems like an audit of the Church’s charitable status seems in order 🙂

It seems likely the P.E.I. church is secretly doing its last-minute cancellations of Liberal events to get revenge on the party for Trudeau’s abortion policy.

I hope that’s what they’re up to, because the alternative — that they are telling the truth — is chilling.

Grecco said the church is afraid that if it allows Liberals to hold events in its halls, the church could have to face auditors. [the Church seems not to fear repercussions from holding Conservative events]

“That would jeopardize our standing as a charitable status with the (Canada Revenue Agency),” Grecco said.

That seems like a weak excuse from an organization trying to avoid the truth, but who knows?

In 2012, the CRA threatened to take away the tax-free status of a magazine published by the Mennonites because they published some editorials that were critical of Harper’s wise environmental stewardship.

The CRA’s political auditors have also taken a hard line with the Kairos church charity, various anti-pipeline groups and, of course, the David Suzuki Foundation.

They even targeted Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., bird watchers who were unwise enough to criticize the environmental policy of Conservatives in their bird-watching circulars.

Is it possible that some of the prime minister’s auditors in the CRA have been excessively zealous in carrying out the leader’s wishes, to the point they are frightening churches into cancelling events from opposition parties?

The idea is ridiculous.

We can be sure Harper wants church halls to open their doors to events for all parties, because he supports the fundamental democratic rights of all Canadians.

It’s absurd to think, as the Harper haters would have you believe, that he doesn’t care about the rights of those who disagree with him.

Still, maybe he should say so from time to time, just to make it crystal clear.

Stephen Maher: Can you remind us how you care about your opponents’ rights too, Mr. Harper? | National Post.

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Ottawa’s ‘Strong Proud Free’ slogan can’t be explained because it’s a secret

2015/04/21 Leave a comment

Both sad and funny, the contortions required to justify public funds for quasi-partisan funding:

The genesis of the Harper government’s “Strong Proud Free” slogan that is currently bombarding Canadian television viewers is considered a cabinet confidence and will be sealed from public scrutiny for 20 years.

A request by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act seeking any background rationale for the tagline, which is being used to punctuate all the latest taxpayer-funded advertising, has come up empty.

That’s because a 149-page Treasury Board submission on advertising has been deemed advice to cabinet, placing it behind a lead sheet of secrecy that even the federal information commissioner can’t penetrate. No title for the submission, nor a date, author or even the department that originally prepared it can be revealed.

A spokesman for the Privy Council Office, the bureaucracy that supports the Prime Minister’s Office, would only say that the slogan is “drawn from the thematics” of the government’s 2013 throne speech.

Opposition critics point out the language is also drawn from the 2011 Conservative party platform and mirrors the themes promoted as Conservative values on the party website and in fundraising pitches.

“Using cabinet confidentiality on something that should be so benign is ridiculous,” said Mathieu Ravignat, the NDP Treasury Board critic.

“They’ve been caught using a partisan tagline and they’re hiding behind cabinet confidentiality to avoid the political fallout.”

No minister or department will claim responsibility for the whole-of-government marketing campaign, and requests for comment from the Prime Minister’s Office were returned by the Privy Council, which co-ordinates the development of government advertising.

“Section 23 of the communications policy of the government of Canada states that institutions must not use public funds to purchase advertising in support of a political party,” PCO spokesman Raymond Rivet said in an email.

“All government of Canada advertising is designed to comply with the guidance set out in the policy.”

Ottawa’s ‘Strong Proud Free’ slogan can’t be explained because it’s a secret – Politics – CBC News.

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Something of a compromise on the census?

2015/04/20 Leave a comment

This is a significant improvement, given that income reporting through tax returns should be more accurate than self-reporting. Of course, the broader issues related to the NHS versus Census remain:

But StatsCan has made one notable change to the process.

. . . in order to reduce the time required and to make it easier for Canadians to respond to the National Household Survey, income questions will be replaced with more precise tax and benefit data that have been available to Statistics Canada since 1985. As this will be done for all Canadians, income information for 2016 will be the most accurate in the history of the census.

What does this mean?

Within the 2011 national household survey were various questions about income. But respondents were also given the option to skip those, if they agreed to let Statistics Canada access information already provided in their tax filings.

… In addition to saving respondents time, StatsCan says it will save the agency money. In the case of 2016, income data will be linked to census responses.

Liberal MP Ted Hsu had proposed a private member’s bill to, among other things, reinstate the long-form census. That bill was defeated in February, but, at the time, he told me about a possible compromise: adding some number of questions to the short-form census to provide a better statistical basis. UBC economist Kevin Milligan dubbed this the “medium-form census” and Milligan says he’s somewhat pleased with the change. “I think it is a step toward a medium-form census,” he says. “If I couldn’t have a long-form census, and I was asked for one change to the short form, this is what I would have asked for.”

Hsu would still rather have the long-form census—something the Liberals are committed to reinstating if they form government—and notes that the voluntary nature of the NHS will still create problems. Hsu also thinks it would be useful to link tax and benefit data to the NHS so that income could be correlated with dwelling, education and labour market information. Milligan would also rather have income data linked to the NHS, but says, “Having it for short form gets you pretty close to the tools you need to make some decent weights that make all the other surveys (like NHS) more useful.”

And though Hsu doesn’t think the use of tax and benefit information is a big deal, he does think there needs to be a conversation about possible privacy implications if the government moves further to use administrative data that it already possesses. Back in 2010, when debate arose over the government’s decision to eliminate the long-form census, the Scandinavian model of data collection and use raised as a possible alternative, but the databases maintained by those countries might raise questions for Canadians about the handling of personal information.

Something of a compromise on the census? – Macleans.ca.

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What conservatives really care about

2015/04/15 Leave a comment

Interesting perspective by Sunstein of Jonathan Haidt’s assessment of the similarities and differences between the values of  liberals and conservatives:

In his later work, Haidt has rightly emphasized a sixth moral foundation, one that conservatives and liberals both respect, but that they understand differently: liberty. He finds that conservatives are more likely to emphasize the right to be let alone, while liberals emphasize the rights of vulnerable groups, such as racial minorities, whose freedom requires (in their view) government support. Nonetheless, the biggest and most consistent partisan differences involve loyalty, authority and sanctity.

Haidt’s central claim is that across partisan lines, people often fail to understand one another, because a moral concern that strongly motivates one group may be obscure or unintelligible to another. Democrats are wrong to be puzzled when rural and working-class Americans turn out to favor Republicans. There is no puzzle here, because Republicans are more likely to speak to their deepest moral commitments.

These claims are arresting, but it’s not clear that they are entirely right. Insofar as liberals focus on the environment, they are often motivated by ideas about the sanctity of nature. More than conservatives, liberals appear disgusted by cigarette smoking. Nor are they indifferent to loyalty: If a civil rights leader publicly opposed affirmative action, or if a prominent Democrat broke with the party on health care or climate change, many liberals would feel a sense of betrayal. Conservatives may be more likely to emphasize loyalty in the abstract, but in concrete cases, everyone cares about that virtue.

That said, Haidt’s general conclusions are founded on evidence, not speculation, and he has compiled a mountain of evidence to support his conclusions. There’s a big lesson here for those who aspire to public office, including the White House: If they neglect the values of loyalty, authority and sanctity, they’re not going to speak to the moral commitments of a large segment of the American electorate.

Suspect this also holds true for Canada.

What conservatives really care about

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Cohen: Time to move beyond the myth of Vimy

2015/04/13 4 Comments

Andrew Cohen on Vimy, with help from Jack Granatstein:

“For the first time, Canadians soldiers fought as one unit, under the command of Canadian officers and employing tactics developed by Canadians,” according to an article in the National Post in 2013. “And we won, trouncing the Germans where our allies had failed and congratulating ourselves ever since.”

As J.L. Granatstein argues, that view “is almost completely wrong. Almost. All that it gets right is that Canadians have congratulated themselves ever since.”

Granatstein, the highly decorated military historian who chaired the advisory board of the Vimy Foundation until 2014, is not belittling the foundation or Canada’s role in the Allied offensive that spring. Nor am I.

But, as he points out in his provocative new book, The Greatest Victory: Canada’s One Hundred Days, 1918, we have come to believe a more comforting mythology. His persuasive point is that our decisive impact came in the last three months of the war, that those were our greatest battles.

At Vimy, Granatstein writes, the Canadian Corps was not commanded by a Canadian but by British Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng. The planners were not Canadians, as widely thought, but Britons. Seven of nine of the Heavy Artillery Groups that put Canadians on Vimy Ridge were from the Royal Artillery. And the supplies, weapons and ammunition were largely from Britain, he says.

While thousands of the soldiers at Vimy were born in Canada, most were recent British immigrants to Canada. (Indeed, we had no citizenship then.)

Most important – and hardest for us to accept – is that Vimy changed little. Yes, we took the ridge with courage, daring and innovation, a magnificent victory. But the Germans retreated a few miles east into new trenches, suffering a “tactical” more than a strategic defeat.

“Vimy regrettably did not win the war or even substantially change its course,” concludes Granatstein.

Yet that is not what Canadians know about Vimy. More likely, they hear that it “began our evolution from dominion to independent nation.” Or, more breathlessly, it marked “the birth of a nation.”

It helped that the battle opened under gun metal skies on Easter Sunday, fostering a poetic sense of resurrection. That some 10,300 were killed or wounded, that they fought through snow and sleet, that it was our greatest victory in the war up to then – all contributed to a national mythology.

But the birth of a nation? Lord, we had been here for 300 years, and organized as a country since 1867. To say that we fell from the heavens in 1917 denies centuries of achievement and sacrifice. That we began to emerge in the world afterward because we went to the Versailles Conference is an empty boast; in reality, we had little international influence until the Second World War.

All this may be useful to those who crave a comforting narrative. A century ago, as an adolescent people, we needed one.

Today we should remember Vimy. But we should also ask what we were doing there, and in the slaughterhouse of the Great War itself, and what the war did to us. That’s what a mature, self-confident people does.

Vimy is a myth. It’s time to move beyond it.

Cohen: Time to move beyond the myth of Vimy | Ottawa Citizen.

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Employment Equity in the Public Service of Canada 2013–14

2015/04/10 Leave a comment

EE - TBS 2013-14 Summary Chart

Disappointing that TBS has not updated labour market availability (LMA) from 2006 (unlike Labour Canada for federally-regulated sectors – banking, communications, transport – has (17.8 percent visible minorities). However, while visible minorities remain under-represented, the hirings, promotions and separations data is relatively strong:

As at March 31, 2014, all four employment equity designated groups exceeded their workforce availability, as determined from 2006 Census data. Aboriginal peoples continued to increase their representation, from 5.0 per cent to 5.1 per cent; members of a visible minority group increased their representation from 12.6 per cent to 13.2 per cent; the representation of persons with disabilities decreased marginally from 5.8 per cent to 5.7 per cent; and women’s representation decreased slightly from 54.2 per cent to 54.1 per cent.

Within the executive cadre, representation rates continued to exceed workforce availability for three of the four designated groups. Women increased their representation from 46.0 per cent to 46.1 per cent; persons with disabilities increased their representation from 5.3 per cent to 5.4 per cent; and members of a visible minority group increased their representation from 8.2 per cent to 8.5 per cent. The representation of Aboriginal peoples remained stable at 3.7 per cent, below their workforce availability for executives.

For those interested, this table shows the overall trend over the past 5 years:

2009-10

2010-11

2011-12

2012-13

2013-14
Representation

10.7%

11.3%

12.1%

12.6%

13.2%
Hirings

11.3%

9.8%

10.7%

14.7%

16.0%
Promotions

12.1%

12.5%

13.5%

13.5%

13.8%

Separations

6.4%

7.1%

7.7%

8.9%

9.9%

Despite most of these years being under restraint and cutbacks, it is encouraging that representation, hirings and promotions continue to increase (separations may reflect cutbacks).

While TBS has not yet issued a revised LMA, a rough calculation would suggest the LMA has increased from 12.4 in 2006 to 15.0 percent in 2011.

This is based on the percentage of the population which is visible minority (19.1 percent) and adjusting for the percentage that are also Canadian citizens (78.3 percent).

Another view of public service employment equity can be derived from the National Household Statistics on public sector employment, which covers all federal public institutions (less the Canadian Forces), not just the Schedule 1 departments covered in the TBS reports:

 

Multiculturalism in Canada-Evidence and Anecdote Deck - April 2015.044 Multiculturalism in Canada-Evidence and Anecdote Deck - April 2015.045

Employment Equity in the Public Service of Canada 2013–14.

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