Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Jason Fekete reports on the growing recognition that tax evasion and avoidance are serious global problems - and the Cons' attempt to be seen nodding at the issues. Needless to say, that posturing would be far more plausible if the same Cons weren't simultaneously announcing their intention to slash the Canada Revenue Agency's enforcement capability even further (in keeping with their past moves to attack the CRA).
- Meanwhile, the fallout from Peter Penashue's acceptance of illegal corporate campaign donations continues. And it's well worth highlighting the fact that the financial agent now being labeled as an "inexperienced volunteer" in an effort to deflect blame was in fact appointed by Stephen Harper to a patronage position as his reward for that service to his party.
- In a similar vein, Craig McInnes expands on the revelations surrounding the B.C. Libs - featuring a cabinet minister who denied any knowledge of a scheme to use public resources for partisan ethnic voter targeting saying "great job" in response to an e-mail advising of the need to cover the government's tracks.
- Bruce Johnstone rightly criticizes Brad Wall's hot air over Keystone XL.
- And finally, Bob Turner grades John Gormley's paean to standardized testing. Much hilarity ensues.
So what I'm gathering from this is that it was apparently normal for corporations to make donations but normally they would get all the board members or whatever to "donate individually" so as to preserve the illusion that no corporate donations were being made. So just in this one case, some guy wasn't around to make his "individual donation" so they skipped one little step and just took the money straight from the corp. And so, you know, no wonder it slipped Penashue and Bowers' mind.
ReplyDeleteTo them, and almost certainly to the Conservative party and very likely to the Liberals as well, it's not that corporate donations are a problem. It's that you have this annoying extra step in receiving them so as to deceive the public and Elections Canada, all just to stop the NDP from getting union donations. I'm sure they wonder why all this charade is necessary and why they couldn't just ban union donations but keep corporate ones.