Jim Flaherty died

[blake 3:17]

Flaherty's right wing economic policies have caused terrible problems for working people across Canada.

Flaherty's death comes as a 'terrible shock,' Harper says

The House of Commons is silent and its members are in shock over the sudden news that former finance minister Jim Flaherty has died, just weeks after resigning from cabinet.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a sombre message to his caucus Thursday afternoon.

“Today is a very sad day for me, for our government and for all of our country. I learned a short while ago that our colleague, my partner and my friend, has passed away suddenly today,” Mr. Harper said, as his wife, Laureen, who was at his side, wiped tears from her eyes and looked upwards.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/flaherty/article17919447/

[The Intransigent Faction]

Shock and sadness seems to be the general tone about this in the news and amongst people I know.

If you want to talk in terms of Canadian workers' situation in the class struggle as a result of his legacy, well, that will continue one way or another. I am a little tired of hearing about how "Thanks to the government's policies, Canada averted a housing bubble", which is a useful pretext for tightening mortgage rules. The devaluing of the dollar also doesn't help Canadian workers trying to get by.

I naturally disagree with his right-wing economic policies. That said, they were as much or more "the Harper government's" policies. There's not much to say about political implications here given his earlier resignation. Those right-wing policies will continue with the new Finance Minister.

In any case, maybe I'll catch some flak for it and maybe not, but I harbor no ill will toward him as a human being. May he rest in peace.

[blake 3:17]

Federal budget: Little here to address Canada’s most pressing issues: Olive
Not much to say about those of us living below the poverty line, or the 1.3 million Canadians out of work.

By: David Olive Business, Published on Tue Feb 11 2014
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” — Proverbs 29:18
You can take the measure of a government — or for that matter, any enterprise — by its priorities. And by those challenges and opportunities it neglects.
The Harper government’s latest budget has nothing substantial to say about a Canadian export export prowess that is perilously eroding. There’s nothing new and significant here about building a technology-based New Economy to replace our dwindling base of traditional manufacturing jobs.
The latest budget has little to say about on the 4.3 million Canadians living below the poverty line and 1.3 million of us out of work, and on the causes of the poverty crisis, among them lack of affordable housing and daycare.
Nowhere in this budget is there an exhortation to the oilpatch to ramp up its R&D to make Athabasca environmentally viable. One of Alberta’s economic mainstays thus remains in jeopardy, as the world will someday cease to support it. Already this reality is manifesting itself in U.S. political delay of approval for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, a delay that is likely to extend into next year if it’s approved at all.
There is no relief for Ontarians, whose government claims that Harper has short-changed us by $641 million in transfer payments. That’s the money that pays for our health care and education, the twin pillars of long-term prosperity.
If you’re alarmed about continued health care wait times and Canada’s recent drop from 6th to 13th among the world’s best-educated workforces, there’s no comfort in this budget that these failings are being addressed.
Harper’s recent ballyhooed proposal of about $2 billion for upgrading aboriginal-community schooling, long an international disgrace, is window dressing. The money rolls out over three years. It doesn’t even commence until two years from now. And the funds are actually a reallocation of long-delayed earlier commitments.
Why even hint at dealing with a crisis for which a meaningful solution is long overdue? One of Harper’s first acts as PM was to kill the $5 billion “Kelowna Accord” by which Paul Martin’s government sought to cover a wide range of native issues, from endemic poverty to double-digit suicide rates.
The answer is that this budget, with its happy talk about a smidgeon of consumer protection, a touch of job retraining, a tad of infrastructure spending, is meant to apply a patina of compassion and common sense to the Tories’ singular obsession with balancing the books by next year.
The Tories continue to pursue that one goal at the expense of big yet solvable problems.
To the extent that we do have a debt problem, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) accurately notes, it is with record-sized household debt. That is a consequence of continued high unemployment and the fact that, adjusting for inflation, Canada’s middle class has not had a pay raise for 30 years.
By contrast, our public finances are the envy of the world. Corporate Canada also has a clean balance sheet, undercutting justification for the additional corporate welfare in this budget.
The CCPA is not alone in its view that Canada should be “much more concerned with slow growth, a weak labour market, and income inequality than the federal government’s historically low (and falling) debt levels.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its latest report on Canada, says the same thing: Canada’s GDP growth is disturbingly anemic. But its federal finances are in great shape, and Ottawa needn’t hurry to achieve a surplus. Indeed, many economists believe a federal surplus is possible as early as this year, without a resort to false economies.
The facts on the ground thus argue for continued stimulus, and for additional investment in our people.
Yet a misguided sense of personal legacy compels Flaherty to make good on his longstanding vow to balance the books by 2015, come hell or high water.
Failing to do so would be a deep embarrassment for Flaherty. He imagines that achieving a surplus will have him standing tall in the world. There is no near-term prospect of surpluses in the U.S., Britain, Japan and so on.
But sound public finances are a means to a greater end, of building a more caring society. If that kind of genuine nation-building is an objective of Harper’s Tories, it’s one they’ve never convincingly acted on.
It says everything about the small-ball vision of this government that its latest budget vows to crack down on dubious charities. That’s a crowd-pleaser for Harper’s conservative base, but of no consequence to Canadians struggling to make ends meet.
Harper’s agenda has won sufficient electoral support to enable him to form successive governments, though a majority of Canadians have yet to endorse it in any election. Since this government came to power eight years ago our social progress has been stalled. And so it will remain, as this latest, unimaginative budget makes clear.

http://www.thestar.com/business/2014/02/11/federal_budget_little_here_to_address_canadas_most _pressing_issues_olive.html

[The Intransigent Faction]

So my mom found this lousy article...and I don't know what to tell her:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/04/10/jim-flaherty-obit_n_5127449.html

"He steered Canada through the Great Recession"...

"He fought corporate Canada over income trusts" (ironically Harper decried the Liberals trying to tax them years before: "When Ralph Goodale tried to tax income trusts, they showed us where they stood. They showed us about their attitude towards raiding seniors' hard-earned assets"---admittedly I don't fully understand this issue).

The worst part of all, though, was "He helped transform Ontario in the 1990s"...indeed.

******* Huffington Post...

[Die Neue Zeit]

(ironically Harper decried the Liberals trying to tax them years before: "When Ralph Goodale tried to tax income trusts, they showed us where they stood. They showed us about their attitude towards raiding seniors' hard-earned assets"---admittedly I don't fully understand this issue)

http://people.ucalgary.ca/~law/tutorials/L541/lesson5_Part1_intro.html


In theory, the total tax paid by a corporation and its shareholders should be the same as if the individual had earned the income directly. This is the principle of integration. No tax advantage (or disadvantage) should arise from the use of a corporation.

Income trusts before Flaherty's tax regime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_trust#Canada) were a structured loophole around this principle of tax integration.

[Onecom]

He also tried to make being homeless a crime, and force people on social assistance to get jobs or be cut off.

So there is that.

[blake 3:17]

A fitting gravestone:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/faab3c9c4fff6c421dcbbe4c656e0b75/tumblr_n43jol5FkP1sop0l0o1_250.jpg

[Sea]

“Today is a very sad day for me, for our government and for all of our country. I learned a short while ago that our colleague, my partner and my friend, has passed away suddenly today,” Mr. Harper said, as his wife, Laureen, who was at his side, wiped tears from her eyes and looked upwards.Heh, let us know if she finds anything interesting.
In any case, maybe I'll catch some flak for it and maybe not, but I harbor no ill will toward him as a human being. May he rest in peace.Shit, looks like a lot changed while I was away.

edit: well, not TOO much changed, the quote function is just as broken as before

[blake 3:17]

Interview with John Clarke of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty on Flaherty's legacy:


In an effort to highlight a critical voice on Flaherty's legacy in real human terms, I sent a series of questions to community organizer John Clarke from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty in Toronto who has dealt first hand with Flaherty's economic hits on the ground in marginalized communities in Ontario over the past decades.

Stefan Christoff : Today mainstream media outlets are lionizing Flaherty's life in politics, stretching from the "common sense" revolution in Ontario, to the austerity-driven current Conservative government in Ottawa. As an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) you dealt first hand with the impacts of Flaherty's policies on the daily life for low income, poor and working people in Ontario, could you offer some insight into the lived realities of Flaherty's policies for economically disadvantaged communities?

John Clarke : The Tory ‘Common Sense Revolution’ in the Ontario of the 1990s was one of those Thatcher or Regan like operations that sought to speed up the process of dismantling the social infrastructure, weakening unions and transferring much more wealth to those who were already the wealthiest.

Flaherty was the Finance Minister during this period and, as such, was an exceptionally influential and important figure in the implementation of the agenda. People on social assistance saw a massive cut to their grossly inadequate incomes. Single parents, overwhelmingly single mothers, had their relatively secure incomes taken from them. Precarious workers had what few protections they had available to them removed. In Toronto, the 21.6% cut to social assistance rates was followed by a 67% increase in the use of homeless shelters.

One of the defining incidents of the period was a homeless man who was found dead on the streets following a winter storm. He could not be identified when discovered because his hands were frozen to his face. Those were the politics of James Flaherty at work.
Stefan : Can you offer your comments on the soft and humanist image that major media is projecting, the CBC reports on Flaherty's "personal touch", while the National Post writes that Flaherty was a "good servant to Canada".

Across the mainstream media spectrum there seems to be a universal attempt to celebrate Flaherty, to create an image of humanist politician. I understand from many experiences within social movements that Flaherty's policies are based on extreme economic violence, can you detail how Flaherty's polices were deeply violent for so many people?

John : While we might not be able to precisely calculate it, there exists a certain number of years of human life that were lost to the political agenda and decisions of James Flaherty. People in poverty despaired or sickened as a result of the things he did. Families were broken up. Children went through formative years that were marked by inadequate diet and unhealthy housing conditions.

I don’t know anything of James Flaherty’s personal life but I can only say that his political role was that of someone who inflicted misery on hundreds of thousands of people. He was a ‘good servant’ of the ruling class and its profits and an enemy of working people and the poor.

Stefan : Any reflections on the cross political consensus on lionizing Flaherty, including the NDP, being respectful of someone's passing is one thing, but a collective dishonest accounting on the politicians record is another thing? Any thoughts on this front?

John : Generations ago, in many of the European countries, trade unions fighting for the rights of workers realized that the representatives of the employing class would never stand up for them in the parliaments so they formed labour parties and elected from working class communities men and women who they trusted to stand up for their interests.

The ruling class political representatives in those places were smart enough to conceal their contempt and disgust and welcome the working class MPs into their little club. They house trained them to shadow box during the question period but to join them for drinks afterwards and to respect the rules and decorum of the institution.

full story: http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/interview-john-clarke-ocap-jim-flaherty/22619