Canada makes real economic progress; meanwhile U.S. corporations flee to quaint medieval town in Switzerland to avoid fate of Golden Goose

Bloomberg, May 4:

Canada Seen Rebounding as Currency of Choice With Harper Winning a Mandate
By Simon Kennedy and Theophilos Argitis

Investors worldwide have a reason to make Canada the economy of choice after Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decisive election earlier this week ratified policies that helped the government outperform most of its peers among the Group of Seven industrialized countries.

After the Conservative Party won the first majority in the Ottawa-based House of Commons in seven years, Harper vowed to fulfill his pledge to eliminate the budget deficit by 2014 and cut corporate taxes and spending.
[...]
“Canada is a poster-child for the rest of the G-7,” said Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London, who remembers lamenting the state of the economy when he entered banking three decades ago. “They have commodities, links to growth-driving economies such as China and very solid policies and governance. It’s hard to pinpoint what its immediate challenge is.”
[...]
Harper sought re-election on a plan to maintain reductions in corporate tax rates for companies such as Royal Bank of Canada and Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX) that would cost the government more than C$6 billion in revenue next year. He argues lower taxes are needed to sustain the recovery and generate jobs.
[...]

There's lots more riveting news in the Bloomberg report about Canada's economic prospects but I wanted to stop at the point about reductions in corporate tax rates to ask if you saw a 60 Minutes segment aired on March 25 titled A look at the world's new corporate tax havens. It's about the flight of U.S. corporations to avoid a killer tax rate. Many have settled in a "quaint medieval town in Switzerland call Zug."

The details brought out in the 60 Minutes interview are a nightmare. We're hemorrhaging jobs here in the United States because the federal government with backing from Congress is determined to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

If you haven't seen the segment and think you know how dire the developing situation is with corporate flight, you might be in for a shock. Here's the CBS 60 Minutes transcript or watch the video of the segment, also posted at the same CBS website.

Canadian Human Rights Tribunal Refuses to Enforce Section 13

Marc Lemire's challenge to the constitutionality of Section 13 of Canada's Human Rights Act has taken quite a turn. Edward Lustig, the presiding Member of a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, adjourned a Section 13 case sine die pending Canada's Supreme Court ruling on Marc's case.

Unless the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) somehow gets around Lustig's decision, this seems to mean all pending Tribunal decisions on Section 13 cases are suspended until Marc's case is settled, which could take years.

For more information on Lustig's decision and an introduction to Section 13 see Marc's March 28 post at his blog. And see Mark Steyn's September 2009 A Landmark Victory for a summary of a Tribunal decision on Marc's Section 13 case, which allowed his constitutional challenge to Section 13 to proceed.

While pondering how much Marc has accomplished during his seven-year battle with the CHRC I found myself recalling something Mark Steyn observed about him earlier this year:

Different people react to "human rights" torture in different ways: Ezra Levant and I are oppositional by nature and by profession. You take a swing at us, we'll swing back. Go ahead, "human rights" punks, make our day. So is Marc Lemire, whose bloody-minded refusal to sit there and take it wound up inflicting more damage on the racket than anything else.

Yes. However, Marc is fighting much worse than a racket. On paper a democratic society is one governed by laws, not men. But what happens when the law supports an extrajudicial process in which truth is no defense? That is what happened in Canada with the enactment of the 1977 Human Rights Act, although it took years for the implications to manifest. A harbinger was a minor incident that played out unnoticed at the time by all but a handful of Canadians:

There might have been a pianist playing at Toronto's super-fashionable Courtyard Café that July 3 in the summer of 1978. Although probably not, given it was lunchtime. Still, those were more melodious times. Schools and airports had no grating security procedures. Canada's thought police were nascent and complaints to them could be smoothed out over a plate of smoked salmon.

I was sharing my salmon with the rabbi who had married me a few years earlier and had now been sent by his fellow commissioners on the Ontario Human Rights Commission to informally straighten me out.

The Manitoba and the Ontario human rights commissions had complained about an article I had written for Maclean's on the "British disease." The U.K. was lurching from crisis to crisis with strikes that left bodies unburied and bread unbaked. I had used the word "Huns" to explain British apathy as in "the Huns are no longer at the gate."

The word was clearly used in a historical context, but to no avail. In the bowels of Manitoba, a lobby group of professional grievance collectors found solace for my wounding word in Canada's up-to-date human rights legislation. I was, wie schrecklich, slagging off all German Canadians.

After a bout of correspondence I saw both [commissions] off but not before they had tried to get me censored, possibly fired, and all behind my back. Fortunately, then-editor of Maclean's Peter C. Newman felt I ought to be made aware of their complaints. ...[1]

As to where speech censorship in the name of protecting human rights leads, I think I explained that well enough recently with this example of Pakistan's blasphemy law in action:

In October 2000, Pakistani authorities charged Younus Shaikh, a physician, with blasphemy on account of remarks that students claimed he made during a lecture. The students alleged that, inter alia, Shaikh had said Prophet Mohammed’s parents were non-Muslims because they died before Islam existed. A judge ordered that Shaikh pay a fine of 100,000 rupees and that he be hanged. On 20 November 2003, a court retried the matter and acquitted Shaikh, who fled Pakistan for Europe soon thereafter.

All that stands between the hangman and you for speaking your mind are not laws but people who value freedom. If you don't understand that, by the time you comprehend the implications of Section 13 and Marc Lemire's battle with the CHRC, you will.

1) I feel like suing them myself but that's not the point; Barbara Amiel, Maclean's, January 9, 2008

Obama and the silencing of dissent

Up north, Marc Lemire is still battling it out with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and their attempts to quash freedom of speech in Canada. The CHRC has been putting great energy into turning itself "into a quasi national security-type agency," charges Marc. In this way any internet postings deemed politically incorrect by the CHRC could be judged a threat to Canada's national security.

When I first got involved with the battles of Canada's free speechers, which was in January 2008, I knew little about the maze of authoritarian-minded cadres that had been laboring for decades under the radar of the American public's attention, nor of Obama's connection with them.

So while I knew that the battles of Canada's free speech advocates would eventually be played out in America I saw those as distant on the horizon. And I believed freedom of speech in America would be hard to dismantle because of the wording of the First Amendment.

Fast forward to today. There are growing concerns in the American news profession about Barack Obama's draconian tactics to control media coverage of his administration and policies:

Much of the criticism is off the record, both out of fear of retaliation and from worry about appearing whiny. But those views were voiced by a cross section of the television, newspaper and magazine journalists who cover the White House.

Unless you're aware of the concerns and the authoritarian approach of Obama and his administration it might be hard to read the following May 19 report from RBO, crossposted here, without thinking, It can't happen in America.

Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for World Net Daily, reports from New York:

It was President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, who hired radical regulatory czar Cass Sunstein as a Harvard law professor.

Sunstein and Kagan have expressed views about freedom of speech that should be of concern.

In February 2008, Kagan, serving as dean of Havard Law School, announced the arrival to Havard of Sunstein, then a longtime University of Chicago scholar. Kagan called Sunstein “the preeminent legal scholar of our time.”

WND previously reported Sunstein drew up a "First Amendment New Deal" – a new "Fairness Doctrine" that would include the establishment of a panel of "nonpartisan experts" to ensure "diversity of view" on the airwaves.

WND also reported that in a recently released book, "On Rumors," Sunstein argued websites should be obliged to remove "false rumors" while libel laws should be altered to make it easier to sue for spreading such "rumors."

In the 2009 book, Sunstein cited as a primary example of "absurd" and "hateful" remarks, reports by "right-wing websites" alleging an association between President Obama and Weatherman terrorist William Ayers.

He also singled out radio talker Sean Hannity for "attacking" Obama regarding the president's "alleged associations."

Ayers became a name in the 2008 presidential campaign when it was disclosed he worked closely with Obama for years. Obama also was said to have launched his political career at a 1995 fundraiser in Ayers' apartment.

Meanwhile, in a lengthy academic paper, Sunstein, argued the U.S. government should ban "conspiracy theorizing," WND reported.

Among the beliefs Sunstein would ban is advocating that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

Sunstein also recommended the government send agents to infiltrate "extremists who supply conspiracy theories" to disrupt the efforts of the "extremists" to propagate their theories.

Just yesterday, Breitbart.com posted a video of Sunstein proposing that Congress hold hearings about mandates ensuring websites post links to a diversity of views on issues.

Meanwhile, when it comes to other First Amendment issues, Kagan shows strong beliefs for court intervention in speech, going so far as to assert free speech should be weighed against "societal costs."

She has advocated silencing some kinds of speech, stating, for example, speech that promotes "racial or gender inequality" could be "disappeared."

In her 1993 article "Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V," for the University of Chicago Law Review, Kagan writes:

I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.

Also in a 1996 paper, "Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine," Kagan argued it may be proper to suppress speech because it is offensive to society or to the government.

The paper asserted First Amendment doctrine is comprised of "motives and … actions infested with them," and she goes so far as to claim, "First Amendment law is best understood and most readily explained as a kind of motive-hunting."

Kagan's name was also on a brief, United States v. Stevens, dug up by the Washington Examiner, stating: "Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs."

Kagan's academic writings are sparse – just nine articles, two of which are book reviews.

Her stand on free speech could become a hot button issue as the Senate confirmation hearings convene.

With research by Brenda J. Elliott