The Sixth Estate

In recent months the Canadian airline industry has been pushing, hard, for lower costs. Not content with having the Harper regime order its employees to work under threat of legal sanction (so much for small government, eh?), Air Canada apparently wants to have that same government give it a variety of other under-the-table handouts, too. This lobbying has resulted in several reports in recent months, including from the Senate and, this week, from the Conference Board of Canada.

In light of the ongoing Margaret Wente plagiarism scandal, it seems only fair to point out that the Conference Board of Canada has a plagiarism problem, too. Unlike the Globe & Mail, though, they more or less dealt with it. I’m not condoning what happened. Some disturbing evidence emerged about corporate influence over report-writing. But on the whole, they did the right thing with regard to plagiarism: they recalled the reports, acknowledged plagiarism occurred, admitted “undue reliance on… a funder,” and contracted an Osgoode law professor to prepare new reports. Bonus points for all that.

Both the Senate report and the Conference Board report have received entirely favourable and uncritical news coverage, of course, which is less a comment on the quality of the reports, than on the negligence of journalists. Even more extraordinary, though, are the ways in which some of the findings contradict one another. There’s really no other way to put this than as follows: the Conference Board is better at producing sound, independent analysis under industry pressure than our own government is. Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, it’s not hard to tell who the more competent research organization is. The Senate report is 21 pages long; the Conference Board report is 43 pages long.

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The Montreal-based think tank Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) has recently been in the news for publishing a study which, in the media’s collective eye, purports to disprove NDP leader Tom Mulcair’s comments about “Dutch disease” — basically, blaming the decline in Canadian manufacturing on the rise of the Albertan tarsands sector because the latter boosts the Canadian dollar. Instead, the IRPP finds that manufacturing is declining because of a rising dollar, but the dollar isn’t rising because of the tarsands.

This conclusion is at odds with a peer-reviewed study about to be published in Resource and Energy Economics, which received Industry Canada funding several years ago but has now been renounced by the government. Views that might have been politically acceptable three years ago are now evidence of treason instigated by the NDP.

IRPP’s study may well be the accurate one, even if it’s not the peer-reviewed one. Unfortunately, recent events have called IRPP’s political neutrality into question, and to be perfectly honest, that makes studies like this one, which appear to support government policy and are released at a time when government policy is in urgent need of just such a study, highly questionable indeed.

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Former Reform Party MP turned Fraser Institute fellow and Vancouver economist Herb Grubel has taken to the pages of the Globe & Mail to drum up support for a new edition of his Fraser Institute “study” purporting to show that immigrants soak up an average of $6000 extra in government handouts every year.

I didn’t like last year’s report, not least because of its draconian proposal for a privatized Big Brother-style surveillance network that would monitor immigrants’ employment, sick time, etc. I also speculated that the numbers they were using were a little bit flimsy, and a little while later, some SFU academics said I was right. In fact, they said, immigrants only cost an extra $450 per head. Ah, statistics. You can prove anything with statistics.

Which is why I’m so happy to see that Mr. Grubel has published a new study, revising his old results and updating them with a new, sophisticated methodology. Right?

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Alternate title: Toronto Star Leaves Key Piece of Information Out of Coverage of Mowat Centre.

The Mowat Centre, it seems, is unhappy about the state of federal-provincial transfers in this country. Ontario and British Columbia are being short-changed to the tune of billions of dollars because it fails to account for the cost of living, says the Mowat Centre. For all I know, they’re probably right, although in my mind no government that is actively considering tax cuts has any right to complain about the fact that they’re not getting enough handouts from Ottawa.

But come to think of it, there was a key piece of info that used to be on the Mowat Centre’s front page, which seems somehow germane to this discussion. Now, where could it have gone…

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Among all the secretive and secretly funded think tanks in Canadian politics, surely the most preposterous rationalization is provided by the Montreal Economic Institute:

Although the MEI discloses the amount and the breakdown of its funding, its policy is not to list specific donors. Publishing such a list would give organizations similar to the MEI an opportunity to solicit its donors directly, which is not desirable.

Yeah. Exactly what “organizations similar to the MEI” are there, anyways? There are a half-dozen major free-market think tanks in Canada, they get the lion’s share of their funding from the same sources, and I’m pretty sure that everybody in that privileged circle of wealthy welfare bums and their loyal water-carriers in the think tank sector already knows everybody else. I honestly doubt that the Fraser Institute, say, is desperately trying to poach donors away from its sister institutes, but perhaps I’m underestimating the ruthlessness of these propagandists.

In any case, it’s patently apparent that they also don’t really want us to know, probably coupled with the fact that at least a few donors just want to remain anonymous. So I’m going to perform a public service. I hope that representatives of “organizations similar to the MEI” are reading this list, because I’m about to make my best effort to give you a list that you can use to poach their donors, assuming there are any that aren’t already giving you money anyways.

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Picking up where I left off last week, I want to explore what we know about the “objective” process by which an “independent” think tank like the Fraser Institute goes about choosing a topic to write a research paper about. As economists, they will doubtless nod in approval when I give you the basic maxim of that profession: there is no such thing as a free lunch. And in the research profession, there is no such thing as a free paper. So, every time the Fraser Institute publicizes one of their new studies, the question you should ask yourself is: who paid for this study, and should that affect how I read it?

Sometimes the Institute acknowledges its funding sources: for instance, the Institute openly acknowledges that its annual mining industry survey is paid for by a trade group, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada. Other times, it is not apparent that any dedicated funding was provided for the project to go forward, even though I am absolutely certain that it was. Unattributed studies are not uncommon, and I caught the C.D. Howe Institute carrying water for the private trash lobby in just this fashion last year.

What you might be interested to learn is who else shares these ideas. Before getting to that, though, I want to back up a little and review what we do know about how the Fraser Institute conducts research. As the Institute proudly declares, it is “independent,” and “non-partisan,” and takes no government money (though it it happy to issue tax receipts to that its donors can collect government money). Its researchers are top-notch, and their work is vetted, when necessary, by a review board. Until I began writing about the board earlier this year, several of its supposed members were actually dead. They’ve since clarified that little problem.

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That definitely is the leading possibility, as a new report from the Fraser Institute has finally updated the listing of that group’s Editorial Advisory Board to reflect the total number of dead members, which now stands at six. The Fraser Institute, for those who are unaware, is a radical think tank which, among other activities, has taken money from the tobacco industry to oppose cigarette taxes and to suggest that secondhand smoke does not cause lung cancer.

It is possible that the Fraser Institute has made this move entirely independently, but I doubt it. The Editorial Advisory Board, supposedly the “final arbiter” in the Institute’s BS peer review process, consists of a number of mostly old scholars, some of whom were dead. After I repeatedly poked fun at them for this, they updated their Advisory Board list to indicate “Members” (the living ones) and “Past Members.” The Past Members were Current Members as recently as a few months ago, even though some have been dead for almost 20 years.

Only one problem: Sir Alan Walters was still listed as a current member, despite the fact he has been dead since 2009. I happily pointed this out, correctly (in my opinion) noting that this was probably an indication that the Editorial Advisory Board doesn’t actually do much editing or advising. Well, I am now happy to report that Sir Alan Walters is listed as a Past Member.

Not because he’s dead, I should stress. Walters should have been listed as dead two years ago. He was listed as living and active as recently as June. Given the average age of the Board, it’s a certainty that a number will pass away over the coming years. When that happens, it will be interesting to see how long they linger as active members before the Fraser Institute finally lets their souls depart.

The Fraser Institute has, you may have heard, weighed into Canada’s immigration debate with the release of a new report claiming to calculate the “true cost” of immigration. Unsurprisingly, they think that immigrants are a burden on Canada’s social welfare system (to the tune of $23 billion a year), and despite the fact that they can usually be found arguing for the wholesale dismantling of that system, in this report they come out as its defenders. As usual, the cheerful coverage in the media is a strong indication that nobody has actually bothered to read the report. Even the National Post shied away from actually endorsing the report’s conclusions, although that didn’t stop them from publishing a positive article about the report.

Now, as usual, I need to begin my coverage of the Fraser Institute with a few disclaimers. Before you crack open a Fraser Institute report, it’s important to remember that this is a group funded by the same wealthy American backers as the American Tea Party, which has taken tobacco industry money to claim that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer, and which has an editorial advisory board which supposedly vets papers like this week’s Immigration and the Canadian Welfare State, even though six of its members are dead (one of whom the Fraser Institute appears to believe is still alive, zombie-like), and a seventh just happens to be the co-author of this paper. I have warned the anti-immigration movement about jumping into bed with the Fraser Institute before.

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With entirely benign intentions, I can assure you, I fear I sent The Exile into a Twitter typhoon without so much as an umbrella by observing recently that, as usual, some of the members of the Fraser Institute’s Editorial Board are deceased (and that this puts a grave complexion on the academic merits of their peer review process). Someone apparently retorted that the list of dead editors is from 2008 and is out of date, which is not only not true (the list of dead editors can be found on the back of the 2011 School Report Card, not on some old undead page dredged up out of the Fraser website’s shadowy past) but beside the point, given that the same five men were also dead in 2008.

It does raise a far more serious question, though, one which I initially missed. The Editorial Advisory Board is supposed to be the “final arbiter” of published reports, notwithstanding the fact that numerous members have already met their, um, Final Arbiter. But one of its members, Alan Walters, is not only dead and buried (as of 2009), but isn’t listed as such. This would seem to suggest the Fraser Institute hasn’t bothered to update their board list since 2009. Have they actually sent reports out to them for review in the meantime? Have they wondered why all the reports being sent to Walters are being bounced back?

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Stephen Harper’s campaign director, Guy Giorno, is giving a speech at the Economic Club of Canada on the subject of how they won the election and how “Harper is now poised to become one of Canada’s longest-serving prime ministers.” While it may well happen, I’d say it’s a trifle optimistic. He’s only halfway to cracking the top five, at which point he’ll be in fine company — two of the most corrupt prime ministers in our nation’s history and a third who is the only other one to date to try to shut down Parliament improperly. (Unlike Harper, King failed.) He’ll also be the first person in the top five who is neither a Grit nor a Tory. The current Conservative Party are not Tories. They are Reformers.

Still, maybe he’ll get there. In the meantime, the Economic Club of Canada gets to be the subject of my latest complaint about the odious over-use of phrases like “non-partisan” and “independent,” by people who are regularly neither. As I write this, its president Mark Adler, is actually a Conservative MP! Adler beat out Dryden for York Centre in the 2011 election. The Economic Club is so non-partisan, it has its own seat in Parliament!