The Sixth Estate

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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As you may have heard by now, the Auditor-General is not happy about the fact that the Harper Regime gave over $280 million in subsidies to the Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers’ Marketing Board to pay off tobacco farmers to kick their habit, so to speak, only to miss the fact that a large number of farmers were pocketing the money, engaging in some creative accounting (something the Ruling Party knows a lot about, I should add), and keeping right on growing tobacco after some dubious “quota transfers”:

• [Tobacco Transition Program] recipients working on their own farm as employees;
• independent children of TTP recipients renting their parents’ land and infrastructure, and obtaining a license to grow tobacco; and
• TTP recipients loaning money to a licensee or co-signing at a bank for a loan for a licensee.

Now, every so often, you can hear Conservative ministers crowing about how their government has made unprecedented advances in making government finances fair and free from the stain of lobbying. The tobacco scandal illustrates why we should look further. You may recall that Harper’s head PR flack during the 2011 election was an Ensight Canada lobbyist named Jason Lietaer. Lietaer is well-connected and his name was bandied about to take Harper’s communications director post last year, and then again earlier this year, after director Dimitri Soudas’s political career was tarnished by allegations (never seriously investigated) that he might be given a bribe in exchange for securing an appointment on the Montreal Port Authority.

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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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Earlier this week, David Climenhaga seized on the ludicrously suggestive “freedom of information” campaign being waged by conservative forces in this country (CBC and unions should have to open their books for public inspection; corporations and the rest of government, not so much) to advance an even more radical solution: any organization that receives government money should have to publicly report how much money it gets and what it does with it. That would also include think tanks, subsidized corporations, and churches.

I’m not sure whether it’s intended in all seriousness or not, but I think Climenhaga raises an interesting idea while still sort of missing the point. I am not particularly excited by the idea that every citizen should have the right to pore over the public account books on a whim (though in a democracy, she should). More important, where think tanks and the like are concerned, is that most of these groups routinely put themselves into a conflict of interest when they advocate policies which benefit their large donors (mainly foundations owned by large corporations and billionaires who own large corporations), and compound that conflict of interest by not disclosing it. This position isn’t about accounting transparency; it’s about basic public ethics.

Finding out where think tanks get their money from is exceedingly difficult in Canada because they are not required to disclose who funds them, and the Canada Revenue Agency does not list all recipients of grants from a charitable foundation (unlike in America, where this information can and is retrieved by organizations like MediaMatters. Still, I want to make use of some of the limited available material we do have to make some observations about how the Canadian think tank sector works.

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It’s hardly surprising, but I thought it was worth mentioning.  November 23, 2011, is the day that Fraser Institute director Michael Walker officially and publicly announced that he opposes democracy. In Greece, only. Not here, so far. I was pleasantly surprised to hear both Bank of Canada chair Mark Carney and Reformer-turned-libertarian-activist Preston Manning say that they supported Greek democracy, in the face of a successful campaign by European elites to force the Greeks to back down on their public promise to put the question of cruel austerity policies to referendum. Walker takes a different tack. It’s too late for democracy, he says. Abandon ship.

It’s worth noting how vague everything in this incredibly disturbing column is. Democracy has failed because people are too greedy and too prone to vote for deficit-heavy governments, he says. Therefore, people can no longer be allowed to vote on what their government will do. Exactly who can be trusted to institute a proper regime, over the wishes of the citizenry and presumably without their consent? Walker doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. It’s written between every smug line in this piece of traitorous shit.

We reached democracy by fighting along a long and blood-soaked path. The Greeks, more than many of us. It’s too important, too precious, and too hard to get back to give away simply because some arrogant, technocratic wonks like Walker don’t like it. And anyways, Michael, if you’re really so concerned that the public purse is in trouble, you could always give up your damned charitable status. The fact that public money indirectly subsidizes a supposedly free-market think tank like the Fraser Institute is obscene and hypocritical. Why can’t you live on the avails of the free market you claim to love, the tender mercies of which you apparently also want to throw the Greeks to?

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No sooner was the metaphorical ink drying on my attack on National Post faux-environmentalist Lawrence Solomon’s paranoid conspiracy theory that climate change is being perpetrated by insurance companies as an excuse to jack up their premiums, that I realized I would have to return to the same deposit of BS and retrieve a sample from his comrade-in-arms, Terence Corcoran. Corcoran usually works the finance beat on the opinion pages, and why he occasionally sallies forth into environmental issues, almost unfailingly very badly, I can’t imagine.

Corcoran’s diatribe picks up on a Solomonic meme, claiming that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which for years now has been denounced by the climate change denialist crowd as the Great Satan behind modern environmentalism, is now backing away from its previous claims that human carbon emissions are driving climate change. He has three arguments to support this claim, and they range from the merely preposterous to the unnecessarily deceitful.

The “text” Corcoran is working from, incidentally, is an unpolished final draft manuscript of the executive summary of the real IPCC report, which isn’t due out until next February. We hardly need a better example of why the average contemporary journalist isn’t qualified to report on scientific issues that Corcoran and Solomon apparently feel this is the best imaginable way of commenting on climate change science.

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Lawrence Solomon, the anti-democratic oaf employed by the National Post to make spurious claims about the falsehoods of climate change, has a new and even more bizarre conspiracy theory about climate change. In the past, I have grown familiar with Solomon and his ilk claiming that climate change isn’t real, that socialists are rigging the debate, and even that would-be carbon traders like Al Gore are trying to scam us into making them billions of dollars. But in his latest column Solomon ascends to new heights of paranoia and ridiculousness:

The insurance industry has been behind the global-warming fraud since the 1970s… The insurance industry wants more money to cover its poor stock picks.

The insurance industry is powerful indeed, if it not only managed to get in on the ground floor of the climate change lobby forty years ago (as Solomon claims) but that, still talking forty years ago here, they realized they would be making “poor stock picks” during the 2007-2008 recession and would need an excuse to jack up their rates to restore profitability. And anyways, since when did insurance companies need an excuse to up our rates?

I’ve been wondering for some time now what would happen when insurance companies decided climate change was a serious enough risk to build into their rate calculations. This has been a turninng point in social movements before — in the provision of running tap water, for instance, which had the helpful side effect of creating a legion of fire hydrants. I guess I was overly optimistic. It turns out they just get slotted into their place in the conspiracy. As with the Conservative paranoia about Liberals, we are witnessing the creation of a profound, grand conspiracy theory which has the dual effects of creating a fount of magic knowledge for misguided followers to rally around, and a ready-made tool for instantly (if spuriously) discrediting any criticism.

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One of the long-running themes of this blog are the unstated corporate conflicts of interest which the major newspapers cheerfully allow to proliferate on their editorial pages. Monday’s strange promotional piece about RIM by former Conservative minister Jim Prentice provides an unusually explicit case in point. RIM, you will recall, is the manufacturer of the Blackberry, and, it would seem, a notably un-Canadian operator who helps foreign dictators spy on their citizens. I only mention this because Prentice is so absurdly insistent that loyal Canadians should praise RIM in the same breath as they call for a fresh round of seal meat.

As it happens, Prentice’s new job is Vice-Chairman of CIBC. So this is the Vice-Chairman of CIBC writing a promotional piece about RIM. Here are two sentences which CIBC is required to disclose in its financial advice reports about RIM, but which its senior officers apparently do not feel the need to state when they promote RIM to the public in other forums today:

CIBC World Markets Inc. expects to receive or intends to seek compensation for investment banking services from Research in Motion Limited…

CIBC… own 1% or more of a class of equity securities issued by Research in Motion Limited.

As usual, you should take your daily op-ed page with a large helping of salt.

As you may have heard by now, a polling company has been phoning around Montreal, claiming that Liberal MP Irwin Cotler is about to resign and asking who they plan to vote for in the upcoming by-election. The first problem is that Cotler hasn’t resigned and there isn’t (as yet) a by-election. Now, Cotler may be stretching the truth when he says he isn’t resigning. Whoever decided to fund this shadowy operation — presumably the Government of Canada’s ruling party — must have thought he was going to, or they wouldn’t have exposed themselves like this.

The press has done us at least some service by reporting that the organization responsible for the calls is Campaign Research. Given that both Campaign Research nor the Conservative Party have refused to comment on the matter, it seems relatively safe to assume that Campaign Research really is doing it, and they were prompted into it by the Conservative Party.

What the press doesn’t seem to have noticed is that Campaign Research is a Conservative outfit. Yes, there’s Nick Kouvalis, the Rob Ford election aide from Toronto. But there’s also Aaron Wudrick, a Conservative campaign manager who was caught a few years ago calling for the creation of Conservative “shell organizations” and “front groups” on university campuses. And Richard Ciano, athe Conservative national vice president up until a couple of years ago; Greg Dunlop of the Guelph Riding Association; and Shahin Behroyan, a BC Liberal youth leader.

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