The Sixth Estate

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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In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote that around half of scientists in the world at some point find themselves at least partially dependent on the military to fund their research — and that this is a problem. Today, that’s still true. But another serious problem is the privatization of “public” scientific research. Under the Harper Government™ this has proceeded on three fronts, one of which has occupied most of this blog’s attention recently.

At major research institutions around the country, a profound change is taking place. Programs are being taken over by corporatists — not just administrators with an inadequate knowledge of the gritty details. Objectives are being quietly altered to reflect commercial priorities rather than basic scientific ones, which often can’t guarantee short-term industrial applications. Some important research programs that have so far thrived in the public sector are simply being handed over to the private sector on the dubious grounds that they will somehow run them more effectively. In at least one case I’ll discuss, these have an enormous added cost which won’t appear anywhere in the contracts.

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Yesterday, the C.D. Howe Institute actually proposed letting the Canada Health Act, which guarantees universal public healthcare in Canada, expire. As with the Fraser Institute’s connections to the tobacco industry, I think that this is the sort of anti-Canadian stance that should be mentioned whenever the Institute comes forward with one of its schemes for deregulation, privatization, and corporate tax cuts.

The article in question, by Institute analyst Colin Busby, argues that the Canada Health Act be given a “sunset clause,” causing it to expire every 5 years and then be subject to renewal. Technically this is not the same thing as abolishing our public healthcare law outright. But what Busby pretends not to know, and what every Canadian citizen should know (I wonder how many do), is that it’s pretty tough to pass a law, even a routine one. Every session bills die on the order paper. And when they do, that’s it. They’re gone. We cannot afford to let public healthcare in this country die simply because of some procedural clogging in the House of Commons.

Busby has the gall to suggest that the Health Act needs a sunset clause so that we can “improve” it from time to time. He’s unable to suggest any real improvements beyond a few minor tweaks that don’t actually require a legislative change. More to the point, we can already amend the Canada Health Act from time to time. Parliament doesn’t need a sunset clause to change an existing law. Most of the bills in Parliament at any given time are amendments to existing laws, like the Criminal Code, the Copyright Act and the Immigration Act. The only reason to have an expiration clause is because you think at some point in the future you won’t want the law to exist at all — in short, if you want to abolish universal healthcare.

I want to stress that last point. It’s conceivable that a newcomer to the country with little knowledge of how Canadian politics works would propose this with the best of intentions. But Busby is a professional policy analyst with one of the most distinguished think tanks in the country. We can assume he knows very well (a) that an expiry clause isn’t needed, and that (b) an expiry clause raises a real risk that the bill won’t be renewed at all. In short, he’s either incredibly naive or being deceptive here about his real intentions. Out of respect for his professional accomplishments, I’m going to assume it’s the latter.

I’ve gotten over my recent gratitude to the National Post for properly disclosing the background of op-ed writer Keith Beardsley, because they’ve failed again, this time more spectacularly than ever. March 2, the Post published a defence of American telecom company Globalive by Finn Poschmann and Larry Herman. Globalive, you may recall, came into Canada to compete with Canadian wireless companies. The CRTC ruled that foreign carriers were banned. This decision was reversed by the Conservative Cabinet, partly as a result of Globalive’s Con-rich lobbying campaign. Recently that reversal was itself reversed in court, though, where a judge upheld the initial CRTC ruling. It’s uncertain what happens next, but Poshmann and Herman advise that the best thing to do now is to revise the Telecommunications Act and throw the company’s wireless market open to American corporations.

That Finn Poschmann, the vice-president of the C.D. Howe Institute, would advocate deregulation doesn’t surprise me. That organization has never met a deregulation proposal it didn’t like, and Poschmann is probably saying much the same thing on the Advisory Panel on Canada’s System of International Taxation, which the Harper government appointed him to in 2007. Why an obscure trade lawyer (no offence, Larry) would join him in this venture was more puzzling. Until I realized he worked for Cassels, Brock & Blackwell. Oops. I guess he just forgot to disclose in the article that he works for Globalive’s lobbying business.

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I have observed a disturbing trend in “independent” think tanks. They seldom disclose major funding sources, so that readers are unable to judge the relevance of potential conflicts of interest. But when we do know, interesting coincidences occur. A decade ago, the Fraser Institute took money from the tobacco industry, and produced studies arguing that regulation wouldn’t reduce cigarette smoking rates and that cigarette smoke doesn’t cause lung cancer. The trade group Ontario Waste Management Association gives $50,000 to the C.D. Howe Institute, and they produce a study arguing that private-sector trash collectors are better than municipal service provision. In this case, the C.D. Howe Institute expert on monetary policy, Christopher Ragan, is paid for by the banking sector, as I will show here.

The National Post has just finished a two-part series by Ragan (here and here) in which he argues that the government should “correct” the Consumer Price Index downwards 0.6% per year (no particular reason is given for why he thinks Statistics Canada can’t calculate price differences correctly), that the Bank of Canada should cut its annual inflation target in half from 2% to 1%, and that this will be better for everyone. There is also no analysis of who generally would benefit from this move. Ragan claims every Canadian will, because their money will retain value longer. Those Canadians with incomes tied to the CPI would lose, though (and lose a lot if Ragan is wrong on his 0.6% estimate). How the Bank of Canada will adjust inflation is not described. Despite being a member of a free-market think tank, Ragan does not seem to have a problem with this chummy relationship between a government bank and big business when it comes to managing the nation’s money supply.

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In the U.S., Tea Party movements are incensed that several “socialist” municipalities are switching to public garbage collection. In Toronto, a right-wing Canadian government is going the other way and attempting to privatize garbage collection.Toronto’s garbage collection already costs 30% less than the Ontario average, which is further evidence that this is a manufactured debate. There are some convenient and conspicuous gaps in the current “debate.” This is true despite Friday morning’s Globe and Mail, which featured an op ed by C.D. Howe Institute researcher Benjamin Dachis, who unsurprisingly favours “competition.” Dachis is the author of the C.D. Howe study which everyone is now citing as “proof” that private garbage collection saves money.

What the media has neglected to tell us is that the C.D. Howe Institute’s report was funded by the Ontario Waste Management Association, a lobby group made up of private garbage companies. It would be nice if the media, you know, did its job, instead of leaving it up to me. I can’t find a single mention of this rather important fact anywhere in the coverage, although maybe it’s out there somewhere. Instead, people are trusting the C.D. Howe Institute when it says, on its website, that it is “independent” (a common deception by think tanks).

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