Self-interest? What self-interest?

We've got an organization here in Canada that other nations would die for. These good folks are an endless source of amusement and fun. They make us laugh. They make us cry. And this time, they've got us rolling in the aisles in helpless glee.

Omigod, send in the clowns!

Spiffily named "The Canadian Council of Chief Executives" (shouldn't they have gone for something more descriptive, like Really Pompous Rich Guys?), this group unfailingly advances the most bizarre and astounding ideas. They're like the Blue Men of Business.

Get this!

The Chiefs' latest too-public project is castigating the governing party for "trying to cling to power" by carrying through on some promises it made during the last election campaign. You have to remember this is a minority government that remains in office by forming alliances with other parties. When the Conservatives pulled their support for the government's proposed budget last spring, the ruling Liberals, of necessity, went hunting for new friends and found them in the ranks of the soft-socialist New Democratic Party. They made a deal, which is how things work in a minority parliament. It just happens that the deal echoes the things they promised in the last election. So they're really making a deal to do some of the things they promised to do.

Big deal, eh?

Well, the Chiefs don't like it. In fact, they're in a holy snit. They can't understand why the revamped Liberal budget doesn't reflect their Conservative values. Apparently they've never heard of no tickee, no washee. But the Chiefs like Conservatives. They want Conservative policies. They like rigid fiscal responsibility that includes tax cuts for their 150 stinkingly rich members and diddlysquat for the rest of us. That is the One Best Way for this country, isn't it? Why aren't we doing what they want? It's not right! It's not fair!

Don't get them wrong. They are men of the world. They know you've got to SAY things so people will vote for you and make you the government. But doesn't mean you should actually DO those things. You should do what the Chiefs want, because they are very rich and very powerful, and they know best.

Like this.

The Chiefs know that the very best thing for this second-rate country is something called Deep Integration with the U.S. economy. It is the very best thing. A continental economy is just the ticket for us. Never mind that the Americans don't want it, aren't pursuing it and wouldn't honour it if we got it. We'll just go ahead and do it anyway, shall we? Look how well it worked in softwood lumber. Oops. Well, what about our beautiful continental economy in beef? Oh, oops again. Wheat? Potatoes? The film industry? Wanna go for another? Wanna see how the Americans react to a downturn in their auto industry? Think they'll go after the Koreans and Japanese, who will actually bite back if attacked? Think again. These are people who have never seen an Evil Empire they couldn't back away from. But they've done a hell of a lot of damage to sleepy backwaters like Vietnam, Grenada, Afghanistan and Iraq. Fair fight? Level playing field? Surely you jest!

Canada - the sleepy backwater of North America. Be warned, folks. The Hollywood North retaliation is just a warm-up. Softwood lumber, a flexing of the muscles. The beef ban, a mere exercise to get the blood flowing. GM is making deep cuts to its States-side workforces and we just won a shiny new Toyota plant. The bombs are in the bays, boys, and the jet engines are gunning! Wait for it!

Deep Integration. Ha-ha! Deep Doo-doo is more like it.

Anyhow, these Chiefs are pretty funny guys. In the world of gratuitous, self-serving advice, they kinda take the cake.

These clowns are pretty free with their advice to Canadians, but here's what I'd like to see from them. I would like to see them do something tangible for this country for a change. I want big-time philanthropy. I want funding for inner city kids, museums, art galleries, bright scientists, research labs and gardens, and a payback for all those hard-scrabble northern and rural towns that gave rise to the fortunes that sustain so many of these "leading" corporations.

I would like NOT to be suspicious of the Chiefs' motives. I'd like to have some confidence that they are NOT pushing schemes devised to fill their own pockets or win promotions to Atlanta. I would like them to halt the University of Chicago syncophanteries and put a lid on the sucking up to Washington and New York. In short, I would like them to stop advancing the interests of foreign nationals, gussied up as the considered advice of "concerned" Canadians.

Stop making me laugh, guys. There's a word for you and your half-baked schemes. We will not speak it here.

We don't have to.

Here's a role model for you!

I wish I had met Charles Rathgeb earlier. Unfortunately, I met him only this morning in the Toronto Star's obituary section.

Chuck, as he was known to friends and family, died this week at the age of 83. He didn't leave a big family behind. Just a wife of 58 years, a nephew and two nieces. But he bequeathed a story that cries out for a novel, a movie or at least a television series.

Listen to what this man managed to cram into his 83 years.

When he left Upper Canada College, he joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and served out west. Then he transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy and saw action in the North Atlantic, Norwegian Sea, the Bay of Biscayne and the invasion of Europe. Back from the war, he joined his dad as co-boss of a big construction firm and travelled all over the world on major projects. Apparently, it wasn't enough to keep him busy because he found time to join a number of international corporate boards and various charities.

And that was just his day job.

In his spare time, Chuck was a member of the Commonwealth Cricket Team, manager of the 1964 Gold Medal Canadian bobsled team, mountain climber, power boat racer, championship tuna and marlin fisherman and operator of a racing car team. Oh, yes. He also ran a thorough-bed racing horse stable. Want something more high-flying? Well, Chuck was an accomplished balloonist apparently. Both gas and hot air. Both North America and Europe. Also a glider pilot. Also...wait for it...a jet pilot. Seems he had a World record Atlantic crossing. More amazing, these weren't even his favourite sports. What he really liked was golf, which he played, I guess, between bouts of ballooning over the Alps, scaling the Rockies and jetting over the Atlantic.

Chuck wasn't just about business and sports. He also valued culture. He produced a play, Staircase, on Broadway, the movie Fahrenheit 451 and a Doors concert. Think about that. Produced a Doors concert. That means he must have met the Doors.

He sounds like Forrest Gump's older, better brother.

Reading between the lines, his last years must have been difficult ones. There are thanks, in the obit, to a palliative care unit, several health care givers and some dedicated support staff, suggesting a long illness and waning strength. I hope Chuck and his friends and his family were not defeated by the circumstances of his last days. I hope they all found comfort in his accomplishments and peace of mind to celebrate his extraordinary life. Because it was extraordinary and worthy of celebration.

Congratulations, Charles Irwin Rathgeb.

You were a renaissance man with a life fully lived. I am sorry I missed you.

What does this say about Canadians?

I was in my favourite video store today, getting a few flicks for my vacation, when I noticed something really odd. I don't know what to make of it.

There I was browsing through the Foreign section when I noticed a recent release by a well-known Quebec film-maker. Okay, it was in French, so maybe that qualified it as "foreign" to the young staff of the local outlet. No big deal.

But wait! A shelf away there's another Canadian film. This one is in English, and it's by one of the leading lights of the Canadian movie industry. Good lord, you would have to have missed the entire broohaha around this year's Cannes awards to be ignorant of the fact that this guy, and this film, is definitely a home brew.

Move another shelf and...my goodness, there's another one. Perhaps less notorious, but still...I mean, it stars Sarah Polley! I've watched it. It's so Canadian, it makes your teeth ache. What is it doing in the "We're Foreign!" section?

And then, omigosh, there's another one. Okay, this one is about Afghanistan, but the film-maker is very definitely from Toronto. I confess I haven't seen the movie yet, but I believe it's about the impressions of an ex-pat returning to her homeland after years abroad in Canada. That's Canada, folks. Not foreign.

So what the heck is going on here?

I could understand if my local video store was one of those gargantuan American chains that thinks anything made outside Hollywood is foreign, but that's not the case here. The store is run by the same guys who probably pipe the cable into your house, if you live in the Greater Toronto Area. The name on the store is an icon of Canadian broadcasting. It's just not possible to get more Canadian, or at least more Toronto, that the people who run my local video store.

So why are they classifying home-grown films as foreign? Why do they share the thinking of those big Texas outfits that anything not American is obviously foreign? Why are they relegating our best and our brightest to an itsy-bitsy foreign section in the corner of the store mixed in with flyblown offerings from Mexico and Portugal?

What does this say about us?

I really don't know what to think about this. Pretty sad, though. Pretty sad.

Taxes Schmaxes

This is the time of year when my thoughts inevitably turn to income taxes - and my thoughts are inevitably homicidal.

Tell me, was it the intention of legislators, when they first introduced the income tax at the early days of the last century, that it would become a tool to punish and impoverish their citizens? Surely not. Yet that is what has happened.

There was a recent story out of Vancouver about a group of current and former JDS Uniphase employees who are now facing ruin because they were "gifted" by their employer with a cheap stock deal. They got something like a 15% reduction in the price of a stock that was then, in the middle of the dot.com boom, flying high. With the passage of time, the dot.com boom went bust and their holdings became a pale shadow of the price they had paid for them.

End of story? Not quite. The federal income tax agency, in its wisdom, has decided these people must pay tax on the 15% benefit they gained, valued at the time of when the stock was actually worth buying. For some, that represents a hefty piece of change. Two, three, even four times their annual salaries in some cases. Of course they can't pay. Some will lose their homes. One woman will lose both her home and her business.

Tough luck, eh?

It reminds me of another scam the income tax people tried a few years ago. Some genius came up with the idea that artists should pay taxes on their "inventories." Those are the works that they have completed, but have not yet sold. As you might expect, Canada's novelists, painters and composers freaked out. These poor people make ridiculously low incomes. About 90% of everything they create rots in their basements. It NEVER sells. Now the income tax people were talking about taxing them on money they would, in all likelihood, never, ever see.

Sanity somehow intervened, and that perversion bit the dust. But there's plenty more where that idea came from.

Like this one. A friend of mine invested his life savings - along with a bunch of other wrongheaded savers - with a highly touted financial advisor who turned out to be a crook. All of them in this sadly familiar story lost their nest eggs. That would have been hard enough to take, but just as they were absorbing that blow, Revenue Canada stepped up with a bag of salt to rub in their wounds. Seems the crook had misinformed them about their investments being tax sheltered. Not true. Seems they owed megabucks in back taxes.

Several went bankrupt. Others had to postpone retirement. Everyone was impoverished.

What's next? Taxing babies on the money they MIGHT, in theory, earn in their lifetimes? Screwing widows and orphans out of their pensions? Kicking welfare recipients in the teeth because they THOUGHT about winning the lottery one day?

Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think people should pay taxes on income they actually make. They should be able to see and taste the money, take it to the store and buy groceries with it. They should not be asked to pay tax on money that disappeared long before it reached their bank accounts.

Apparently this is an unsophisticated and naive approach to modern taxation methods.

In any event, there's a moral in these stories. Don't ever trust the government. Do not ever regard the government as your friend and protector. Do not save. Do not invest. If you must save and invest, do not tell your friend, the government. Better still, leave the country.

Work only if you must, and never work for yourself in an activity that might actually contribute to the cultural life of the nation.

For God's sake, don't be one of those honest, salt-of-the-earth people who worry about doing their part and pulling their share of the load.

The government will make mincemeat out of you.