CALM Editorials

EDITORIALS

* What's the cost of corporate fraud?
* We should be making $53 per hour!

What's the cost of corporate fraud?

ELP / CALM -- If it was discovered that people on welfare had ripped $2 billion off taxpayers, how big would the headlines be? Of if they caught people on UI sneaking $60 billion out of the country without paying taxes, how loud would the outcry be?

Yet that's exactly what corporations and the banks have done in recent months. And the fraud has gone almost ignored. The federal Science Research Tax Credit was supposed to cost taxpayers $100 million, but eventually cost $4.2 billion. Of this, $2 billion was fraudulently claimed and will probably never be recovered. The reporting? -- a quarter-inch headline in the Ottawa Citizen announced, "Revenue Canada ready to close book on $4.2 billion fiasco -- biggest tax loss in history." (Did you miss that one?)

And in May the Financial Post reported that "Billions of dollars slip offshore undetected." Banks and corporations ship money out of the country without telling the government, thereby avoiding taxes. (Did you miss the media campaign against corporate and bank fraud? So did we.)

We should be making $53 per hour

WALT HATCHER / PPWC LEAFLET / CALM -- When I worked as a bartender in the mid-1950s the going rate was a dollar an hour, union or non-union. The cost of a glass of beer was ten cents, and a package of cigarettes was thirty-five cents. The cost of a glass of beer is now two dollars and a package of cigarettes is six dollars.

The question I have is: All things being equal and proportional, are our bartenders making twenty dollars an hour? If not, who is getting all the money?

When I started in the pulp mill in Crofton (on Vancouver Island) in the mid-1960s, the going rate for labourers was $2.18 per hour, union rate. I bought a three-bedroom bungalow in Saltair for a little under $10,000 with a $2,000 down payment, and with the owner taking an agreement of sale for the remainder at an interest rate of six per cent. The total payment for the house was $90 a month.

The question I have is: All things being equal and proportional, the labourers in our mills should be making $53 dollars an hour, since the same three-bedroom house is now worth $150,000.

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