Law Times

Law times • OctOber 27, 2008 "fairness" for Ontario in the distribu- tion of tax benefits from the federal government. He claims that $20 billion is drained annually from the pockets of Ontarians by federal taxes that are not returned in transfers to the province. He isn't talking about money A curious disconnect exists at the heart of Premier Dalton McGuinty's campaign for transferred from the province to Ot- tawa, mind you, but about money taken from Ontario taxpayers that is then redistributed by the federal government to other provinces and individuals. The main vehicles are equalization transfers and employ- ment insurance payments. He says this is unfair. And it is. But aren't such transfers the es- sence of the Canadian way? Do we not, as a matter of course, take from those who have and redis- tribute it to those who don't, what a deservedly forgotten political economist once called "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs?" Equalization, the big daddy of them all, as well as employment in- surance, were both designed with unfairness in mind. What McGuinty calls "unfair" is what people like him used to call helping their neighbours, or sharing the wealth. It is bizarre to see him stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Quebec Premier Jean Charest, since a good chunk of equalization is money that flows to Quebec as part of the unof- ficial deal of bribing Quebec to stay in Canada. Curious disconnect in campaign for 'fairness' Inside Queen's Park By Derek Nelson and to impose his infamously unfair and regressive health levy. Since then there has been some tinkering, but the fundamentals of his discriminatory tax regimes re- main: uneven corporate taxes, many parents paying twice to send kids to schools of their choice, and some people paying his health levy and some not. Those inequities McGuinty could fix. He even promised to re- view the health levy five years into his mandate, but has since reversed himself and said no more discus- sion. That unfairness shall remain. When the federal Conservatives reduced the GST virtually every economist and political commenta- tor decried their action for its effects on savings and productivity, despite it being beneficial to the poor, who spend disproportionately more of their income on consumption than anyone else. McGuinty had the option to par- COMMENT 'Opportunity missed' Louise Arbour: BY GLENN COHEN For Law Times High Commissioner for Human Rights (Speaker's Corner, Sept. 22, 2008), and sug- gests why she should have instead been the recipient of our accolades. I disagree. And here's why. Trudell correctly describes our world as B ill Trudell laments the lack of "grati- tude and praise" that Louise Arbour received following her stint as UN tially move into the gap by raising the provincial sales tax and then re- distributing that money to the mu- nicipalities that are crying out for federal dollars. He chose not to do so. More un- fairness. It is curious, too, that when for- This being Canada, the politi- cians enshrined the principle in the constitution. To wit, the equalization clause in the 1982 constitution: "Parliament and the govern- ments of Canada are commit- ted to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide rea- sonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation." And they are doing this why? Again, according to the consti- tution, it is to promote "equal op- portunities for the well-being of Canadians," to further "economic development to reduce disparity in opportunities," and to provide "es- sential services of reasonable quality to all Canadians." McGuinty thinks this unfair. Admittedly, all other federal sys- tems of which I am aware operate without any such aspirations clause. And are none the worse for it. But Canada is different. In Can- ada, redistributing wealth is a na- tional mania. Medicare is essentially a wealth transfer from the young and healthy to the old and sick. (The bulk of medical expenditures involve the last two years of life.) Unfairness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. For example, in 1993, the first acts of McGuinty's new government were to raise corporate income taxes, to retroactively disallow tax deductions for parents struggling to pay for educating their children, mer premiers Bob Rae (NDP) and Mike Harris (PC) called attention to the inequities Ontario was suf- fering because of cuts to transfer payments from Ottawa, the media treated the comments as self-serving "fed-bashing," done only for grimy partisan political purposes. The same media treat McGuinty's words as driven solely by earnest conviction and belief. Yet McGuinty, unlike Rae and Harris, has received not cuts, but massive increased federal transfers during his terms, with promises of more to come. The Toronto-Do- minion Bank calculates the current real deficit at less than $12 billion. The reality is simple. McGuinty needs money. Spending by his Liberal govern- ment is out of control, a 50 per cent increase in program expenditure in just five years. Much of this spending is of the wealth transfer nature but, interest- ingly, not to those in need. The money that goes to educa- tion, for instance, essentially moves from the pockets of taxpayers into the pockets of teachers. Many have been hired even as enrolment de- clines on the unproven theory that simply reducing the number of students in a class will improve the skills quality of the graduates. All the public sector unions are being offered three per cent wage increases per year while the rest of society is going broke. Unfairness indeed. Derek Nelson is a freelance writer who spent 19 years at Queen's Park. His e-mail is jugurtha@rogers.com. www.lawtimesnews.com one of "ethnic cleansing, kidnapped children in uniform, desecra- tion of women and the young, torture of prisoners, and millions in refugee camps." Yet, from the record compiled by the UN Human Rights Council under Arbour's di- rection for four years, you'd only be aware of one major human rights violator in the entire world: no secret, it's the State of Israel. The UNHRC continued the conduct of its prede- cessor, the so-called Human Rights Commis- sion, with its hysterical over-obsession with Israel and "Zionism." For example, in 2006, over 46 per cent of the Council's resolutions (34, to be specific) were directed at Israel — each one of them critical. Trudell's lament about the sorry world con- dition does not expressly mention Sudan/Dar- fur. However, it is generally accepted in demo- cratic countries with a free press that over the last four years over 400,000 Africans have been murdered by Arab Janjaweed supported by the Sudanese military, and some four mil- lion people have been displaced. Rape is com- monplace. This is state-sponsored genocide, murder, and terror on a massive scale. Yet in 2006, only four UNHRC resolu- tions dealt with the situation in Darfur. And they were not one-sided critical, as were the Israel resolutions. Here was Arbour, a Canadian jurist trained in a legal system focused on respect for in- dividual human rights and protection from physical harm and threat, given a golden op- portunity to change a failed, discredited or- gan of the UN. Instead, she dropped the ball. She failed miserably, and in so doing discred- ited herself in the eyes of most observers. She should have been under no illusions about the challenge she faced and the oppor- tunity available to her. She took the job know- ing that many of the constituent countries of the UNHRC — Angola, Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Sudan, to name just a few — have no recognizable concept of hu- man rights within their own jurisdictions. She surely knew about the miserable record of failure by the hopelessly politicized prede- cessor Human Rights Commission. While under her watch, the UNHRC ntheun.org, a web site edited by Professor of International Law Anne Bayefsky). In 2006 — the year of the Second Lebanese War, when terrorists of the Hezbollah, a recognized was perverted by the likes of China, Libya, Iran, and Cuba, who systematically blocked almost all critical scrutiny of any state behav- iour but Israel's. In the face of this, did she speak out? Did she use her worldly platform to try to break this pattern? Did she threaten to quit unless decency and level play were in- troduced into the Council? No she did not. Look at more statistics (taken from eyeo- Speaker's Corner political entity forming part of the govern- ment of Lebanon, crossed an international boundary without provocation to murder and kidnap Israeli soldiers, thereby sparking a war — only two Council resolutions were directed at Lebanon. In that same year, the Council was silent on Myanmar, Cuba, China, and all of the other Arab states in the Middle East ex- cept of course Iraq. (Why "of course?" Because Americans were in Iraq!) Instead of fair and decent advocacy for human rights, Arbour publicly condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force" in the war, and publicly de- cried the "intolerable" conditions of the Pal- estinians in Gaza. She also lost no opportuni- ty to publicly criticize the United States in its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It is said that with other countries like Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, etc., she alleg- edly employed "quiet" or "private" condem- nation. Somehow, I doubt that. And who knows whether that's true or not? Would any reader of Law Times accept a secret judgment with unpublished reasons from any judge? And 2006 was not an exceptional year for Ms. Arbour or the UNHRC . . . For example, in 2007 over 40 per cent of the Council's resolutions were aimed at Israel. Democracies are prone to criticism, and all are deserving of some criticism on the hu- man rights agenda. It is in the nature of free and democratic societies that criticism be al- lowed, indeed fostered, from without as well as within. Israel doesn't need the UNHRC for its daily dose of criticism; the newspapers pub- lished in that country do a fine job every day of criticizing their own government — a phe- nomenon that you won't find in the countries constituting the UNHRC mentioned above. So what to make of Ms. Arbour's record? One can argue ad nauseum the fine points, as Trudell tries to do, about the exact word- ing of some of her missives, and whether or not she has been wrongly "affixed with the anti-Semitic label." We've heard that be- fore: criticism of Israel and "Zionists" is, af- ter all, not ipso facto anti-Semitism (as Iran's Ahmadinejad likes to remind us). And, some of Arbour's most vocal critics, such as Professor Alan Dershowitz, are themselves controversial and hardly objective. But she is not an anti-Semite. No rational observer would label her as such, and she did not fail because of unjustified attacks from a media that her UNHRC constituents would say is controlled by world Jewry. PAGE 7 Arbour failed because she could not proj- ect a human rights message or initiative, and made no apparent effort to do so, into the hundred-plus totalitarian/authoritarian re- gimes where human rights, women's rights, children's rights, religious freedoms, labour freedoms, press freedoms, freedom to associ- ate, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, etc., are substantially or entirely non-existent. That is all the more regrettable because her constituency in the UNHRC consisted, for the most part, of just such regimes. Opportunity presented, opportunity missed. An abject failure — in my opinion. Glenn Cohen is a partner at Berkow, Cohen LLP. He practises commerical litigation in To- ronto. His email address is gcohen@berkow cohen.com. LT LT

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