‘Enemy’ Lists, Tax Audits, and Acceptable Government Actions

July 29, 2014 No comments Article
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I was reminded recently by a reader of Richard Nixon’s “Ene­mies List” that freaked out a gen­er­a­tion of US cit­i­zens who expected their politi­cians to play by the rules. The list came to light when John Dean, the for­mer White House Coun­sel for Nixon, tes­ti­fied before the Sen­ate Water­gate Committee.

The orig­i­nal list had 20 names, includ­ing actor Paul New­man, but was later expanded to hun­dreds on a “mas­ter list.” The orig­i­nal list had lead­ers of non-profit orga­ni­za­tions and unions, human rights sup­port­ers, mem­bers of the media, and oppo­si­tion politi­cians and their mon­eyed supporters.

Here’s how Dean explained the list to the committee:

This mem­o­ran­dum addresses the mat­ter of how we can max­i­mize the fact of our incum­bency in deal­ing with per­sons known to be active in their oppo­si­tion to our Admin­is­tra­tion; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the avail­able fed­eral machin­ery to screw our polit­i­cal enemies.

Wikipedia notes that the com­mis­sioner in charge of tax­a­tion, refused to audit the peo­ple on the list.

The reader’s note reminded me of a cou­ple of news reports from 2013 about the “enemy” list given new cab­i­net min­is­ters in the cur­rent fed­eral gov­ern­ment. A senior PMO staffer directed staffers about what to include in tran­si­tion book­lets given to new min­is­ters. Items include: “Who to engage or avoid: friend and enemy stake­hold­ers” and “Who to avoid: bureau­crats that can’t take no (or yes) for an answer.” The gov­ern­ment later con­firmed that the Prime Minister’s Office had pre­vi­ously sent an email to Con­ser­v­a­tive min­is­te­r­ial aids ask­ing for “enemy” lists.

Crit­ics, includ­ing 200 public-interest and aid orga­ni­za­tions for­mally asked Prime Min­is­ter Stephen Harper to reveal who was con­sid­ered an “enemy” on the list.

The National Post reported for­mer Envi­ron­ment Min­is­ter Peter Kent’s con­cerns with the “juve­nile” lan­guage of the lists and its obvi­ous res­o­nance with the Nixon list.

Inter­est­ingly, the National Post piece also quoted resigned Con­ser­v­a­tive MP Brent Rathge­ber, who found the lan­guage “very, very trou­bling. We can have respect­ful dis­cus­sions and dis­agree with each other with­out resort­ing to name-calling or vil­i­fi­ca­tion by refer­ring to some­body as an ‘enemy.’”

And the Post quoted Coun­cil of Cana­di­ans exec­u­tive direc­tor Garry Neil:

They don’t view us as cit­i­zens with strongly held opin­ions that come from places of prin­ci­ple. They view us as eco-terrorists. They see us stand­ing with the child pornog­ra­phers. I mean that’s the way they view politics.

Neil expected the Coun­cil to be on an ene­mies list because of its vocal crit­i­cism of pub­lic poli­cies pur­sued by the government.

Now, I’m not sug­gest­ing a direct com­par­i­son between Stephen Harper and his PMO on the one hand and the deeply para­noid psy­chosis that gripped Richard Nixon and his inner circle.

But my research did find that the gov­ern­ment is abus­ing its author­ity and oper­at­ing out­side of tra­di­tional Cana­dian polit­i­cal bound­aries. It is doing so by using admin­is­tra­tive bod­ies, in par­tic­u­lar Canada Rev­enue Agency, to muf­fle and dis­tract its crit­ics in the form of char­i­ties that have dif­fer­ent pub­lic pol­icy pref­er­ences to those of the cab­i­net. This politi­ciza­tion of the bureau­cracy is a cor­rup­tion of Cana­dian democracy.

It may not be Water­gate, but it’s beyond tra­di­tional bound­aries of accept­able polit­i­cal behav­iour. I won­der if it passes the “smell test” among citizens.

Mean­while, please check out my Master’s the­sis and feel free to for­ward and tweet it. And you can fol­low me on Twit­ter: @garethkirkby

 

I am a for­mer jour­nal­ist and media man­ager who recently com­pleted my Master’s the­sis for Royal Roads Uni­ver­sity and now work as a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sional. I have earned a Web­ster Award of Dis­tinc­tion, among other awards, for my reporting.

Categories: Uncategorized

Government Rhetoric Frames Charities as Criminals — and Worse

July 11, 2014 No comments Article
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Up to 10 per­cent of the resources—money, peo­ple, time—of a Cana­dian char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion can be devoted to what reg­u­la­tions call “polit­i­cal activities.”

Repeated stud­ies show that the aver­age is far below this, and that many char­i­ties do not par­tic­i­pate in polit­i­cal activ­i­ties. But a 2010 sur­vey by Imag­ine Canada, the umbrella orga­ni­za­tion of char­i­ties, found that 37 per­cent of char­i­ties actu­ally par­tic­i­pated in some form of “polit­i­cal activ­ity,” com­pared to the one per­cent of orga­ni­za­tions that actu­ally declared in their tax returns that they had done so, as found in a 2012 study by Cana­dian Press.

The Imag­ine Canada study has cred­i­bil­ity because it asked char­i­ties to report their var­i­ous kinds of com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and then the researcher sorted through them to dis­cover which met the government’s def­i­n­i­tion of “polit­i­cal activities.”

That’s a mas­sive dis­crep­ancy. And prob­a­bly the result of con­fu­sion in the char­ity sec­tor about what kinds of com­mu­ni­ca­tions are con­sid­ered accept­able. That con­fu­sion may be exac­er­bated, at least in the pub­lic mind, by fed­eral cab­i­net min­is­ters as far back as 2012 fram­ing polit­i­cal activ­i­ties as some­thing unde­sir­able, and inap­pro­pri­ate for orga­ni­za­tions that can offer donors a receipt allow­ing a tax deduc­tion. The rhetoric ramp­ing up to the audits of “polit­i­cal activ­ity” spoke of crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tions, ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, money laun­der­ing, and rad­i­cal ide­o­log­i­cal agendas.

The pub­lic, and by exten­sion char­ity lead­ers, can be excused for think­ing that “polit­i­cal activ­i­ties” occur when you rec­om­mend that cit­i­zens vote for a spe­cific party or can­di­date in an elec­tion, or inap­pro­pri­ately par­tic­i­pate in a polit­i­cal party’s event, or get really per­sonal in crit­i­ciz­ing a gov­ern­ing party or oppo­si­tion politi­cian. If that’s what was going on, who wouldn’t want char­i­ties audited, caught, and spanked?

But that’s not Canada Rev­enue Agency’s def­i­n­i­tion of “polit­i­cal activ­i­ties.” Under the reg­u­la­tions, an orga­ni­za­tion can seek to pres­sure the gov­ern­ment about an issue cen­tral to the charity’s offi­cial pur­pose (Canada’s four allow­able char­i­ta­ble pur­poses are alle­vi­at­ing poverty, advanc­ing edu­ca­tion or reli­gion, or other pur­posed ben­e­fi­cial to the com­mu­nity). Pres­sur­ing gov­ern­ment is fine so long as the char­i­ties do not get par­ti­san or exceed 10 per­cent of their resources. So, yeah, they can advo­cate for their point of view as experts in an area, and should pre­sum­ably be able to do so with­out harass­ment. And if the char­ity con­ducts a study, and then speaks of the rec­om­men­da­tions of the study, that’s not even con­sid­ered polit­i­cal activ­ity under the reg­u­la­tions, but rather “char­i­ta­ble activ­ity” and so they can do it with­out limit. Or at least these are what the char­ity “experts” I spoke to see as the dif­fer­ence between char­i­ta­ble, polit­i­cal, and par­ti­san activities.

Clear? Well, there are indeed grey areas and one of my research find­ings is that, despite mak­ing some progress on this front, CRA needs to fur­ther clar­ify these. Instead, some lead­ers say the CRA is inter­pret­ing more strictly. Whether the inter­pre­ta­tions are in flux will become clear as the audits now under­way come to fruition.

In any case, as a researcher the ques­tions that I find most inter­est­ing include why the gov­ern­ment rhetoric seemed cal­i­brated to cause con­fu­sion, to frame as crim­i­nal or un-Canadian some orga­ni­za­tions that were work­ing within the rules as they know them. Why were mil­lions of dol­lars sud­denly needed for audit­ing char­i­ties? What char­i­ties are being audited? What’s the affect on char­i­ties that advo­cate on pub­lic pol­icy issues? Most impor­tantly: what’s in it for the gov­ern­ment, why this, why now, and what does it tell us about the vital­ity of our democracy?

But more on that next posting.

Check out my Master’s the­sis.

I am a for­mer jour­nal­ist and media man­ager who recently com­pleted my Master’s the­sis for Royal Roads Uni­ver­sity and now works as a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sional. I have been awarded a Web­ster Award of Dis­tinc­tion, among other awards, for my reporting.

Categories: Uncategorized

Charities Muffled & Distracted by Government Actions: Chill

July 11, 2014 No comments Article
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Check out my newly com­pleted the­sis, now posted to www.garethkirkby.ca. I looked at how char­i­ties are affected by fed­eral Cana­dian cab­i­net min­is­ters seem­ingly sug­gest­ing that they are crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tions and ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions and work­ing against the inter­ests of their coun­try. And how they are being affected by the fed­eral government’s new reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing char­i­ties and the stepped up audits of the “polit­i­cal activ­i­ties” of these charities.

I won­dered: Is the gov­ern­ment action caus­ing a chill among char­i­ties, divert­ing them from speak­ing out about the issues they know so well, effec­tively muf­fling their voices at a time when we most need to hear from them?

And I looked at whether some kinds of char­i­ties are being tar­geted for atten­tion, and what that really means. I exam­ined why this is hap­pen­ing, and hap­pen­ing now, and what the impli­ca­tions of putting char­i­ties under the micro­scope are for pub­lic dis­cus­sions about the choices we have in our eco­nomic, devel­op­ment, human rights, and envi­ron­men­tal policies.

Most of us have our favourite char­i­ties that we donate to and wish the best for. Per­haps you view char­i­ties as experts—not the only experts, but experts just the same—in the issues con­nected to their Mis­sion? And per­haps you believe that we need the best minds, from a cross-section of soci­ety includ­ing char­i­ties and research insti­tutes and non­profit orga­ni­za­tions, to par­tic­i­pate in the big debates about impor­tant issues? Their par­tic­i­pa­tion, and that of civil soci­ety gen­er­ally, ensures that the best ideas rise to the top so that we as a soci­ety make the best all-around decisions.

My the­sis explores issues like these, based on 21 inter­views I con­ducted with lead­ers of some of Canada’s best-known and some­times less-known char­i­ties, and with other experts on char­i­ties, law, gov­ern­ment admin­is­tra­tion, and secu­rity and policing.

In a series of blog post­ings, I’ll share with you what I learned, explor­ing the issues raised in the the­sis, and also includ­ing insights from my data that never made it into the the­sis but should be dis­cussed in pub­lic. And I’ll com­ment on cur­rent events through the prism of my research and inter­ests in pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions, civil soci­ety, and social movements.

Oh, and yes, I did find out that there is indeed an “advo­cacy chill,” that affects dif­fer­ent char­i­ties to var­i­ous extents. We are not fully get­ting the inclu­sive pub­lic dis­cus­sion about top­i­cal and often con­tro­ver­sial issues that we ought to have, that we as Cana­di­ans need to have if our democ­racy is going to be vig­or­ous, and pol­icy deci­sions the best available.

But more on that in the next posting.

Check out my the­sis: www.garethkirkby.ca

I am a for­mer jour­nal­ist and media man­ager who recently com­pleted my Master’s the­sis for Royal Roads Uni­ver­sity and now work as a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sional. I have been awarded a Web­ster Award of Dis­tinc­tion, among other awards, for my reporting.

Categories: Uncategorized