APPEALS TO REASON ..

APPEALS TO REASON – Part 14
A series of letters and E-mail messages from Canadian victims
of taxes on phantom income to Canadian Government Authorities, at all levels,
appealing for fair treatment and the, often idiotic, replies they received.

Read: Appeals To Reason Part – 1 (preamble) & Parts – 2, to 13 for more background information.
By Victor Drummond ©
May 2009

Synopsis of the events to the present

Part 8: Excerpts from additional published articles that could explain what happened to disillusion former Minister of National Revenue, the Honourable Carol Skelton and possibly the reason she decided not to run for office in the 2008 federal election.

Part 9: Letters to Carol Skelton from other Members of Canada’s 39th Parliament pressuring her to take action to have all Canadian victims of phantom income tax treated fairly.

Part 9 closes part way through reporting on the events following the announcement on May 28 2007 by the Honourable Carol Skelton, Minister of National Revenue and the Honourable James Flaherty, Minister of Finance, of two new government initiatives proclaimed to bring fair taxation to all Canadians.

Part 10 Reveals a possible reason why both Prime Minister Paul Martin and Prime Minister Stephen Harper reneged on their public commitments to “fix” and/or “resolve” the phantom Income tax fiasco.

Part 11 Reveals a sample of letters being sent to the Hon Jim Flaherty describing the distress being caused to honest, hard-working Canadians by the defective taxable benefit legislation and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) policy in applying that legislation to tax phantom income.

Part 12 Provides excerpts from the Hon. Mr. Flaherty’s speech to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, where he preaches “Tax Fairness” for all Canadians but ignores all appeals from victims of Canada’s unfair policy of taxing phantom income. Thereby earning himself the title my maternal Mennonite grandmother applied to straight face prevaricators e.g. Flannel Mouth.

Part 12 Also reports on the creation and evolution of the group of grass-roots Canadians named: “Canadians for Fair and Equitable Taxation” (CFET).

Now find out some of the things members of CFET have done, and are doing to inspire the Canadian government to live up to it’s promise(s) of fair taxation and equal treatment under the law.

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When it became apparent the Canadian Government was merely paying lip service to “fair taxation” and were totally ignoring appeals, by Canadians financially devastated by being levied horrendous taxes on income that never existed, CFET members began looking for other ways to nudge the government to honour their “fair taxation” promises.

For example I discovered an article in the February, 2006, issue of the Readers Digest that told of the growing practice of internet users to express themselves in the field of blogging. The article was titled: “Are you blogging yet?” by author Tom Hawthorne.

Although the concept of blogging was totally foreign to me I began searching the internet for active blogger’s and blogger web pages. I came across a blogger web site with the title: “Blogscanada.com” containing a sub-group of bloggers’ with the title: “E-Group” specializing in political punditry.

It looked like the ideal place to try my hand at blogging: especially with the e-group web page inviting submissions from newbie bloggers. One of the named E-group administrators was (is) a gentleman named Jim Elve.

I sent an e-mail to Mr. Elve inquiring about submitting articles and whether or not a pen-name could be used when submitting items for posting. Mr. Elve was most accommodating and I began submitting articles under the pen-name “Victor Drummond”.

A Google search today will bring up one or two of the earliest articles by Victor Drummond that were posted on the blogscanada.com, e-group web pages. (1) “The Cat and the Rare Stamp” March 25, 2007
and (2) “Famous Lines – Who said that?”, April 2, 2007 -- for example.

Jim Elve soon became aware the Victor Drummond articles were not a good fit with the theme of the E-Group blogger web page and he very diplomatically, and politely suggested Victor Drummond articles would have more impact if posted on a new blogger web site dedicated to the CFET objective of fair taxation.

Consequently on April 24, 2007 a blog site titled: buyerbeware—caveatemptor.blogspot.com was created with the first entry being an “Introductory Mandate” and the very first article titled: “Income Tax versus Opportunity Tax” was posted.

Being a complete novice to the field of blogging I wasn’t sure how to set up the blog site options and how to enable reader’s comments. It took several months to gain some experience and apply some of the more common reader options to the web page.

Also I was initially rather disappointed at the low level of reader’s feedback.

Comments to Victor Drummond posted articles were few and far between and because the blogspot.com web pages do not provide a hit counter I couldn’t even determine how many readers had actually visited the articles posted.

I set a goal for myself of posting articles twice a week . Articles were to be posted on a Sunday and on a Wednesday whenever conditions allowed. By mid April 2009, approximately two years after the first posting, I had posted a total of: 163 articles.

Because I had been raised in a family that cherished and practiced truth, honesty, decency and integrity I naively believed those who governed Canada had at least a few of these same qualities.

Consequently my initial posted articles were abstract stories with rationales designed to expose the unfair aspects of taxing Canadians on money they had never received. (Phantom Income)

Believe it or not I actually expected a mild nudge or two would: (a) produce spontaneous government action to rectify the situation and/or (b) the voting public would speak up and demand their elected representatives take corrective action as soon as they realized their "RIGHTS" to fair taxation are being violated.

As you can see neither event (1) or (2) has taken place to date. I would like to believe, however, my articles exhorting voting age Canadians to demand representation of their candidates for election to Canada’s Parliament, or no vote, had some bearing on the historically low voter turn out in the 2008 federal election.

It turned out the federal political party that campaigned for election on the platform of: providing “reduced and fair taxation” and using the slogan: “STAND UP FOR CANADA" when elected in the 2006 federal election did not provide the promised fair taxation and they "DID NOT STAND UP FOR ABUSED CANADIANS" who voted them into office and who are still being victimized via the unjustified, unfair phantom tax legislation and the CRA application policy.

By the time Veterans’ Day, 2008 arrived I had been thoroughly disillusioned and now realized what a perfidious collection of federal politicians Canada had inherited.

It was cause for me to wonder why the voting rights of convicted felons were being upheld by opening voting polls inside prison walls and just what personal qualities a felon would support in their choice of candidate.

Perhaps that might explain how Canada became governed by people of low integrity, lack of honesty, and zero compassion for those they choose to victimize. For example a government minster who made grand speeches promising fairness but who then used his political power to make sure it didn’t happen.

Not one member of Canada’s 39th parliament has acknowledged the travesty of justice being imposed on honest, hard-working Canadians that were, and still are, being legally robbed of their life’s savings on the pretext the government is entitled to tax potential but nonexistent income.

I then expressed my profound disappointment in Canada’s government by posting the year 2007 Veteran’s Day article: “Canada Remembers and So do I.” By this time, however I no longer expected anyone to care, or comment, or do anything about it. And this time I was right.

On Veteran’s day 2008, I posted a similar article entitled: ‘When My Country Called – I responded”

Again there was no feedback.

Not one civilian or Canadian veteran posted a comment and no action was taken by any Canadian Veteran’s organizations, such as the Royal Canadian Legion, or, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

Perhaps no one reads Victor Drummond postings -- but somehow I don’t think that is the answer.

It makes more sense to me that the deafening silence on this travesty of justice has more to do with concern for government reprisals by withholding funding than it does for lack of concern the average person has for the well-being of victimized Canadians.

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From its inception the CFET group has been, and even before then, victimized Canadians were, appealing to their elected members of Canada's Parliament for relief of the unjustified, outrageous, taxes being levied on them by reason of the defective taxable benefit legislation.

Following the creation of the CFET lobby group I began to receive copies of letters and e-mails exchanged between CFET members and all sorts of government authorities and even between victims and the media.

Most Canadians feel comfortable -- with having outspoken Newspaper journalists, Radio Talk-show commentators and the many Television commentators, such as Rex Murphy, Mike Duffy (formerly),and Public Service Documentary’s such as “The 5th Estate” and “W5” – watching over government wrong-doers.

I also had confidence that these stalwart examples of public service would jump at the opportunity to right any serious wrong-doing on the part of our elected representatives. That is until CFET members began requesting support from these social watchdogs. Not one has acknowledged these requests or taken any action to publicize the abuse of honest, hard-working Canadians.

Over the past two years no less than four requests were sent to the editors of the Readers Digest Canada asking for the RD to publish something in the classification of their series: “That’s Outrageous” publicizing the Canadian government levying finacially ruinous taxation on phantom income.

Three of those requests were totally ignored and the fourth was acknowledged by a junior member of the RD magazine who replied they were forwarding the request to the RD editorial board. Three months later CFET is still waiting for the editorial board’s reply.

Several requests for support were sent to Rex Murphy, and to Mike Duffy, prior to Mike’s Senate Appointment and although months have gone by there has been no response from either one.

An e-mail was sent to Canada’s Ethic’s Commissioner, months ago, complaining to the Commissioner of the unjust and unfair treatment of Canadian taxpayers by the Canadian Government.

To the credit of the Commissioners’ office staff a reply came back within a reasonable time explaining the mandate of the Commissioner was limited to monitoring and reporting upon the conduct of individual government members and did not extend to dealing with the ethical conduct of the government overall.

Several E-mails were exchanged between CFET members and the Canadian Federation of Taxpayers, Ottawa Division. Although the e-mails were acknowledged by an official of the Taxpayers Federation the response was very much limited to tea and sympathy.

Not one article, critical of the phantom tax issue, written by a Tax Federation member/author has yet been published -- to my knowledge.

There is much more to follow in the APPEALS TO REASON series so keep in touch.

Victor Drummond ©