Resist Carney’s Pro Billionaire Agenda
by Yves Engler
A CEO summit in Toronto highlights Mark Carney’s corporate, wealth-concentrating policies. The September get to together of the “the world’s largest investors” should be protested.
Last month the Liberals passed legislation granting cabinet the power to authorize the use of pesticides Health Canada has already deemed unsafe. In effect, Bill C-30 gives cabinet the ability to overrule science in the service of corporate profits.
Also last month Carney announced that part of his plan to improve housing affordability was to bail out corporate condo developers unable to sell already built million-dollar units. Rather than build social housing, $1.5 billion of federal money will go to bailout capitalists who’ve sought to maximize profits.
Immediately upon taking office the former Goldman Sachs banker and chair of Brookfield Assets cancelled a scheduled increase to the capital gains inclusion rate, allowing capitalists to continue paying tax on only half their gains. Those who make their income through labour still pay tax on 100% of their earnings.
In another early sop to wealth holders, Carney scrapped a small Digital Services Tax. As a result, the world’s largest internet giants will save a billion dollars annually.
Carney has instigated a slew of other measures that lower the tax burden on large enterprises. His government immediately deferred corporate income tax payments and GST/HST remittances and created the Productivity Super-Deduction and Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) incentive.
Carney’s radical militarist agenda is also driving an upwards concentration of wealth. Arms production is notoriously capital, not labour, intensive. Additionally, the flow of public resources to arms production has already led to reductions in federal funds for social programs that disproportionately benefit the working class and poor.
As a pillar of his wealth-concentrating economic policy, Carney has promoted privatization and public-private partnerships. He is seeking to privatize airports and established a $25-billion Canada Strong Fund to de-risk major industrial projects. The Sovereign Wealth Fund will subsidize the risk of major corporate ventures.
At the same time, Carney’s Major Projects Office tramples on Indigenous rights and weakens environmental oversight for large corporate projects in energy and critical minerals. It empowers the government to fast-track infrastructure projects, weakening the requirement for free, prior, and informed consent mandated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). In a sign of the capitalist, fossil fuel orientation of the legislation, Carney named the chair of the board of directors of Trans Mountain, Dawn Farrell, to be CEO of his government’s Major Projects Office.
Carney has turned to the corporate world for a slew of positions in his government such as the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Canada, Tim Hodgson, as energy minister and the CEO of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Michael Sabia as Clerk of Privy Council. He also reintroduced Stephen Harper’s practice of regularly holding informal meetings with Bay Street CEOs.
Carney’s pro-corporate measures are exacerbating an already spiralling inequality crisis. The top 1% of the tax bracket has a historically high proportion of income and Canada’s 86 billionaire families control more wealth than the country’s 6.2 million least wealthy families. One single Canadian, Changpeng Zhao, has $150 billion. It’s grotesque. Billionaires shouldn’t exist, nor should one hundred millionaires or even ten millionaires. Yet Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.
Carney has invited the world’s top 100 capitalists and investment firms to an Investment Summit in Toronto for mid-September. He is pitching the event as a way to stimulate a trillion dollars in investment, no doubt stimulating extraction of ecologically damaging resources and selling off assets at discount rates. The summit showcases and will consolidate Carney’s pro-corporate, militarist and anti-ecological agenda. At a time of unprecedented global heat waves, Carney is advancing new fossil fuel infrastructure.
The summit provides an opportunity for environmental, labour, Indigenous, housing, peace and social justice movements to come together against Mark Carney’s corporate agenda. The Capitalism Can’t be Fixed campaign is calling for a “Carnival Against Capitalism” in opposition to Mark Carney’s wealth concentrating, ecocidal policies.