SpankyMcFarland

I don’t see Detroit on that list.

Yes, she came across as a bit stuck-up but she was given a hospital pass by Mulroney and shouldered the accumulated hostility to a government long in power. Regarding the infamous ad, did she even see it before it was aired? John Tory deserves more of the blame there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Chrétien_attack_ad

I haven’t seen the odds lengthen but people are talking about the effect it will have on the team. Terrible red card. She didn’t even stamp on her properly.

Thanks for the explanation. I never remember how Americans calculate betting odds.

Kim Campbell seems to have rubbed some people up the wrong way. How could she be considered the worst after such a short time in the job? If you add the two opinions together, Chrétien and PT come out well. I suspect JT’s negatives will decline after he leaves office.

Low scoring games like soccer are inherently less predictable than the likes of basketball and American football. That’s part of the fun.

Goalless draws can be a lot of fun. England and Nigeria showed this today. What a match, with powerful shots at both ends and wonderful goalkeeping. Nigeria demonstrate that the WWC is not a club for rich nations any more. Unfortunately, they came apart in the penalty shoot-out. In the other match, Australia had a convincing 2-0 win over Denmark. The Matildas are looking strong. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=women's+world+cup+2023 If you want a World Cup blog with lots of exclamation marks and English bias, this may be the one for you: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/womens-world-cup/index.html And can somebody tell that TSN lady to stop saying Briz-BANE instead of BRIZ-bun? It kind of undermines my confidence in everything else she’s claiming.

I thought someone more knowledgeable would have done this already but here goes. The Women’s Soccer (Football) World Cup is well advanced in Australia and NZ. Thirty two teams started, played in ten venues and sixteen were eliminated in the group stage. We’re half way through the Round of 16 knock-out stage now. Yesterday the US was beaten by Sweden on penalty kicks, while the Netherlands beat South Africa. In the US game, the Swedish goalie had one of those dream days where nothing could get past her. https://www.fifa.com/fifaplus/en/tournaments/womens/womensworldcup/australia-new-zealand2023

It’s a systems problem. CRA are not exactly the most popular people in the country and expanding their activities makes us all feel a little nervous. I would argue that pursuing expensive cases has a deterrent value. The medical insurers CMPA defend any case they think has merit regardless of cost. Over time, rightly or wrongly, this has had a powerful inhibitory effect on medicolegal litigation in Canada.

I’ll finish with a positive area of Canadian taxation - rules on residency. Many countries have deeply opaque rules on whether one is liable for taxation there even involving the incredibly complex matter of domicile and some have a ludicrous number of days rule where you can be present in your previous country of tax residency for a certain number of days and not be liable for tax there. In Ireland, for example, this led to most of the very rich Irish business people (Micheal O’Leary, the cartoon villain of Ryanair fame being an honourable exception) claiming to live in a very low tax foreign country for tax purposes despite continuing to really live in Ireland. They were deemed non-resident for tax if they jetted out before exceeding their maximum allowed number of days. Because of EU treaties this rule has become more common in Europe. By contrast, Canada relies on a strength of ties system. If somebody claims to have left Canada they will be asked common sense questions to see if this true like, where is your primary residence, do you own any property here, where does your wife live and where do your kids go to school? The list continues in an impressively granular fashion. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/international-non-residents/information-been-moved/determining-your-residency-status.html Here is the form: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/cra-arc/formspubs/pbg/nr73/nr73-17e.pdf I’m sure the system is by no means foolproof but at least it starts at the right place. If you want to leave us, fine, do so. But don’t pretend to do so.

I think you mean envious there rather than jealous but no matter. The vehicles used by the seriously rich are not available to all because they are very expensive. You’re talking about a theoretical right that does not exist in the real world. I prefer to live in the world as it is. The megarich and their minions make some of the rules in this area. They’re hardly going to make what they do illegal, are they?

That foreign Trudeau trust is truly sickening. What’s a Canadian PM, and a Liberal one at that, doing with one of those? His father patriated the Constitution. Let’s see him repatriating his foreign family trust. That’s right. I guess one caveat is figuring out how much income people with massive assets make because they have so many ways of ‘camouflaging’ that income.

I believe CRA should not be looking at cases on a profit or loss basis but on whether an honest effort has been made to pay taxes owing. When an individual has gone to great pains to conceal income, often abroad, that case should merit special attention irrespective of whether CRA loses money pursuing it.

So you approve of what KPMG did here and would like to see more of it? Once again, the vehicles used by the seriously rich - I’m not talking about the upper 20% here, of course, but the top 1% - have a high entry cost. That means they can only used by a tiny elite of high net worth individuals. But I am not talking about that here. Obviously. Read my posts. Mother of God. Once more I have to suggest to you to play the ball, not the man. I hope envy is not what motivates me here but a desire for a more just system that holds all Canadians to a similar standard before the law. As numerous revelations from across the world have shown, the tax system is broken and is getting worse. The megarich have escaped from it. For the record, I have paid way more tax than the average Canadian in my working life.

It’s not a complete free-for-all in Canada. There are already some limits, e.g. on what military and CSIS veterans can divulge under the Security of Information Act, for example. We must find some way of protecting CRA from improper influence by the megarich. If there are other solutions, let’s hear them. We do have a problem, though. We have a particular problem in Canada with high-ranking tax officials being way too cosy with their adversaries in the top accounting firms. Have you read the CBC articles about the Isle of Man saga? There was clear intent to conceal there. If you can suggest remedies for this that don’t involve either a complete ban or a much longer cooling-off period, especially at the most senior level, I’m all ears. And I have absolutely no problem with the standard tax-cutting tools we are given that you list. I use them myself and their legality does not need any qualifying adjectives like ‘completely’ that often alerts one to something dodgy out foreign. It’s the complex ‘vehicles’ I am talking about. The dust still hasn’t settled on KPMG’s Isle of Man caper regarding beneficial owners etc.

Unfortunately, the top accounting firms have so damaged this process that a clear line between the two sides has to be drawn in order to re-establish public confidence. Aggressive tax avoidance has become a serious problem for governments across the world and is undermining the credibility of taxation. It’s not a simple matter to determine whether a complex tax ‘product’, as the jargon goes, is legal or not. One problem is that lobbyists for the wealthy can influence the drafting of laws so that something that was illegal and appears to be so can become ‘completely legal’ at the stroke of a pen. No poor person can dream of such a thing. Another is that CRA seems to consider the cost of cases when deciding its strategy. This means that the very wealthy with their armies of lawyers get preferential treatment while middle class taxpayers have their cases dragged out. This ‘low-hanging fruit’ strategy encourages cynicism and distrust of our taxation system. Imagine if the police did this when investigating crime? For goodness sake, at least give the CRA the people and financial resources needed to fight every case on its merits. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-revenue-kpmg-secret-amnesty-1.3479594

A person at CRA knows they may be in line for a job at a top accountancy firm. This may have been hinted at during their many wine and dine sessions together. They are also involved in cases involving that firm where the firm looks like it may have broken the law. There would a clear temptation to do the usual thing with very rich clients represented by the top firms - settle the case and keep the whole thing secret. No, I literally do not think that and I did not write that. You imagined I wrote that. At the end of the day, this is about the game, not the players. A person who avails themselves of existing rules is playing the game. My primary interest here is in changing the game and making it fairer and more transparent.

No CRA official should be allowed to work for a major accounting firm afterwards. The conflict is obvious. They may be considering cases from one of those companies while they are still working for CRA or after they stop working for government they may divulge confidential strategies of CRA to the company. I did not think that. I was referring to the CRA official joining an accounting firm there, not the taxpayer. Politicians - I’d say they all consider themselves serious - have criticized some of the aggressive tax avoidance tactics of KPMG and Co.

Does that address what I stated about CRA officials joining accounting firms? The story seems to have gone quiet for years now so I don’t know if it is still happening. Of course, it shouldn’t be allowed. Gamekeepers should not become poachers. No serious politician in Canada is advocating a flat tax. It’s a complete non-starter and in no way a solution to the problem.

I think hope is fading fast for LK-99 but we’ll see stronger candidates in the future.

How could Castro and Mrs. Trudeau have gotten together at the right moment? This is a claim that doesn’t have real legs.

I’m sure anybody tut-tutting about JT took a stern view of Trump’s dismal relationship with women.

Wait a second, you’re saying they’re available to everybody….but most people wouldn’t make a profit on them? That’s a rather lawyerly way of saying the same thing I said. They only make sense for a tiny segment of the population and should not be available to anybody. The sort of vehicles I referenced bring the whole tax system into disrepute. Something else that should not be allowed - accounting firms recruiting senior CRA officials. The potential for corruption should be obvious to any sentient human here.

Tax shelters are not the same for everybody. The boutique overseas products offered by the likes of KPMG are only a realistic option for the seriously asset rich - high net worth individuals. Letting these people away with their wrongdoing and crimes destabilizes the whole system and encourages everybody to cheat.

Given that nobody else has had a go at this potentially important topic, I will do my blissfully ignorant, copy-and-pasting best and hope that somebody better informed steps in to rescue the thread. Like cold fusion, room temperature superconductivity is one of those advances that has long been predicted but has yet to arrive. Superconductivity at any temperature or pressure sounds like a magical state where electrical resistance and magnetic flux fields abruptly vanish as the temperature of a material is lowered below a critical point. Get this: an electrical current through a superconducting wire could continue indefinitely. The possible technological consequences of being able to do this at room temperature are obvious. Cast your minds back to high school and Ohm’s Law which states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the voltage across those two points. Introducing the constant of proportionality, resistance, one arrives at mathematical equations to describe this relationship: where I is the current through the conductor, V is the voltage measured across the conductor and R is the resistance of the conductor. After Ohm’s law was accepted, it was discovered that the resistance of conductors reduced gradually as temperature declined. However, in 1911 Heike Onnes amazed the world by demonstrating that when Mercury was cooled a lot, to 4K (-269C), it abruptly lost all resistance, an extraordinary and, at the time, inexplicable finding. It was left to quantum physics to supply an answer - the BCS theory which explained the superconducting current as a superfluid of Cooper pairs, i.e. pairs of electrons interacting through the exchange of phonons. Another major advance occurred in 1986 when it was discovered that some cuprate ceramic materials have a critical temperature above 90 K (−183 °C). They were called high temperature superconductors, which seems strange until one recalls that liquid nitrogen boils at 77 K (−196 °C). Consequently, superconductivity at higher temperatures than this opens up applications that are much trickier at lower temperatures. Fast forward to 2023. A South Korean group has just claimed to have discovered a room temperature superconductor, LK-99. Unfortunately, the sceptics are getting louder every day: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02481-0 While ‘we’ may be back to the drawing board/test tube/computer model very shortly, it’s certainly a quest that will continue.