Comics, Taxes, and Civil Rights

Winnipeg high school student Elly Hooker has won a national award for the comic she created which tells the story of Nova Scotian Viola Desmond's fight for civil rights. Ms. Desmond, born in Halifax, became famous in 1946 for refusing to sit in a segregated area of a New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, movie theater.  She didn't realize that the ticket she had bought was only good for a balcony seat, where all African-Canadians had to sit. Downstairs seating was only for white Canadians. She wanted to purchase a downstairs ticket but the cashier refused. When she tried to take a downstairs seat, police arrested her. The next day, she paid a fine for refusing to pay the one cent difference between the ticket prices (based on the "amusement tax" due to the provincial government).

She eventually appealed to the courts. Although she died in 1965, her sister continued the fight for her. In 2010, the then Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia granted Ms. Desmond a pardon. In 2016, the Bank of Canada chose Viola Desmond as the first Canadian woman to appear on a Canadian banknote (the ten-dollar bill).

Ms. Hooker will receive the Kayak Kids' Illustrated History Challenge in Ottawa for her comic celebrating Viola Desmond.

A short Viola Desmond bibliography below:

Heritage Minutes: Viola Desmond; Historica Canada: Heritage Minutes

How Civil Rights Icon Viola Desmond Helped Change Course of Canadian History

The Story of Viola Desmond, "Canada's Rosa Parks"

Who's the Woman on Canada's New $10 Bill? A Viola Desmond Primer

Constitutional History and National Identity In Canada

Eric M. Adams, University of Alberta Faculty of Law, is publishing Canadian Constitutional Identities in volume 38 of the Dalhousie Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

Constitutions are stories nations tell about themselves. Despite the famous declaration in the Constitution Act, 1867 that the “Provinces of Canada…Desire…a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom,” most of Canada’s constitutional history can be understood as the search for a distinctly Canadian constitutional identity. Canadians have always looked to their constitutional instruments to both reflect and produce a particular vision of the nation and its citizens. This article focuses on the search for Canada’s constitutional identity during its first century as a nation, from Confederation until the 1960s. Drawing on a varied array of sources and voices, this article argues that the powerful yearning for identity operated as a driving force in Canadian constitutional law, politics, and culture in an era before the catalytic arrival of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Download the text of the article from SSRN at the link.

Evaluating the Lougheed Era In Alberta, 1973-1993

Ted Morton, University of Calgary School of Public Policy, and Meredith McDonald have published The Siren Song of Economic Diversification: Alberta’s Legacy of Loss as SPP Research Paper No. 8-13. Here is the abstract.

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed is celebrated for his defence of the province and Western Canada during the energy wars of the 1970s, and deservedly so. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was a formidable opponent. He was able and willing to use the full arsenal of federal powers to redirect soaring western energy revenues away from Alberta to Ottawa. For those of us in Western Canada, it is unpleasant to imagine what the outcome of this struggle would have been if a lesser man than Peter Lougheed had been at Alberta’s helm. But there is another aspect of the Lougheed legacy that is less remembered because it is less celebrated — also deservedly so. These were Lougheed’s ambitious economic diversification projects. Between 1973 and 1993 (when Ralph Klein became premier), the Lougheed-Getty “forced-growth” economic diversification projects are conservatively estimated to have cost Albertans $2.2 billion. While former premier Don Getty got most the blame for these losses (as many occurred during his watch), most of these programs began earlier. Lougheed’s push for government-led diversification of the Alberta economy was a policy hallmark of his 1971 electoral breakthrough, and marked a sharp break from three decades of Social Credit laissez-faire policies.

The Lougheed-Getty diversification fiascos are of more than just historical interest. While the subsequent Progressive Conservative (PC) regime of Premier Ralph Klein (1993-2006) followed an explicit philosophy of “government is not in the business of business,” the more recent Stelmach (2006-11) and Redford (2011-14) governments have not.

Both have embraced government-sponsored “value-added” and diversification initiatives, including the North West Redwater Partnership upgrader and two new endowments to provide “funding for social and cultural innovation, and agricultural innovation.”

As Alberta’s fifth premier in the past nine years, Jim Prentice, takes the helm and tries to restore some stability to Alberta’s public finances, it merits revisiting the Lougheed-Getty experience for lessons learned. Our read of their record cautions against going down the same road again. While we identify several successes (e.g., Syncrude, Alberta Energy Company, and the ethane-based petrochemical industry), these were mostly in the hydrocarbon energy sector, and so contributed little to diversifying Alberta’s economy. Our analysis identifies the largest dollar losses (the “Dirty Dozen”), several of which suggest that failure to control costs is endemic to government-led projects. Last but not least, the sheer number and diversity of government-funded projects reflects an unhealthy culture of corporate cronyism. With billions of dollars sitting in the newly created Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund earmarked for “diversification” and “capital projects,” the temptation to spend became irresistible. The Heritage Fund, rather than serving its original purpose of a long-term “rainy-day account,” became a giant slush fund for ministers’ pet projects. The result is that, in real dollars, the Heritage Savings Trust Fund has a lower net worth in 2015 than it did in 1987.

By the time Klein won the leadership of the PCs in 1993, his predecessors had racked up over $23 billion in net debt. Klein is widely celebrated by some (and criticized by others) for the harsh budget cuts he made to eliminate the structural deficit he inherited. Less well known is that the Klein team also terminated almost all the Lougheed-Getty diversification and stimulus programs. In their stead, the Klein governments — under the leadership of treasurers Jim Dinning and Stockwell Day — pursued a diversification policy based on macroeconomics: making Alberta the most tax- competitive jurisdiction in Canada. This “build-it-and-they-will-come” approach was intended to attract both financial and human capital. This approach has enjoyed modest success thus far, as witnessed in the growth of the financial services sector and the relocation of many corporate head offices to Calgary. It is clearly a lower-risk path to sustained prosperity than the ill-fated, government-led “forced-growth” initiatives of the Lougheed-Getty era.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.