This is the first report of expenses of and contributions to the website of the Isaac Brock Society.

While I have taken on the expenses and the administration, which I am handling through my corporation, Petros Research Inc., this website is not a commercial venture.  Several participants indicated that they did not want this site to start advertizing.  In deference to them, I have decided only to take private contributions.  In the worksheet below, I have enumerated my costs in both expenses and estimated time (@25 per hr), the contributions by number, and the estimated deficit.  Each contributor has now received a thank-you email indicating the number of their contribution.  I am happy to say that our generous contributors have adequately covered the time and expenses involved in moving the Isaac Brock Society to the dot.ca domain.

I have included in the expense sheet the approximate time that I’ve spent up on the website (conservatively estimated at 10 hrs per month and ten hours to set up the original wordpress site).  If anyone still wants to contribute to this and to the future maintenance costs, I’d be overjoyed.  I explain on another page how to make a contribution and why it is that I hope to recover some expenses for my labour (it is because I am paying out of pocket for a full-time assistant who is helping me with another project–the time I spend on Isaac Brock Society takes away from that project and thus I end up losing money–your generous contributions, however, help me to justify the time I spend on Isaac Brock Society. Thank you).

Since the transition to isaacbrocksociety.ca, we have had similar number of page views per day to our original dot.com site.  So the change over has been without a hitch.  For the last eight days, I have been using Google Analytics to determine our traffic.  In those eight days, we have had 3,500 unique visitors and about 38,000 page views.  The counter on the lower right-hand side of the page is using a different system, but the numbers are similar (nearly 35,000).  Before leaving the dot.com, WordPress had counted our page views at 660K, and for a few days here, we were trying to come up with a good system of counting page views.  So the total page views since our inception has been well over 700K.

I am happy with the progress of the Isaac Brock Society.  So far we have succeeded somewhat in getting the attention of both the new and the old media.  Any notice that we get will highlight further the injustices that the United States government is inflicting upon its expat community.  As we continue to grow in influence, I hope that we will be able to cause the reverse of the many policy decisions that make our lives so miserable.  Also, we are providing a source of information and news which is helping hundreds of people to find the best possible solution–or rather, the least bad solution–for their situation.  It is all worth it if we can help people save thousands of dollars in expenses and fines and help them sort through this citizenship predicament.

Perhaps our most important act in our first six months was our first press release which has likely steered many Canadian residents away from the 2012 OVDI program, saving them many thousands in unnecessary OVDI fines and lawyer fees.  This was against the stream (1) of the IRS, which was encouraging minnows into the program by scaring them with unconstitutional, excessive fines; (2) of the media which all too often carried the IRS’s water; (3) and of the tax professionals who often give the impression that clients must enter the OVDI.  Against this prevailing current, we fought and I think not a few of our readers realized that there were other, much better alternatives to the OVDI plea bargain.  Canadians who read the news reports in 2011 and joined the 2011 OVDI might have been spared if the Isaac Brock Society had started a year earlier.  But alas, that 2011 scaremongering which sent many thousands of people into an absolute panic is why we exist.

Sincerely, Petros (Peter W. Dunn)