IRS wants Canada to nab U.S. tax cheats: Why we should care soc.li/6lgB73i – Cdngovernment involved in #FATCA discussions with US
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) January 7, 2013
Globe article discussing Canada, FATCA and IGS
FATCA represents the most egregious example of extra-territorial reach the U.S. has ever attempted. It will turn all the world’s banks into IRS auditors – at their own expense of course – and apply U.S. tax law on every country that allows it to happen. Its impact is so onerous that, while the Act is now legally in force, implementation has been delayed several times because the U.S. can’t produce a set of enforceable rules to make it work.
Why should we care? Because the Harper government is in the middle of negotiations with the U.S. to produce an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) that would impose U.S. tax law on Canada and turn Canadian banks into IRS auditors. Should this go forward, it would represent a colossal surrender of Canadian sovereignty and likely violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Let the comments roll!
Want to know why #FATCA should be stopped read this superb comment: sitelife.theglobeandmail.com/ver1.0/gocomm?…
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) January 7, 2013
Will Harper go down in Canadian history as the PM who turned Canada over to the United States on a silver platter?
Thanks for posting this great article by Don Whiteley. Comments are pretty good too.
Yes, thanks for pulling this one out of the threads and posting it. Comments are up to 110 now, and almost uniformly negative on FATCA. Well done @Arrow!
One of those comments has inspired an addition to the Perspectives section at USxCanada InfoShop: Air Takeoff from Canada
I have posted the following comment on this article:
Deckard1138
7:24 PM on January 7, 2013
On December 15th, 2012, a groundbreaking FATCA Fact Finding Forum was held
at Victoria College on the University of Toronto campus. The event was
sponsored by the Progressive Canadian Party (pcparty.org) and the Isaac
Brock Society (isaacbrocksociety.ca). Members of the media were invited,
as were all federal Members of Parliament. The only representative of a
federal party to attend was from the Canadian Green Party.
Key guest speakers included the leader of the Progressive Canadian Party, a
privacy-rights lawyer from The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a
Montreal-based international tax lawyer and McGill professor, a founding
member of the Isaac Brock Society, and finally, a Washington-based
lawyer and lobbyist who is working to repeal FATCA, “The worst law most
Americans have never heard of”, as described on his web site
repealfatca.com.
Full-length video recordings of the entire day’s sessions are available on the FATCAForum YouTube channel at:
youtube.com/user/fatcaforum
The Forum represented the first public Canadian grassroots effort to bring experts together to examine the many destructive consequences of FATCA which face not only Canadian citizens, but the citizens of every country around the globe, including the United States – the FATCA legislation’s own creators.
The article is date lined Jan 7. I have gone through the Jan 7 print edition of the Globe, and it is nowhere to be found. So, evidently online edition only?
@Deckard1138
I saw that. Good to reference the forum. It is great that it is there and available now for education of the wonky masses. I followed you with my meager comment too, even though I am a long way from Canada! 🙂 Just had to join the party! Thanks @Arrow for creating it!
@NorthernShrike
Online only — much too long for the print version, and frankly I prefer that because they don’t cut as much stuff out. They don’t pay as much for online either – good cost-saving policy.
I’m not done with this — and thanks everyone for all the comments, both here and on the Globe site.
DW
*Well I hope Mr. Flaherty and Mr. Harper have read the article and are paying attention to the reader comments inspired by it.
@usxCanada…
The US has been trying to track all going and comings for years, and the airlines have been in the forefront of these continued effort to create that Total Information Awareness System that keeps morphing into different forms.
As I have said previously, years ago, they were trying to do this for small yachts sailing the Pacific back in the 80s, via the Small Vessel report that ALL governments Customs were required to submit (and they complied) to the Coast Guard in Hawaii for each entrance and exit from even the most remote ports in the Pacific. Only the French said up yours, in Caledona, and ignored it back then.
So, frankly I thought they already had already got this all done with International airlines (Canada) because they have been required to submit manifests to the government prior to flight arrival since after 9/11. Guess they are just doing the natural, and extending it farther and farther. They do love these automatic data exchange programs, don’t they?! The goal, no place for anyone to hide without them tracking your movement as well as your assets and bank accounts.
Thanks for posting the online Globe article. Perhaps the essence of it can be printed in the paper edition. The number of comments show considerable interest and seem to warrant that.
As of 9am this morning, January 8, the article is the 2nd most popular on the Globe commentary website. See:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/
Excellent article, thank you Don!
Everyone, do as I just did, forward the Globe and Mail link to your MP, his/her party leader, and his/her party’s Finance and Revenue ministers or critics, with your own comments on how important it is for Canada’s government to uphold Canadian laws, Charter rights, and sovereignty and to stop surrendering any more of our sovereignty to the US or anyone else, lest we no longer have a country truly our own.
USP’s be ready for negative blow-back from ‘regular’ Canadians. I just concluded an argument with one of my husband’s ‘friends’ on Facebook, a regular Canadian who has some minor position with the Liberal Party who after reading the article thinks rather than try to fight a futile battle with the US over FATCA, that USP’s should be made to bear the costs that the banks will incur implementing FATCA. Among other things, I said I’d rather put my money in a mattress than pay the bank even more for their privilege of using my money!
*Your friend was probably one of the same people who said back in the 1980s and early 1980s that Canadians HAD to approve the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords.
We are going to kill FATCA just like we killed Meech and Charlotteown.
@Tim
The thought of that makes me feel giddy.
*Do you remember these commericials
I liked the comment:
It’s appropriate. We would have been fucked had we said Yes.
@Tim
I don’t remember those! The FATCA version of the commercial would have the Marquis de Sade participating.
Re the comments in response to the article, the level of discourse is managing to keep the idiot comments to a minimum. Congrats everyone!
When I checked it is now down to number 4, but with 172 comments, and just making the Most Popular list is a big KUDO to @Arrow. Good work guys. Would to god that someone would make the case down here in the NZ or Australia media, but frankly, as my in-laws who are visiting said, “We have never heard anything about this!”
@Bubble
Nobody in Canada likes FATCA, but if we have to have FATCA the banks and the USPs are lining up on opposite sides. We can expect that the message from the banks to Canadians will be that they must impose what the US demands upon USPs. If not, they will incur the 30 percent withholding, which “we have no option but to pass along to all of our customers”.
This, if it works, will line up USPs and the rest of Canadians on opposite sides, letting the banks off the hook. That will be the intention.
@NorthernShrike
Why don’t we just start an all-out trade war with the U.S.? We could easily slap a matching 30% tariff on energy exports to the south, including natural gas, oil and electricity – stuff that they’ll need a lot more than we’ll need their devalued currency.
*NorthernShrike
The banks can attempt to make that case or have others do it for them. I don’t necessarily think they will be that sucessful. Remember a relatively small group of individual customers will be directly effected by witholding. Most people only hold US investments indirectly through mutual funds, hedge funds, pensions etc. The typical person will view witholding through prism that is just something their “professional” pension fund manager will have to deal with not them personally.
@Northernshrike
Either that, or the banks will simply close USP accounts. Either way, USP’s will become pariahs and we will see the armchair anti-Americanism we enjoy in Canada today become something more. Harper’s government better play this carefully.
*bubblebustin
There has always been a group of native born very Pro American Canadians. They have never been anywhere close to a majority of the population but they have always been a distinct group of people going all the way back prior to Confederation. For a long time they supporters of what people would call the Turner/Martin wing of the Liberal Party against the “Anti Americanism” of Trudeau and Chretien in the Liberal Party. Of course they would always feel betrayed when Turner and Martin got into political trouble like 1988 and 2004(after Martin only won a minority by the skin of his teath and had to cozy back up to the Chretien crowd) and would embrace the anti American left.
I would say to their credit there has never really been a pro-American wing of the NDP. In terms of where the Conservatives fall on this spectrum that is hard to say. I still believe the current government is trying to hedge their bets on FATCA. What happened to their promise of an IGA before the first of the year.
If you’re still in the mood to comment after the globe article, here is some more of the same firewood
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/08/168870692/havens-are-turning-hellish-for-tax-avoiders
@WatACrock
Just checked that article and the comments. Looks like another sadly misinformed bunch of people needs a dose of the Isaac Brock SWAT team – let’s get over there too!