Perhaps the saddest, most telling indictment of our current political administration is that even after the drone strikes, the executive murders, the ongoing suppression of torture reports, the all-engulfing phagocytosis of the surveillance state\u2014 basically, a Human Rights record so abysmal that even Dubya might flush with shame\u2014 \u00a0we Canadians can still<\/i> look south of the border and wish we were led by the likes of Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
At least Obama doesn’t muzzle his own scientists. At least his administration doesn’t strangle research programs in the crib on ideological grounds, or fight tooth and nail against the slightest effort to mitigate climate change (he has Congress to do that for him). At least Obama has the balls and the fluency to weather interviews that extend beyond the comfy restrictions of tightly-scripted photo ops.<\/p>\n
There is, however, at least one area in which The US and Canadian governments see eye to eye. The US wants to extort money from Canadian citizens. The Harper administration wants to help them do that.<\/p>\n
You can tell both of them to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, if you’re so inclined.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Somewhere between one and two decades ago\u2014 in the midst of a relationship which has long-since ended\u2014 I first met Gwen and Kevin, a couple who were friends with my then-partner.\u00a0 If you ran into them on the street you’d figure they were almost too good to be true; co-owners of a successful graphics design company they ran out of their home, both smart, both ridiculously charismatic. Gwen was hot; Kevin looked like a Navy Seal from a martial arts movie.<\/p>\n
We called them “Gwevin”.<\/p>\n
I fell out of touch when my partner and I split up\u2014 the last time I ran into Gwevin was at a book launch way back in 2008. We caught up a bit, friended each other on facebook, mutually liked the occasional link. That was about it. For the next six years I had no idea what either of them was up to.<\/p>\n
That changed last summer, although I didn’t realize it at the time.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Like any fading imperial power, the US has a tendency to bite off more than it can chew. After a global meltdown precipitated by the deregulation of their financial institutions, a couple of unnecessary wars that continue to go about as well as could \u00a0be expected, and an ongoing smattering of police actions designed to plaster over the resulting cracks in the middle east, the royal treasury is apparently running a bit low. There are a couple of ways The IRS can boost tax revenues to make this up. They could, for example, stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, or increase taxes on the 0.1%. Alternatively, they can redefine as “US Persons” a bunch of unsuspecting little people who’ve lived their whole lives in other countries, then present them with a bill for taxes owed stretching all the way back to the fucking Paleolithic.<\/p>\n
Guess which option they chose.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
I first started paying attention to this in early 2014, when my eye was caught by the anomalous fact of the CBC<\/a> and the Global & Mail<\/a> actually agreeing on something. Turns out the NSA hasn’t quite<\/i> got the whole global surveillance thing down pat just yet. They’re not up for extracting the private financial records of Canadian citizens on their own\u2014 or maybe they are, but it’s just easier to order our banks to hand over their lunch money on threat of getting the shit beaten out of them. In this case, said shit-kicking comes down to punitive financial penalties on all US activities if the banks don’t play ball, enshrined in a piece of legislation called FATCA<\/a>. Two governments push; the banks go over like a pile of bricks; Harper’s henchmen collect the financial records of a few million private citizens and, tail wagging vigorously, passes it all on to Uncle Sam.<\/p>\n Lest you think that we’re only talking about a few rich Americans hiding out in Yellowknife to avoid the taxman, let me disabuse you: we’re talking about anyone the IRS defines as a “US Person”. That does include rich tax evaders, of course. It also includes children born in US hospitals to Canadian parents, even if those children never subsequently set foot south of the 49th<\/sup>. It includes people who were not<\/i> born in the US and who never lived there, so long as they were pupped by Americans. In includes the Canadian spouses of Americans. Hell, my Dad\u2014 born, raised, and retired in Canada\u2014 might have been caught up in that net if he was still alive. My late brother, a US citizen, handled Dad’s finances in his declining years, and any citizen who has such financial connections with a US citizen becomes\u2014 you guessed it\u2014 a “US Person”.<\/p>\n A lot of these poor bastards didn’t know they were US people. It never occurred to them. A lot probably still don’t. Those waking up to demands for a few decades of back tax returns can, if they want, renounce their default US Citizenship. \u00a0Only catch is, the IRS has\u2014 coincident with the implementation of this new policy\u2014 \u00a0just jacked up the processing fees from four hundred dollars and change to well over two thousand. Then you have to file five years of back tax returns anyway, and six years of foreign bank account data on all accounts exceeding ten grand; those fees can cost you up to twenty<\/em> grand. IRS demands capital gains tax on your Canadian home. Canadian retirement plans? Taxed. And you could face up to ten years in jail just for failing to file the paperwork.<\/p>\n One way or another, those fuckers are gonna squeeze you.<\/p>\n This past summer I read about a couple of women who’d launched a legal challenge on constitutional grounds\u2014 not to the US policy per s\u00e9, <\/i>but to the Harper government’s eager collaboration therewith. These people took a dim view of the idea that foreign governments should be able to dictate the domestic policy of other countries, even if those countries are<\/i> lapdogs. (The fact that the US has been routinely doing just that for generations is beside the point.) These people were of the opinion that FATCA violated the Constitution as well as the privacy of Canadian citizens. I had no idea who they were\u2014 I got the impression that at least one of them was keeping anonymous for fear of bureaucratic reprisal\u2014 but I wished them well. It was only a few days ago, when one of them gave me a nudge on facebook, that I finally blinked away the cobwebs.<\/p>\n Hello, Gwenny<\/a>.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n David and Goliath doesn’t even come close. It might, if Gwen Deegan and Ginny Hillis<\/a> were only going up against the one federal government they’re taking to court. But there’s another \u00a0Goliath lurking in the shadows, vaster and darker and so much more dangerous than the pallid spiteful fish-faced lapdog yapping on its behalf.\u00a0 This is David and the<\/i> Goliaths<\/i>, and holy shit is it going to cost.<\/p>\n