Fraser Institute co-founder confirms 'years and years' of U.S. oil billionaires' funding

Amidst revelations that the Fraser Institute accepted at least $500,000 from the Koch family between 2007 and 2010, the institute's co-founder acknowledged that the US oil billionaires have a long history of donating to the think tank.

Two foundations under the Koch family's auspices – the Charles G. Koch and the Claude R. Lambe Foundations – gave the Fraser Institute large grants to conduct “international work,” its former executive director Michael Walker told the Vancouver Observer.

Critics say Fraser Institute letter highlights ‘enormous lack of clarity’ in charity-audit rules

A fundraising letter written by Fraser Institute senior fellow and former premier Mike Harris criticizing the Ontario government highlights a double standard in the way the Canada Revenue Agency audits charities, critics charge.

The letter takes swipes at the province for lacking a “credible plan” to balance the provincial budget within two years, and goes on to criticize Ontario’s debt and the province’s unemployment rate.

“As my fellow Ontarian you must be outraged — that is why I am writing to you today to help us educate Ontarians about the severity of Ontario’s problems and the potential solutions,” Harris writes.

How Much "Free" Health Care Really Costs Canadians

"Don't touch my free health care," is a common refrain from defenders of the status quo whenever anyone broaches the topic of reforming Canada's health-care system.

While politicians and interest groups no doubt share a portion of the blame for perpetuating the myth of a $0 price tag for health care in Canada, their ability to carry public opinion with them stems from the murky manner in which health care is funded.

Individuals and families never see a bill for medical services, are not subject to any level of cost-sharing, and only pay a small so-called "premium" for health insurance (in provinces that impose them) that in no way represent the true cost.

The real war over inequality isn’t between old and young

I turn to Maclean’s if I want to know what idea conservatives will be pushing next. So when I saw a recent copy of the magazine featuring a jarring photo of an old person’s wrinkled hand with the middle finger raised, I realized the Right is gearing up to make generational conflict the next big thing.

Paired with that pic was a cover photo of a smiling, white-haired older woman holding a wad of $50 bills, with many more floating around her head, as if money were raining down on her. The cover headline: “OLD. RICH. SPOILED.”

Don't Believe This Misleading Report About Canadian Income Inequality

You'd think that we live in a caste society with an exclusive few perpetually "controlling" the vast majority of wealth given the stream of media stories on a recent report from the Broadbent Institute. Headlines in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and CBC all trotted out the cliché that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, giving the impression of a doomsday-like wealth inequality gap. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

The Fraser Institute's 'research' is junk -- have a happy Labour Day!

While the conclusions of the Fraser Institute's annual Labour Day attack on labour unions and the rights of working people to bargain collectively are predictably in tune with the market fundamentalist nostrums of the globalized corporations that bankroll its efforts, the group's methodology appears to be shifting in an interesting way.

The so-called "institute" released a paper yesterday that asserts the more heavily the labour relations field is tilted in favour of corporate employers, the more "balanced" it is -- an absolute inversion of reality.

This is no surprise because, no matter what the subject, Fraser Institute "research" always lines up precisely with the agenda of its corporate financiers.

Fraser Institute Blasts Canada's 'Biased' Labour Relations Laws In New Report

Just when it seemed that the debate over right-to-work laws had calmed, Canada’s most well-known conservative think-tank has released a report blasting the country’s “biased” labour relations laws for stalling jobs and investment.

After assessing various labour relations laws in the private sector for their “flexibility” — defined for the purpose of their index as “less bias towards favouring unions over employers” — the latest report, released Thursday by the Fraser Institute, found that all 10 provinces lagged behind the 50 U.S. states.

Follow the Money, Part 2 -- Barrick Gold's Peter Munk

The Fraser Institute awarded Barrick Gold chairman Peter Munk its T.P. Boyle Founder's Award at a gala dinner in Toronto in 2010. This is the think tank's most prestigious award, which it gave to Munk "in recognition of his unwavering commitment to free and open markets around the globe and his support for enhancing and encouraging democratic values and the importance of responsible citizenship." Equating "free and open markets" with "democratic values" is a long-standing neoliberal marketing mantra. It also epitomizes Munk's vast charitable giving.

A Canada without compassion: A modest proposal from the Fraser Institute

The Fraser Institute would like to remove compassion from the policy debate about poverty in Canada. Why? Because, according to the author of its latest report on poverty, Christopher Sarlo, compassion is causing us to confuse those who have lower income with those who do not have enough income to sustain life. For Sarlo, those who use relative measures of poverty, which set a poverty line relative to, for example, the median income in Canada, are being misled by emotions. He writes: "Poverty, like disability, is an emotional issue, laden with strong feelings of sadness and disapprobation, but there is surely some value in setting emotion aside in order to measure the phenomenon as objectively as possible."

Immigrants Are Staggeringly Costly? Nice Try, Fraser Institute

My best guess it that the Fraser Institute expects no one to read the report behind their newest sensationalist press release, in which they claim that the cost of immigrants to Canada is staggeringly high.

Anyone who looked at the report more closely would find false claims, deliberately misleading arguments, a naive understanding of global migration trends, and evident ignorance of what informs Canada's immigration priorities. The report is so poor and illogical that it cannot be taken seriously as contributing to public debates about policy reform in the domain of immigration.

Lowering our standards for workers' rights

The right-wing Fraser Institute has released a paper that, if implemented, would dramatically lower our standards for worker pay, workers' rights and workplace protections.

It urges governments in Ontario and B.C. to adopt American-style "right-to-work" (RTW) laws which violate a core principle upheld in Canadian law: if a majority of workers in a workplace vote to form a union, everyone should be a member and pay dues -- because all workers in that workplace benefit from the gains made by the union in their workplace.

Effectively, it would undermine unions' right to organize in Canada.

Fraser Institute report leaves children out in the cold

Apparently people get all subjective when they talk about children. Thank goodness we have economists. Not those crazy "social welfare" people who are "lobbying the state for more resources for families with children." Real economists. With real facts. Economists like Christopher Sarlo, from the Fraser Institute, who published a real report (The Cost of Raising Children) on the real cost of raising children in Canada.

So let's talk economics shall we? Let's talk cost. Let's talk cash changing hands. Because the primary critique that this report makes of other (higher) estimates of the cost of raising children is that these other reports measure how much parents SPEND, not the absolute COST of meeting a child's essential needs. The report's point is that, as parents, we spend money on all kinds of things that aren't really needed (bigger houses, expensive vacations to Disneyworld). Fair enough.

Are average Canadians paying too much in taxes?

On April 23, the Fraser Institute released the annual update of their misleading Consumer Tax Index report. The piece is meant to feed the anti-tax sentiment with numbers sprinkled liberally for their shock value instead of providing any meaningful analysis. Here are some of the main flaws with the report's methodology.

If what follows sounds familiar, it's because I'm drawing heavily from the analysis I did in 2010 here, here and here. All of these critiques continue to apply to the 2013 report, which is based on the exact same problematic methodology as earlier editions employed.

Scoop: How the Fraserites slip their propaganda reaction-free into the media

Have you wondered how the master manipulators at the Fraser Institute, those tireless missionaries of the market fundamentalist religion, always manage to get their stories into the media without any reaction from the vast number of critics of their shoddy, biased and ideologically motivated work?

One would think, after all, that journalists at Canada's few remaining serious news organizations at least would want to phone up the most obvious opponents of the Vancouver-based lobby group's questionable conclusions on any given topic and ask them what they think of them.

Never mind the details: Fraser Institute's a leader in press release production

TORONTO -- According to a press release issued last week by the Fraser Institute, which is one of Canada's leading producers of press releases, government employees earn more on average than equivalent private sector workers.

One is tempted to respond by shouting, "It's the market, Stupid!"

After all, when you're comparing qualified professionals doing important public service work to unskilled workers in the retail sector, as the Fraser institute seems to be doing in this slapdash and amateurish "study," one would expect the market to set higher rates of pay for the workers with skills and necessary qualifications.

Fraser Institute’s tax-exempt status makes mockery of its recent report

I laughed out loud when I read Barbara Yaffe’s column this past Wednesday about the Fraser Institute’s report on the risk posed to civil democratic societies by the growing numbers of tax-exempt workers.

Not laughing at the column. It was a timely, succinct and well-sketched discussion of the think tank’s study, Tax Payers and Tax Takers.

Growing number of tax-exempt workers alarms Fraser Institute

As this year’s April 30 tax deadline approaches, Canadians may be surprised to learn nearly 40 per cent of us pay no federal income tax.

The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, normally a proponent of lower taxes, is sounding an alarm about the growing ranks of those in North America who have become tax-exempt.

“Democracy can’t function properly when a sizable majority of tax filers are exempt from the cost of their decisions because they pay little or no direct taxes,” warns Jason Clemens, the institute’s executive vice-president.

Jim Flaherty’s most humane tax break under attack

Canada’s income tax system is becoming dangerously progressive, the Fraser Institute says.

The Vancouver-based think-tank issues its warning in a newly released report, saying that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty set a “risky precedent” by introducing tax credits for low- and modest-income Canadians. It singles out the Working Income Tax Benefit, introduced in 2007, as the minister’s most serious departure from the path of fiscal responsibility.

The 10 per cent delusion: Fraser Institute gins up fake facts about Alberta public sector pay

The Fraser Institute didn't write the book "How to Lie With Statistics," a guy named Darrell Huff did, but they might as well have!

You've got to have a little respect for the tireless political lobbyists at the Vancouver-based "institute" -- they just never flag in their efforts to twist facts like pretzels to fit their paymasters' ideological agenda.

Misleading with statistics: The Fraser Institute on health care and 'value for money'

No sooner noted than illuminated -- yesterday morning mainstream media was credulously reporting another "Fraser Factoid," this one a report by the far-right political lobby group purporting to show Albertans get poor value for the money they spend on public health care.

Actually, since in this case the market-fundamentalist "think tank" had little choice but to rely on publicly available and legitimate research to tease out its predictable conclusions, the news couldn't be made to seem as bad as the reports author doubtless would have preferred.