Terence Corcoran: Is Carney’s Canada joining the UN war on inequality?

I believe it is accurate to say that Canada has not reached a point where income and wealth inequality are top concerns among Canadian voters and political leaders. Aside from the NDP’s Avi Lewis, leftist journalists and academics, calls to tax-the-rich out of existence are few and far between. There has been little Canadian uptake of the California-based proposal to impose an annual five per cent tax on the wealth of billionaires.

No surprise, then, that Prime Minister Mark Carney has so far failed to publicly respond to a request that he enlist Canada into a major UN campaign to launch an international policy initiative to end an inequality crisis described as “both large in scale and dangerous in trajectory.” The invite came from Joseph Stiglitz, famed Keynesian economist and political activist.

Stiglitz is the leading economic light behind a G20 plan, now making its way through the United Nations, to create an International Panel on Inequality (IPI). In a commentary last week in The Hill Times, Stiglitz asked Carney to take up the cause. “Prime Minister Mark Carney has a pivotal opportunity to help lead the global fight against extreme inequality by championing the rapid establishment of an IPI. We look forward to his support and that of Canada.”

No indication so far that Carney is ready to join the leadership team, and there have been no signs that any reporters have contacted the PMO to find out what Carney’s attitudes are to such an ideologically-charged effort. Nor is Canada mentioned in IPI’s official history, which includes support from the World Economic Forum and a small group of nations, including Spain, Norway, Brazil and South Africa. But no Canada.

The IPI concept is modelled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a global operation that Carney has been closely associated with for many years. Commenting in 2021 on the rising risks of climate change, Carney said an IPCC report that year “shows there is no time to waste. All financial institutions should now join GFANZ and deliver the financing needed for the transition to net zero. If you’re not part of the solution, you are the problem.”

Four years later, GFANZ — the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero that Carney helped create and chaired — nearly collapsed after high-profile banking members began to abandon the climate panic as a misguided effort based on unworkable ideas. Is Carney ready to become the leader of an inequality crusade based on climate change models?

According to Stiglitz, the global inequality crisis deserves an urgent IPCC-scale effort. The IPI would produce “scientifically rigorous” assessments of the magnitude and changes taking place in inequality. The panel would explore “the drivers and consequences, and the success and failures in addressing it around the world.” The IPI research would be used to shape government policies to reduce inequality and deploy funds to shape and improve economic development.

For Stiglitz, the devastations brought on by rising inequality are already known, implying there is no need for research. Since 2000 alone, he claims, 41 per cent of all the wealth created has gone to the top one per cent, while the poorest 50 per cent received only one per cent of the wealth. And as the trillionaire and billionaire rich get monstrously richer, they have the power to “disproportionally influence decisions and shape political agendas” in favour of their own wealth.

To reverse these inequalities, claims Stiglitz, there is a need to globally reshape economic policy and tax systems, with the IPI acting as ideological and policy co-ordinator.

While Carney has been sitting on the sidelines, activists on the Canadian left, along with some media, are attempting to pump up the volume, with special emphasis on the need for annual wealth taxes to reduce inequality and increase money available for government spending on infrastructure and the fostering of national economic projects.

The cover story in the October issue of MacLean’s magazine described “The Great Generational Rip-Off.” Canada’s Second World War baby boomers are “hoarding Canada’s wealth.” The story said high-wealth Canadians should be forced to share their wealth, through a wealth tax or other measures.

A new book by journalist Linda McQuaig and economist Neil Brooks — Cancelling Billionaires Before They Cancel Us: The Urgent Case for a Wealth Tax — argues that redistributing wealth is one of the best ways to improve the lives of millions of non-wealthy Canadians.

While often proposed as a tax on billionaires and trillionaires, many see a broader wealth tax not only as a solution to inequality but also as a way to raise new money to cover the growing fiscal deficits of governments around the world.

A few years ago, Stiglitz supported raising top marginal tax rates to 70 per cent and imposing an annual wealth tax of two per cent on individuals with assets of $50 million — in real estate, stocks, bonds, whatever — and three per cent on individuals with more than $1 billion in assets.

Given Stiglitz’s existing tax opinions (he is also an aggressive advocate of carbon taxes), he hardly seems like the right person to be setting up the International Panel on Inequality.

Where does Canada stand on the IPI proposal? Over to you, Prime Minister.