Income Trust

This whole Income Trust thing isn’t exactly the most sexy issue cartoonists have been given the opportunity to draw on. I don’t profess to have much knowledge in the field of finance, and when it comes to reading up on this income trust story it doesn’t take long for me to imagine myself in high school calculus class wondering when the bell’s going to ring. It definitely has to be the most complex and confusing one we’ve had to deal with in a while.

One day, my younger brother, who works in the Investment banking and asset management canyon on Bay Street might explain what Jim Flaherty’s tax on Income Trusts means in layman terms. I get the political significance of this being the Harper government’s “McGuinty moment” — it being a colossal reversal, or flip-flop on an election campaign promise. And for that I suppose the Tories need to be spanked, or, forgive the pun, be given a half-assed spank. In the meantime, it’d be nice to return to those simpler days… like when the national focus was on Peter MacKay’s dog.

The above cartoon was done in haste, cobbled out from imagery from past cartoons:

I felt the need to get something out for my syndicate the morning after the news of an Income Trust tax was announced. I had an 45 minutes to piece it together. Busy and wordy — not exactly a work of art, but I suppose it illustrates my lack of enthusiasm for the subject.

Still, getting it out of the way freed up the day ahead and for the rest of it I worked on a cartoon illustrating a story on how Canadian cities were petitioning the United States Environmental Protection Agency over lax emmission standards which is allowing American smog to blanket Canada. That story, forgive yet another bad pun, seems to have blown over, and will remain unpublished in the Spectator until an appropriate time comes… and the time will come, unlike another Income Trust cartoon.