Don't bail them out

It’s painful to watch Trudeau and his Liberal handlers attempting to transfer the huge losses suffered by the shareholders in our private sector airlines onto the shoulder of the Canadian taxpayers.

Shareholders in our airline companies do not qualify for financial bail-outs any more than shareholders in Irving oil, Loblaws, Telus, and Home Hardware.

Since the beginning of this year the price of oil has dropped about 30.00 dollar a barrel, with a corresponding drop in the price of shares in virtually all Canadian oil and gas companies.

People invested in those companies, hoping to make a profit, and some of them did, and they will ‘qualify’ to pay capital gains tax on those profits.

Other investors lost money, and they will be able to apply those losses to their taxable incomes and pay less taxes.

The investors who own shares in those airline companies qualify for the same tax considerations, and can apply the losses to reduce their taxable incomes.

When any of those companies lose money, the losses are suffered exclusively by the shareholders.

Should they qualify for loans to bridge the bap between disaster and recovery? Possibly, pending qualifiers.

Should they be forgivable? Absolutely not.

It’s a safe bet lawyers and accountants have been working overtime looking for ways and means of transferring those huge losses from the shoulders of shareholders to the shoulders of the tax-payers, but there is absolutely no way tax-payers should absorb any of those loses.

Canadian tax-payers never have, and never will be responsible for the success and failures of investors in any private corporation for the simple reason, they did not make those risky investments, and Trudeau has no legal or moral right to mine their pockets to bail any of them out.

Trudeau was elected to ‘serve and protect’ and he has an immediate responsibility to protect literally millions of under – and unemployed Canadians who desperately need that money to look after the basics for themselves and their families.

Unemployment will be in the double digits for years, and it should be abundantly clear, that the remaining taxpayers could not possibly be expected, legally or morally, to even attempt to bail out shareholders in any of our private sector corporations, including WestJet and Air Canada.

Andy Thomsen, Kelowna