Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks discuss their new book on ‘Cancelling Billionaires’

On September 22, Canadian author and journalist Linda McQuaig and tax scholar Neil Brooks will visit London to discuss their recent book Cancelling Billionaires Before They Cancel Us: The Urgent Need for a Wealth Tax.

The third book in their trilogy criticizing wealth hoarding and billionaires, their newest instalment brings a new urgency to the problem in an era further wrought with the wealth gap.

The pair has been highlighting the issue for decades and now 16 years since the debut of their first co-authored release, The Trouble with Billionaires, McQuaig believes the problem has become much more pronounced.

“The money has just gone so dramatically to the top, even more dramatically than back in 2010,” she said. “It’s not just that so much more money is concentrated at the top and less through the rest of society, but also with all that money comes just enormous power. And the wealthy have become so much more powerful than they were even back in 2010.”

Though many are familiar with the sheer wealth and power of American tech billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg, Brooks and McQuaig profile several Canadian billionaires to highlight the issue in Canada as well.

“One of the key ways that we see the exertion of billionaire power in Canada is their influence on climate policies — pipelines, fossil fuels, all that kind of thing. And those are very pronounced and very important in Canada,” McQuaig explained. “The pro-fossil fuel lobby, backed by the billionaire class, is shaping so many of our policies.”

Though she describes the Canadian billionaire influence as “less obvious” than the American, McQuaig points to Tobi Lutke as an example that we aren’t very far off from the American personality archetype of the ultra-wealthy.

Lutke, the billionaire CEO of Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, supported the idea of providing wealthy citizens with extra voting power, and stripping voting power from those who are poorer and thus don’t contribute as much in property tax.

“We’re starting to see that kind of billionaire, just self-important, self-entitlement that we’ve seen in the US. We’re starting to see that surface in Canada now,” said McQuaig. As McQuaig points out, even without the proposed ‘extra votes,’ the ultra-wealthy enjoy a much larger political control through their rampant ownership of media and ability to lobby governments. 

“Their extreme wealth gives billionaires extraordinary power, which they use to shape the world in ways that harm the rest of us,” said Norah Fraser, co-chair of the London chapter of the Council of Canadians in a media release shared with Antler River Media. 

McQuaig further discussed the power held by billionaires in media companies. Given the ownership of private media outlets and publications, it is no surprise that wealth taxes are very rarely discussed in most media. 

She drills this point in a critique of national news-media conglomerate PostMedia. 

“The media plays an important role in shaping public attitudes and yet we have the most important news organization in the country, the biggest newspaper chain owned by foreign hedge fund,” said McQuaig. “It’s ludicrous.”

With this book, McQuaig hopes to sell Canadians on the idea of a wealth tax that directly affects the ultra-wealthy and simultaneously protects the average Canadian.

McQuaig and Brooks will be discussing their book and tax proposals at London Public Library’s Central branch at 6pm on September 22. The open event will have copies of their book available for purchase.