Myth Buster

(Please note: If the font today seems very small, it is an issue with WordPress and I’m aware of it!)

Ever since talks between Electro-Motive and its unionized workers broke down at the end of last year there has been a lot of buzz about how the federal government really ought to do something. Word was the Harper government gave the company’s parent, Caterpillar, $5 million in tax breaks and yet it’s picking up stakes and leaving for the US. The NDP took out the cover of London’s weekend Metro a week ago to tell the Prime Minister that “London will never forget” it.  It makes a great headline, but it’s not true.

Tomorrow morning on Free-FM’s The Big Picture we will air my interview with an Economics Professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western who sat back one recent day and asked himself, “is that what happened?”  Everyone from those on the picket line at Electro-Motive to local media has been parroting that supposed “fact” of the tax break without ever digging into it.  So the Prof did just that.  He went back and researched every speech, every press release and every story written about the so-called sweet deal for Electro-Motive and found that it’s not what people think it was.  The real story is as dry as a popcorn fart and was an environmental initiative to encourage locomotive owners to buy new ones.  It also didn’t matter if they were purchased in Canada, Sweden or the USA.  Electro-Motive was simply the photo-op location.   Plain and simple, London’s Electro-Motive wasn’t given anything special; it was an incentive for the purchasers that ultimate benefited the entire industry.Will this information get spread as widely as the inaccurate rumour?  I doubt it.  I think everybody should know about it but I suspect my media brethren as a whole won’t want to tell you they’ve found out something they’ve been reporting is wrong.  As the Professor put it, “It was a story that was too good to check.”  I wonder if it’s a story that’s too good to correct?