It is becoming clear why the leading NDP leadership hopeful came out so quickly to support the Occupy protests, because it is going to become his corner stone to justify increased taxation. It is the same reason that CUPE is paying to bus its membership to the protests, to keep taxes high so there's plenty of money to go around when it comes time to extort a better deal. If Brian Topp wants to run for office promising to raise taxes, have fun with that. In Canada the top 1% cutoff is around $180K per year. If his policy is to raise income taxes on the top 10%, you'll have many unionized workers taking a hit. He's going to find this tough sledding.
The problem for Topp is that the income gap is substantially smaller in Canada than the United States, despite what Topp said Friday on CTV news. He just kept blaming Conservatives, never mentioning the Obama administration, and then made the ridiculous claim that we have a larger income disparity. That's just not true. There's no reason for Occupy protesters to gather in downtown Vancouver banks because there's nothing fundamentally wrong with Canadian banks. Ours received no bailouts because they didn't need them. There were no CEOs getting fat bonus checks financed by tax payers. The Occupy Canada protests are coming from the same clowns who rioted at the G20 Summit and orchestrated those silly anti-prorogation protests.