If I was ever under the illusion that the government of my country was for me and had my best interests at heart, I would get a rude awakening in the mid 80's.
Our Amway business was going really well, and I was envisioning going full time and not having to worry about money for the foreseeable future. We had won trips and awards and our organization was growing, as was our business volume and our profits. A local aspiring Conservative politician approached me about being on his election committee for his attempt to gain the Conservative nomination for our Fraser Valley riding in the upcoming federal election.
I was flattered and certainly my interest and love of politics was a factor in me accepting the position. One of the reasons I was chosen was because the candidate thought I could deliver the 'Amway vote'. We would stack the meeting with our free enterprise loving business partners and vote as a block. We did get a block together but our opponent had a huge 'church block' and won the nomination handily. In the process I learned a lot. I began to understand how the Amway vote in the USA was electing people at all levels of government. There were literally millions of Amway distributors across the USA and they were certainly conservative (Republican) in their political leanings.
Our Prime Minister at the time, PET, was not blind to this fact and he eventually got wind that the same thing could happen in Canada. So, he developed a plan and was able to put it into place rather quickly. We had a prominent Conservative MP attending our weekly meetings in Surrey and he and I had a discussion about what was going on in Ottawa.
Apparently the CRA (Canadian Revenue Agency) does audit projects, which is actually a very efficient and effective way to catch misdemeanors in the area of income taxes. The teams of auditors will educate themselves in all things to do with fishing, for example, learning all the ins and outs and the little tricks that fishermen will employ in order to avoid taxes. Then they will go out and audit only fishermen for the next month or so.
PET called an Amway Project. We were taught in our Saturday morning seminars, how to run a small business, keep accurate paperwork, and file taxes for self-employed business. We were 'above board'. So the devious Prime Minister had to make this audit work. How he did it was by creating retroactive rules. For example, instead of saying that all expenses relating to sales convention outside of our sales territories were no longer tax deductible, he said that those conventions were not eligible for tax writ-offs as of three years ago. You, reader, may find this hard to believe, but this is what he did. Then, every distributor making more than $500.00 a month was audited. Those are the same ones who would go on the conventions to Hawaii, LA, and Phoenix. They were expensive but were made more affordable because of the write-offs. Previously, there were specific instruction from CRA as to how to make sure the conventions would qualify as a business write-off, which we followed to the 'T'. It suddenly made no difference.
So all the expenses of all those audited partners of ours were disallowed, making their income greater, and taxes payable higher. The taxes payable for the expenses from the previous years were in arrears so there was penalty and interest to pay. Interest rates at that time were in high teens. The audit happened over the next few months and our business literally fell apart due to discouragement and financial hardship. We went from close to $1 million in gross revenue the prior three years to mere thousands. We too quit after all our hard work went up in flames and discouragement. The Amway business in Canada was never a force ever again. The prime ministerial objective was achieved.
I would be suspicious of all government from that day forward, realizing that they do what they have to do for the sake of power and keeping their position, for status and a big pension payoff at the end of their tenure.
If I have been long winded, it is so you can understand the mindset of someone who, especially today, with mounting evidence, will never trust the government.
In the next post, I will fast forward to the 2016 - 2020 term of the US president. Things will start to warm up.
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