The National Citizens Coalition: still shilling after all these years

Secretly-funded lobby group continues to bark
for big business and conservative politicians

Ottawa - The National Citizens Coalition (NCC) is at it again - launching a new attack on unionized workers.

In fact, the group hasn't changed much since the late Colin M. Brown, an insurance millionaire from London, founded it nearly 40 years ago by placing one of his crabby old man ads in a newspaper, whining against the evils of big government.

A few people answered and "the coalition" was born, the hobby of a bellyaching country clubber who jetted off annually to the Masters golf tournament in Georgia, where blacks were then banned and women remain barred from membership in 2005.

(My oh my, whatever would Mr. Colin think of Tiger Woods, now four times a Masters champion at Augusta National?)

Brown never had much to do with ordinary citizens but he found them useful to invoke as a group, giving his elite organization the populist and dishonest image that to this day it still shamelessly parades to the public.

Membership rolls secret

No one knows whether the National Citizens Coalition has anything like the 30,000 members it claims, or how much of its funding ordinary people provide. Membership rolls are secret, and have been since its founding in 1967.

But that has never mattered to the media, which has given the coalition pretty much a free ride since its inception, endlessly quoting its shrill, right-wing viewpoints on everything from immigration and unions to health care and federal finances.

Democratic organizations with real memberships many times the size of the NCC, such as unions, are routinely ignored by comparison.

For example, the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), which has 340,000 members across the country (10 times the claimed size of the NCC), gets scant attention from the media, and it's the same with a great many labour organizations, except when strikes occur.

But being a big business in its own right, and having an instinctive affinity with the NCC's agenda, the media never tire of peddling its populist fiction.

The suspicion is that most of the NCC's funding comes, directly or indirectly, from the business community, which pushes its corporate agenda relentlessly by financing a long list of lobby groups at all levels of government.

Bulldog gone?

The motto of the NCC for many years was More Freedom through Less Government. Recently, the Less has been replaced with Better and Brown's beloved NCC symbol, the bulldog, has been quietly put down, presumably to soften the group's old-school image. It no longer appears on the NCC home page. The bulldog is not much of a marketing tool in an age when pit bull attacks on children flare regularly into television news footage.

Whatever its motivations, the NCC maintains a stunningly self-serving interpretation of what less government means.

Officially, the organization is a non-profit group, which means it pays no tax. This is because it does not exist, within the narrow meaning of tax laws, to make a profit, even though the bottom line of the business world is one of its most sacred concerns.

Ottawa turns a blind eye to this contradiction while the NCC feasts happily on the benefits of a government-proffered tax advantage, all the while biting the public hand that helps to feed it.

So what? Hypocrisy has never slowed the NCC down.

A shill for the Conservatives

Through nearly four decades, the NCC has been a faithful shill for business and for far-right politicians of all kind, all the while proclaiming the most transparent and hilarious of its lies - that it is a politically-independent organization.

The last president of the NCC was Stephen Harper, an early member of the right-wing Reform Party. Reform morphed into the Conservative Alliance and then into the federal Conservative Party - which Stephen Harper now happens to lead.

The NCC was there with bells on when Reform was founded in the 1980s and it has been there, as they say, every step of the way.

So close is the relationship between the NCC and Canada's political right that the group has not bothered to fill the post of president since Stephen Harper stepped down to return to federal politics in 2001.

The spokesperson since that time has been vice-president Gerry Nicholls, causing some to speculate that the post is being kept open for Harper's return, should he fail (as many Tories worry he might) to oust the Liberals from power in Ottawa.

New ad campaign

All of which brings us to the latest initiative of the NCC, which is (what else?) another newspaper ad castigating unions and appealing to "citizens" for money to fight them. (One of the donations suggested is $550, which speaks for itself. Widows and welfare mothers will no doubt be cramming postal boxes with cheques.)

Few people believe such ads are really aimed at ordinary citizens. Rather, their main purpose is to perpetuate the populist myth of the NCC and to maintain its image with the media. Meanwhile, the real money comes from the usual sources, which are never made public.

The current ad focuses on seven women at a bank branch in Lively, Ontario. All are portrayed as having been forced to join a union against their will.

It's classic disinformation, with the NCC again posing as public defender while, in reality, attacking the primary bulwark that ordinary citizens have to defend themselves in the workplace - the right to join a union and bargain collectively.

Democracy

In fact, the seven employees were part of a group of workers in eight Sudbury area branches who were unionized collectively after more than 50% of them signed union cards. The small group opposed the union in a democratic process and now they don't like the outcome.

The NCC often waxes eloquently about democracy but the only time it has any real use for it is when it wins.

The anonymity of its latest ad is striking, and again typical of the NCC. None of the seven women is identified, nor is anyone from the NCC. Neither are the bank managers, nor even the bank itself.

The obvious question is why? Who are these people, and what are they getting in return for their service to the NCC's anti-worker cause? What is the relationship between the bank and the NCC?

We'll probably never know the full story. Like its 40 years of invisible donors, the NCC keeps these details secret. NUPGE

More information:
• The National Citizens Coalition loves you - Ha! Ha! Ha!
• Stephen Harper vs. Canada
• National Citizens Coalition honours another fat cat

Web posted by NUPGE: 7 September 2005

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