Penetrating look at the murky world of tax havens
Harold Crooks had an epiphany Tuesday afternoon.
Asked where he gets his social consciousness from, the New York-based filmmaker recalled something he had never told anyone, a memory from his childhood growing up in Westmount.
“I was probably 11 or 12 years old,” he said. “I lived in the middle of Westmount, on Windsor Ave. I had a job delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy on the corner of Victoria and Sherbrooke, for a few hours a night.
“I always noticed that when I bicycled all the way up to upper Westmount, I got very small tips; and when I biked south of Sherbrooke street, the less advantaged, poor people gave me much bigger tips. I think right from the get-go I identified with the underdog in life, and it all grew out of that seed.”
Crooks’s new Quebec-made documentary The Price We Pay picks up the theme of economic disparity by exploring the mysterious world of offshore tax havens. We’ve all heard about the rich stashing their cash in the Cayman Islands, but Crooks digs deeper to explore the rampant exploitation of such financial limbos by a staggering number of multinationals at the expense of the middle class, small and medium businesses and the social safety net.
Apple, Google and Amazon are just some of the companies revealed to be paying next to no taxes, courtesy of some fancy legal sleight-of-hand involving such schemes as establishing head offices in faraway places, outside the reach of sticky government fingers.
The result is that the rich pay next to nothing in taxes, the middle class is taxed through the nose and governments don’t have enough to maintain basic services, from road work to health care.
Shockingly, the whole idea of tax havens didn’t start in the Cayman Islands at all, but in London, England — specifically a 1.2-square-mile area in its centre, run by the City of London Corporation. It is the original tax haven, free from the tax laws of England, or of anywhere else for that matter.
“It amazed me to learn that many sophisticated people in the world of finance, including high-level accountants, knew nothing about London’s part in the creation of the offshore world,” Crooks said.
Canadian banks were key in the rise of the Cayman Islands and other British colonial outposts in the’80s, as they sought a way to take advantage of the benefits of London’s square mile without having to set up shop there.
It’s a lot to wrap your head around, and Crooks breaks it down with admirable clarity in The Price We Pay, with help from Quebec tax expert and author Brigitte Alepin (who co-wrote the script) and a number of financial professionals from around the globe. Not bad for a film he hadn’t planned to make on a subject that had never occurred to him.
It all started at a panel for Surviving Progress, his 2011 globalization documentary co-directed with Mathieu Roy, at Montreal’s RIDM film festival.
“After the panel, this woman (producer Nathalie Barton) came up, handed me her business card and said: ‘I’d like to speak to you,’ ” Crooks recalled. “Soon after that, she asked me if I would be interested in the project.
“Even though I have a background of training in economics, I had never thought about the issue of taxation. Like most of us, death and taxes were things I preferred to leave to the ‘absolutely necessary’ point. When I thought about it and read about it, I understood that taxes are really the lens through which you understand — going back to the French Revolution — who has power.”
The eldest of four sons raised by an entrepreneur mother, Crooks received a Master’s degree in economics from McGill, and earned a Commonwealth Fellowship at the Deli School of Economics, in India. He intended to do a doctorate on the theory of socialist planning, before concluding that “socialism wasn’t coming anytime soon” and changing course for the London Film School.
Crooks’s background provided him with a crucial understanding of the issues at play in The Price We Pay, and the tools to navigate interviews with a wide range of economic specialists. His primary goal was to break down the elaborate fiscal concepts and intentionally convoluted practices in question to present the topic in a way audiences could understand.
“I knew I had to find a story,” he said, “and I knew it had to be a cinematic experience. … The story was the offshoring of the world’s wealth, which to me represents a threat to the major social innovations of the 20th century. People think the middle class has been around forever, but it’s one of the innovations of the mid-20th century, as is the social welfare state, which is dependant on the nation state and progressive taxation.”
On the filmmaking front, Crooks is flanked by a Quebec crew, including cinematographer Alex Margineanu, editor Louis-Martin Paradis (who also worked on Surviving Progress), soundtrack composer Ramachandra Borcar and sound designer Benoît Dame, all of whom made the director feel right at home.
“I grew up at a time when Quebecers really were two solitudes,” Crooks said. “One of the most wonderful things about my last two films has been the opportunity to work with young, francophone Québécois and to be embraced by them. It has been one of the great experiences of my life.”
