Last week I wrote about tobacco industry funding for Fraser Institute research that “proved” second-hand smoke doesn’t cause cancer.

You may think that’s ancient history. And in one sense you’re right. The tobacco industry has shifted its doubt-manufacturing operations to countries like Russia, Indonesia and China, where the incidence of smoking—and cancer—continues to rise. But other industries with deep pockets need to manufacture doubt about the health risks of their products.

On Monday the Fraser Institute released a report, “Obesity in Canada: overstated problems, misguided policy solutions,” that casts doubt on the extent of obesity in Canada and questions whether obesity is even that much of a health risk. Call it obesity denial.

Obesity isn’t an epidemic so we don’t need more government regulation, the study concludes, and besides, the obese die younger, saving us precious health care dollars. Nothing to worry about.

If these findings are correct, they’re good news for food and beverage companies that pack their products with sugar’s empty calories.

The institute didn’t say who funded the study. And the news media didn’t bother to ask. Instead, Postmedia papers gave the report royal treatment, putting it on the front page of the National Post and Ottawa Citizen and giving it prominent coverage in the chain’s other papers.

What’s interesting about this  publication is that, along with Nadeem Esmail, the Fraser Institute’s in-house health-care researcher, the people who produced it were also responsible for the Fraser Institute’s cancer-denial work fifteen years earlier.

The letters the Fraser Institute wrote to the British-American Tobacco Co. in 2000 asking for funding reveal that the institute had set up a social affairs centre to promote market solutions to social policy problems like poverty, drug use, smoking and gun control. Anything but government regulation was the centre’s marching orders. Rothman’s International was providing $50,000 a year for this work and Philip Morris, “generous support.”

The social affairs centre was headed by one Patrick Basham back then. Fifteen years later he’s returned as an author of “Obesity in Canada.” Basham has come full circle, his journey guided by tobacco and other industry funding. After he left the Fraser, he went to work at the Cato Institute, another right-wing think tank with substantial tobacco funding. He then set up his own think tank, the Democracy Institute with offices in London and Washington, where he specializes in turning back public health initiatives (like smoke-free zones or taxes on junk foods) that could interfere with the marketing activities of tobacco, alcohol and food companies.

To launch the Democracy Institute, Basham co-wrote a book titled Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, which argues against any government legislation or programs, not only because they’d be too costly and ineffective, but more importantly, they would result “in the sacrifice of so many of our hard-won economic and political liberties on the altar of a misguided, unwinnable crusade.”

Libertarianism über alles. That’s the frame Basham brings to “Obesity in Canada.”

Basham’s Diet Nation co-author was tobacco industry consultant John Luik. Luik, who accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Tobacco, would have been an author of the obesity study except that he died in 2012. My evidence for this claim is that Luik wrote six obesity-denial articles with Basham that frame the argument in “Obesity in Canada.” Luik wasn’t an unfamiliar face to Fraser Institute staffers, since he co-authored the Fraser Institute’s 1999 book, Passive Smoke: The EPA Betrayal of Science and Policy. The book attacked the US Environmental Protection Agency’s study that found an irrefutable link between second-hand smoke and cancer. It was paid for by Rothman’s and Philip Morris. Luik joined Basham at the Democracy Institute and over the next half-dozen years, they wrote Diet Nation and dozens of articles attacking the “myth” of obesity.

Perhaps they switched from second-hand smoke to obesity-denial because tobacco industry funding for manufacturing doubt dried up.

Unlike the 80-million pages of secret Big Tobacco documents in the public domain, the sugar papers file is much thinner. Documents from the 1970s suggest the sugar companies used Big Tobacco tactics to deflect growing public concerns over the health effects of sugar. They describe industry efforts “to sponsor scientific research, silence media reports critical of sugar, and block dietary guidelines to limit sugar consumption,” as the CBC’s Kelly Crowe reported.

“Obesity in Canada” fits comfortably in this program.

A key claim in the study is that rates of obesity and overweight barely budged between 2003 and 2012 except among adult women. Why did Esmail and Basham pick 2003 as their starting point, one might ask. Perhaps because the dramatic increases in obesity and overweight among the Canadian population occurred before 2003.

Are they lying with statistics? A 2006 Statistics Canada study reviewed the studies on overweight and obesity among Canadian adults and found that “the percentage of Canadians who are overweight or obese has risen dramatically in recent years.” By recent years StatsCan means between 1979 and 2004. Obesity among adult males and females soared from 13.8 to 23.1 percent during those years, an increase of two-thirds.

Somehow the Fraser Institute researchers missed this information. For the atypical time segment they selected they conclude that the rate of growth has been “observable, modest and clearly not exponential,” introducing a requirement that to be classified as an epidemic, growth in the disease or condition must be “exponential.” This is a red herring—there’s no requirement that the spread of a disease must be exponential to qualify as an epidemic—that diverts us from the fact that if you survey the 30-year period, obesity is close to epidemic proportions.

Nonetheless this message was picked up by Postmedia papers: “’There is no epidemic,’ obesity study finds,” “Obesity ‘epidemic’ among Canadian exaggerated: report,” ran the headlines of the two Postmedia front-page stories.

Cheaper than paid advertising.

Having conveyed the message that obesity is not an epidemic, the next task is to demonstrate that the risks and costs associated with overweight and obesity “may be (perhaps significantly) overstated.” Here the authors use a different technique: misquote your sources. The mission is to demonstrate that their findings are “quite different from the often alarmist comments seen and heard in the popular press from those in favour of government intervention.”

But the very first study they cite, a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they claim “found that overweight Americans were less likely to experience premature death than normal weight Americans.” This would be a striking finding, to be sure, but the study reported a more significant result, that obesity was associated with a higher rate of premature death. The Fraser researchers omitted this finding.

Of course, “Obesity in Canada” cites many sources and this first one could be an honest mistake. Nonetheless, the media picked it up as a second key message, that the health consequences of excess weight are being exaggerated.

As the National Post concludes, “That makes the case weak for anti-obesity policies such as calorie counts on menus, tax hikes on sugary drinks and other policies that ‘vilify’ certain foods, given that a ‘sizable portion’ of the population ‘are neither overweight nor obese’ according to their BMI,’ Mr. Esmail said.” Esmail must say “sizable” and not “a majority,” since 60 percent of men and 45 percent of women in Canada are overweight or obese.  But it’s not an epidemic and the health risks are minimal.

There must be smiling faces tonight in Sugarland.

According to this rosy view of the think tank’s mission, Big Oil directors from Calgary, for instance, don’t tell Fraser Institute researcher Kenneth Green to produce studies denying global warming or proving that the Keystone and Northern Gateway pipelines are crucial for Canada’s economic survival. Green does these on his own because that’s what his research indicates.

Or so one would conclude from Walker’s denials.

We’d have to believe Walker’s claim if we didn’t have the Tobacco Papers—a series of letters Walker and his chief fundraiser wrote to a big tobacco company in 2000 asking for financial support for research that would “prove” second-hand smoke didn’t cause cancer.

This rare glimpse into the role of corporate funding in shaping Fraser Institute research was obtained as a result of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between 46 U.S. state attorneys general and Big Tobacco. A condition of the agreement was that the tobacco companies had to make public and post on dedicated websites, (see here and here) every document used in the discovery phase of legal actions brought by the states against the tobacco industry for Medicaid costs associated with smoking-related diseases.

More than 80 million pages of documents were posted. They include letters written by Walker and Sherry Stein, the Fraser Institute’s chief fundraiser, to the British American Tobacco Co., the world’s second-largest tobacco company and owner of Imperial Tobacco (Imasco), which controlled 70 percent of the Canadian market. The letters reveal that the Fraser Institute had set up a social affairs centre to promote free-market solutions to social policy problems like poverty, drug use, smoking and gun control. Tobacco company Rothman’s International was providing $50,000 a year for this work and Philip Morris, “generous support.”

With this funding, the Fraser published a book by two tobacco industry lobbyists titled Passive Smoke: The EPA’s Betrayal of Science and Policy, and held two day-long conferences in Ottawa. This package of initiatives was timed to coincide with bylaws being enacted by municipalities across the country to regulate smoking in public places. Such a bylaw had just come into effect in Victoria.

Big Tobacco was in a panic. Fraser Institute to the rescue.

The Fraser’s book argued that these bylaws were ill-considered because the link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer had not been proven. (Not true.) The book attacked the landmark 1993 decision of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that declared second-hand smoke to be a carcinogen. It was followed by the two conferences, which worked in tandem, the first attacking the need for regulation at all and the second attacking regulation of smoking. Neither the book nor the conferences mentioned tobacco industry funding.

At the end of 1999, Rothman’s was bought by British American Tobacco (BAT), and the Fraser Institute lost this funding. It commenced a campaign to replace, and add to, the money.

Writing to BAT’s chairman Martin Broughton, Sherry Stein asked him to take over Rothman’s funding commitment and consider a new initiative for a risk and regulation centre. She asked for $50,000 a year for each centre. BAT funding for this new centre would help the Fraser “provide the factual information that will seriously counter the risk activists and their misleading and misguided propaganda,” Stein wrote.

Later in the year, Laura Jones, the Fraser’s director of environmental and regulatory studies (i.e., deregulation)—she’s now the executive vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and a deregulation evangelist—thanked Adrian Payne, BAT’s international scientific affairs manager, for “the most enjoyable dinner last week in Toronto.”

Then Michael Walker reiterated these requests in his pitch to Payne. Walker focused on the new Centre for Studies in Risk and Regulation. He railed against the “agitators for a ‘zero-risk’ society [who] have become increasingly successful in advancing their cause, often basing their case on exaggerated junk science scares.” The targets of these nasty agitators were pollution, second-hand smoke, pesticides and genetically modified foods. With BAT financial assistance, the Fraser Institute would set the record straight.

BAT would not be alone in supporting the new centre, Walker reassured Payne. The institute had already:

“met with a number of your colleagues in the industry to discuss this proposal and all are on side and have implied that they will support the Centre with comparable contributions. The companies they represent are Imperial Tobacco Company Ltd., JTI Macdonald Corp., and Rothman’s Benson & Hedges Inc. We have begun discussions as well with Philip Morris International Inc., and Brown and Williamson Tobacco in the U.S. Others we will approach for support are in the food, biotechnology, and chemical industries.”

Later in the year, Stein presented three proposals for BAT’s support. It could contribute: $30,000 for the launch of the centre, featuring guest speaker John Stossel, a well-known television personality and anti-regulation zealot; $42,000 to distribute an anti-regulation book called Safe Enough?; and/or $48,000 for a project that would show regulation was too costly to be effective.

The letters from Stein and Walker don’t indicate which, if any, of these projects BAT did support, but they all took place.

The letters also don’t indicate that Brian Levitt, the CEO of Imasco, BAT’s Canadian subsidiary, was a Fraser Institute director during this period.

Too bad there’s not similar transparency for the Fraser Institute’s work on school choice or privatized health care or any of the dozen other issues the institute beavers away at to prove the market always does better than government.

Its 2012 budget was $10 million. Where does this money come from? The institute won’t say.

There’s something seriously wrong—corrupt?—when an organization wraps its efforts to influence public policy in the deepest secrecy.

The Fraser Institute awarded Barrick Gold chairman Peter Munk its T.P. Boyle Founder’s Award at a gala dinner in Toronto in 2010. This is the think tank’s most prestigious award, which it gave to Munk “in recognition of his unwavering commitment to free and open markets around the globe and his support for enhancing and encouraging democratic values and the importance of responsible citizenship.” Equating “free and open markets” with “democratic values” is a long-standing neoliberal marketing mantra. It also epitomizes Munk’s vast charitable giving.

Munk doesn’t make the list of the hundred wealthiest Canadians. That means he’s worth less than the entry level $725 million.

The 87-year-old Munk leveraged Barrick into the world’s largest gold producer and remained the company’s chairman until retiring in 2014. He owns less than a quarter of a per cent of the company’s shares. And yet some still call him a billionaire.

Whatever his net worth, Munk is making effective use of his fortune to advance his name — Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, Munk School of Global Affairs, the Munk Debates — and his ideology — the unfettered free market.

But while one initiative is high profile, the other is buried.

Munk has pumped $160 million into “good works,” as well as more dubious activities through his two foundations. The good works are funded by the Peter and Melanie Munk Foundation. At the top of the list is the controversial investment of $35 million in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

The deal was controversial because Munk received a $16-million tax reduction. His net $19-million investment turned out to be less than 20 per cent of the total cost, according to Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks in their book, The Trouble with Billionaires. Taxpayers footed the bill for the rest, but had no say in naming the school or even in determining its policies. Munk got a major facility named after him and, according to the secret agreement with the university, would get to approve the school’s direction and scholarship.

Munk’s high-profile naming activities receive accolades in the corporate press. The donation “merited a fawning front page news story in the Globe and Mail,” McQuaig and Brooks observe. The Globe also staunchly defends Barrick’s dismal environmental and human rights record in South America, Africa and the Philippines (see here and here, for instance).

But all corporate media, the Globe included, are strangely silent when it comes to Munk’s donations to ideological causes. No corporate news organizations are following this money.

They should.

Munk’s second granting organization, the Aurea Foundation (“golden” in Latin), is responsible for the rest of the funding. Aurea grabbed public attention as sponsor of the Munk Debates, which pit high-profile liberals against conservatives to debate controversial topics such as: “I would rather get sick in the United States than Canada,” “Climate change is mankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response” and “Foreign aid does more harm than good.” The debates elevate conservative positions to parity with long-standing liberal viewpoints, crowding out progressive ones.

As to how seriously Munk takes these debates, consider the November 2013 question, “Be it resolved men are obsolete.” The Toronto Star‘s Jennifer Wells found this topic a bit hard to stomach when she looked at the make-up of Barrick’s board of directors: 12 men and one woman. And not just any woman. Dambisa Moyo is a neoliberal economist who must have caught Munk’s attention when she spoke for the affirmative in the Munk debate Foreign aid does more harm than good. Barrick had no women at all on its board at that time. Her message of investment, not aid, would likely be well-received by the all-male board.

The debates also mask the foundation’s more financially significant activities: doling out nearly $2 million a year to Canadian right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations. Major recipients (2007-2013) include the Frontier Centre for Public Policy ($1.5 million), Canadian Constitution Foundation ($967,000), C.D. Howe Institute ($885,000) and Macdonald-Laurier Institute ($600,000). The Fraser Institute received nearly $2 million from Aurea and Munk foundations.

Most funding recipients don’t disclose where their Munk money goes. We can peek into this shadowy world at the Fraser Institute, where Munk money supports the economic freedom of the world project. The purpose of this project is to “prove” that economic freedom (and the free market) is more important than political freedom (and democracy). Freedom to mine should come before the rights of indigenous people. And the Fraser Institute can provide evidence for this.

Aurea also pays for the Fraser Institute’s Global Centre for Mining Studies to conduct research to “educate the public on the role that the mining industry plays in the prosperity of economies in Canada and in the developing world, and about the social and environmental effects of exploration and mining investment,” which, predictably, will be found to be minimal.

The Munk family obviously directs the money to the recipients it desires. It is assisted in this task by some knowledgeable outsiders. They include:

– Nigel Wright, Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, who was an Aurea director before going into the PMO

– Robert Pritchard, a former president of the University of Toronto and then president and CEO of Torstar Corp., publisher of the Toronto Star, who replaced Wright

– Ken Whyte, who moved from editor of the National Post, to editor and publisher of Maclean’s, to president of Rogers Publishing, to president of Next Issue Canada, Rogers’ online magazine service.

– Media pundit Andrew Coyne, whose Postmedia columns reach a nation-wide readership of 1.1 million.

That most arm’s-length Aurea directors are connected to the news media indicates that Munk considers it crucial to fund organizations adept in receiving good media play — without divulging the source of the funding.

This direction was reinforced in 2013, when Munk hired Rudyard Griffiths as president of both foundations. Griffiths had run the debates, leveraging maximum mileage from very little. He’s a long-time participant in the conservative propaganda wars as a co-founder and executive director of the Dominion Institute. The goal of this organization was to challenge the prevailing social-history approach taught in most schools, which emphasizes race, ethnicity, gender and class, and to replace it with the story of great men and important wars and events, an approach that fits comfortably with Stephen Harper’s agenda.

The propaganda function was central. “Everything we do at the Institute,” Griffiths explained at the time to the National Post’s John Fraser, “is done with an idea to how it will play in the media. We measure success in hundreds of media hits for each project.”

Griffiths is taking over a smoothly running operation: from Munk and his free-market ideology, to Aurea, to right-wing organizations that produce reports and engage in activities that further the conservative agenda, to positive reports in the corporate media. And no one is the wiser.

He’s Galen Weston Jr., executive chairman of Loblaw Companies Ltd. And while he, or his media handlers, hone the image of Galen among the common folk—top shirt button always undone—the reality is that he’s next in line to head Canada’s second-wealthiest family, with a 2014 net worth of $10.4 billion, a 26-percent increase over 2013.

The Weston family does many good things with its vast fortune, such as fund health research, university scholarships and private land conservation. At the same time, though, it has probably done more to undermine public education in Canada than anyone else. The family foundation has donated nearly $22 million to the Fraser Institute for its programs to destabilize the public education system and promote school choice and vouchers.

Milton Friedman was the inspiration for these programs. His 1995 Washington Post editorial said it all: “Public schools: Make them private.” And that’s what the Weston-Fraser partnership has set out to do.

Three years after Friedman’s call to arms, with Weston funding, the institute began manufacturing report cards that rank secondary and elementary schools in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. Each year the rankings find private schools that control entry and schools in wealthier neighbourhoods top the list. Weston provides awards for these schools and for those that show the greatest “improvement” from the previous year, “encouraging educators to recognize the benefits of productive competition among schools,” as Friedman advised.

Even though the methodology is deeply flawed, the rankings are an unqualified success, as real estate agents tout properties near high-ranking schools, mothers-to-be discuss where to buy houses, and divorcing parents fight over child custody based on which parent lives closer to a higher-ranking school. The Fraser Institute brought choice and competition into the public education system; there’s no going back.

In a second program that lasted nine years (2003 – 2012) and accounted for nearly half the funding, Weston financed the Fraser Institute’s school vouchers program, that sent disadvantaged children to private and religious schools in Ontario. The program was called Children First, implying that in the public system teachers and bureaucrats, and not children, come first, as Friedman claimed. Weston money supported them to the end of Grade 8. What happened to them after was someone else’s problem.

The Fraser Institute’s ability to obtain such vast sums from Weston may hinge on the fact that two Galen Weston cousins are Fraser Institute directors. They’re also on the board of the family foundation that doles out the money.

Does your consumer spending contribute to these attacks on public education? The Weston fortune comes from food wholesaling (Weston Foods) and retailing (Loblaw, Real Canadian Superstore, Provigo, T & T Supermarket, Zehr’s). In 2013, to fend off the Wal-Mart challenge, Weston paid $12.4 billion for Shoppers Drug Mart’s 1300 drug stores.

With the school rankings established as an everyday fact of life in Canada, the Fraser Institute is leveraging their success. In 2013, Weston money opened the Barbara Mitchell Centre for Improvement in Education. Barbara Mitchell, who died in 2001, was Galen’s aunt.

“Improvement” apparently has a different meaning for the Fraser Institute and the Westons than it does for most teachers and parents. For the Fraser, improvement means more school choice. Charter schools where are you? It also means improved teacher “effectiveness.” And that means rewarding schools whose students do well on the Fraser Institute’s rankings. Give block grants to these schools, one recent Barbara Mitchell Centre study recommends.

Principals can then dole the money out as “merit awards” to teachers they think are doing the most to boost test scores. The study also recommends that principals be empowered to hire and fire teachers. Get rid of those teachers with low test scores and build “winning teams.” That would transform principals into mini-CEOs of enterprises—formerly known as schools—engaged in a life-and-death struggle for dominance in the rankings.

It sounds preposterous, but in the early years skepticism also greeted the school rankings.

Such a situation could lead to a new ad with Galen Weston in a classroom—top button still undone—touting the test-score-boosting ingredients in President’s Choice products.

That would mean a nation in which somewhere between a half and a third of its citizens have fallen into poverty or are hovering just above, in low income. This according to latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, 400 Americans are worth more than $1 billion.

And the divide will likely worsen, as Congress and Republican-controlled state legislatures continue slashing programs and benefits, firing workers, and further weakening health, safety and environmental protections to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, if that is even possible.

But rather than face the grim reality of a collapsing American society, conservatives question whether people classified as poor by the Census Bureau are really that poor. Are they actually suffering material hardship? asks Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation based in Washington, D.C. Social safety-net programs have gone too far, Rector claims, citing poor people who live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs. Why should they get help from taxpayers?

This analysis comes from an organization in which 72 executives and staff members each earned over $100,000 in 2009, with president Ed Feulner taking home $921,000 and executive vice-president Phillip Truluck $557,000.

Rector is considered the “intellectual godfather of welfare reform” for his role in crafting the 1996 federal welfare legislation which ended “welfare as we know it” — signed by Bill Clinton — and created a permanent underclass of Americans available for low-paid, dirty work.

While income for the rich was soaring, Rector ensured that income for the poor would be depressed even further.

Having a large pool of low-income workers is exactly what Heritage Foundation folk want. It’s what makes the market work, they say.

People are poor because they deserve to be poor. Otherwise they’d be rich like us.

Here in Canada, the Fraser Institute and its radical conservative allies sing from the same songbook. We need vast disparities in wealth and income so the market can work better. Social programs that lessen inequality just get in the market’s way.

As the Fraser Institute’s Niels Veldhuis observed, “taking money from successful Canadians and redistributing it to lower income Canadians will only decrease the incentives for lower income Canadians to become successful.”

Veldhuis himself must be counted as a successful Canadian — and why should he deprive the poor of their opportunity to become successful like him? But with a 2010 paycheque of $168,836, Veldhuis still has a ways to go before he’s really successful and safely ensconced within the one per cent.

(Statistics Canada doesn’t publish data on the income necessary to be included in the top one per cent, but this figure has been estimated at just over $200,000 for 2009.)

Veldhuis and his colleagues have fought mightily to forestall efforts to raise the living standards of the less well off, most notably the minimum wage, the living wage, and unionization. These are policies which, according the institute, impede economic freedom, the right of individuals to choose for themselves and to engage in voluntary transactions.

Minimum wage laws and the right to be represented by a union infringe on the economic freedom of employers and employees, they say. Having a legislated minimum wage must inhibit a prospective employee’s freedom to choose an even lower wage.

If a country has minimum wage laws and a high degree of unionization, it’s not going to do well on the Fraser Institute’s Index of Economic Freedom.

Other indicators the institute says increase economic freedom are deregulation, unfettered free trade, low taxes, privatization, and minimal government spending — the usual suspects.

As expected, Hong Kong, with the highest level of poverty in Asia and the most billionaires per capita in the world, leads the parade of the economically free. Canada ranks sixth, up from seventh in 2010.

Harper has been a staunch advocate of neoliberalism and economic freedom since he was a graduate student at the University of Calgary in the 1980s.

The importance of the economic freedom project to the Harper government was revealed when the Fraser Institute released its 2010 list. This occurred at a Fraser Institute lunch-hour policy briefing at Ottawa’s Rideau Club with guest speaker Peter Van Loan, Harper’s then Minister of International Trade, who was busy working on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union.

Van Loan applauded his government’s “commitment to free trade, open investment rules and lower taxes.” Free trade is key to economic recovery, he declared. “In Canada, prosperity and quality of life are dependent on trade with the world.”

He reminded his audience of the “fierce debates about North American free trade and the voices from the fringe telling us that it would somehow erode our sovereignty.” Van Loan declared that “we need to continue building a broad base of support for the importance of a competitive, globally engaged Canadian economy of the future.” He ended with an invitation: “So let’s work together to continue convincing Canadians … of the importance of economic freedom.”

And as Canada’s standing on the economic freedom index rises, so do the number of billionaires and the ranks of the poor and struggling.

1. The actual FSA results account for less than half of a school’s ranking. The rest is based on the institute’s manipulations of the numbers.

Grades 4 and 7 reading, numeracy and writing tests account for 7.5 percent each, for a total of 45 percent. With so much of the ranking not based on actual test scores, distortions are created in the results a school obtains. Consider the case of Torquay Elementary in Victoria, which the Fraser ranked as 131st in its 2009 report. University of Victoria education professor Helen Raptis notes that the percentage of Torquay‘s Grade 4 students that met or exceeded expectations on the FSAs was 97 percent (for reading), 85 percent (writing), and 87 percent (numeracy). These figures, Raptis observes, are significantly higher than those for Pacific Christian School, also in Victoria, which scored 83 percent (reading), 69 percent (writing), and 76 percent (numeracy). Yet Pacific Christian ranked 108th.

Scored higher on Ministry of Education-administered tests, but lower on Fraser Institute rankings. Why? Let’s look at the other variables.

2. Twenty percent of a school’s ranking comes from differences between the results achieved by boys and girls. This artificially depresses the scores of schools with students of lower socio-economic status where, typically, gender differences are more pronounced.

Worse, and inexplicably, the Fraser gives more weight to gender differences than to the actual results. Gender differences in Grade 7 numeracy and reading tests (what happened to writing?) account for 10 percent each. The actual test results account for only 7.5 percent each.

3. Twenty-five percent of a school’s ranking comes from the percentage of tests “not meeting expectations.” This result penalizes low-performing schools by accounting for their low scores twice.

4. Ten percent of a school’s ranking comes from the percentage of tests not written in a school. This indicator was added in 2007 “to encourage schools to ensure a high level of participation in the FSA testing program.” It is a not-so-veiled attack on the BC Teachers Federation and parents who don’t want their children to write the tests.

That punishing the BCTF is the purpose of this component of the rankings can be seen by comparing the Fraser Institute’s BC and Alberta elementary schools rankings. This component does not exist in the Alberta report card where the union is not as activist in opposing mandatory testing.

5. Obviously, the elite boys and girls private schools—the ones that top the rankings—do not have gender differences. In this case the institute assigns an additional 10 percent to tests not written and 10 percent to tests not meeting expectation, with no rationale for the choices.

6. Nearly a third of BC schools do not enrol Grade 7 students. Students in these schools move on to middle schools, usually after Grade 5. However, the Fraser assigns the Grade 7 FSA results to the schools the children attended in Grade 4. This is not credible because it assumes that the middle school, where the student has studied for nearly two years, doesn’t contribute to student achievement.

7. The method of statistical standardization used throughout the ranking exercise makes small differences look large. Converting the results into a scale from zero to ten makes the differences appear even greater.

8. The worst problem with the rankings is that they take little account of individual and family differences among schools, which include socio-economic status, race and ethnicity, gender, disability, ESL and school location.

Numerous studies done in the U.S. have found consistently that these factors account fully for school differences. In fact, poor public schools may even do better than wealthy private schools, when these factors are fully accounted for.

In Canada, a 2006 Statistics Canada study found that “higher income is almost always associated with better outcomes for children.”

Ignoring such key factors can lead to some bizarre results. On the 2011 report card for BC elementary schools, for instance, Roosevelt Park in Prince Rupert was ranked 874th out of 875 schools in the province. David Johnson, an economist with the C.D. Howe Institute, also ranks BC schools and he does take some—but not all—socio-economic factors into account. Based on his rankings, Roosevelt Park, with 90 percent Aboriginal and 32 percent special needs students, rates as one of the top 17 schools in the province!

How is such an enormous discrepancy possible? And why does the institute manipulate the numbers so drastically?

As an ideologically driven organization, it can’t allow student achievement results to be related to income and other individual and family characteristics.

The purpose of the report card is to demonstrate—and repeat over, and over, and over again—that the school—its teaching, counselling and administration—is responsible for student achievement.

Its mission is transform an effective, well-functioning public education system into a jungle of schools competing for students, funding, teachers and yes! investors.

The report card is based on the doctrine espoused by the Fraser’s long-time friend and associate, Milton Friedman. In a 1955 essay, “The role of government in education,” Friedman first called for “the denationalization of education.”

In 1995, Friedman renewed his call to privatize public education in a major article in the Washington Post. (“Public schools: Make them private,” 19 Feb 1995, C7). Public schools were not really public at all, he declared, “but simply private fiefs primarily of the administrators and the union officials.” Government schools—his term for public schools—needed competition from the private sector, which could transform education, just like UPS and Federal Express had transformed package and message delivery.

Two years later the institute started ranking schools. The report card wraps the Friedman doctrine in “research” and delivers the results to the public thanks to the participation of a compliant commercial media.

And gradually the climate of ideas about the centrality of public education in a democracy changes.