FOODasFUEL

Hey folks,

I've been asked to talk briefly about our 10 year old legal victory here in Canada, to have food and drink for messengers recognized as an alternative fuel and so an allowable deduction on our income tax, the same way car couriers can deduct gasoline.

Well it took us eighteen years to convince the pinheads up here (finally I had to sue the Queen) but eventually a three judge panel in the second highest court in the land, agreed.

How'd I do it? I kept a list of all my deliveries for a year (1994). Then using my granddaughter's kite string I measured the distance of each delivery on a map of Toronto's streets. I worked every day that year - on foot and public transit - to maximize the total distance, so better to impress the establishment as to just how productive we can be. I then described in detail what an average day was like and gave them three sample menus of what I'd eat in a day. The government here said that the average Canadian male needed about 2500 calories per day to subsist and since I was eating about double that, I maintained that the extra food was the fuel that was powering my delivery vehicle (me).

This was before Kyoto, but Canada had signed on to the 1992 Rio Climate Change Summit so I said that if the income tax weasels - Revenue Canada - allowed car couriers, but not active transport (foot and bike) couriers, to deduct their fuel costs, the government was tacitly encouraging the use unsustainable delivery vehicles over sustainable ones by offering drivers, and only drivers, a financial incentive to pollute. This of course contradicted the government's stated international position at the Rio Summit.

Paraphrasing Monty Python, "we'd run rings around them, logically."

Then we had to come up with an easy way of applying it to every messenger in Canada so I suggested that we allow each courier to deduct the cost of an extra meal a day and we used the governments own figures that they used to estimate the cost of a meal (for long distance railroad workers!?!?!) which at the time had been pegged at $11/day. Ten years later it has been raised twice, first to $15/ day and now it stands at $17/day, without receipts, per day worked for every non-motorised messenger in the land.
If you merit a larger deduction - swimmer Michael Phelps maintains he's eating 9000 calories a day - you'd have to produce receipts to be allowed such a claim.

The actual court judgement is still viewable on the great Joe Hendry's MESSMEDIA website or by Googling ALAN WAYNE SCOTT vs THE QUEEN of ENGLAND. Wild, eh?

And I've still got 5 boxes of documents that anybody is welcome to look at anytime you're in the neighborhood. I start this all this shit 27 years ago and its about time we turned it into a global reality. I talked to Andy Duncan of the IFBMA about it briefly, so hopefully it will soon be a reality for everybody.

It just makes sense.

Here's a link to some of the TV interviews I did at at the time.

http://www.youtube.com/HOOFandCYCLE

If I can be of any further help you can reach me at HOOFandCYCLE@rogers.com

Best of luck mates. Go get 'em. We're all on this little ball together, eh?

-scunny-