For the past six years, I have been screaming it from the rooftops – i.e., this column and in the social media – that our Conservative government doesn’t understand taxation and government spending at all. It’s taken all this time of screaming before the mainstream media finally picked up this week on everything I have been saying all along.
The main bone of contention: Stephen Harper’s “generous” tax breaks. As I have been saying, tax breaks aren’t tax cuts, but part of government spending. Tax breaks force people to spend their money on something first, only to get a measly portion of it back by way of the tax break – think of the $75 for bus passes, for example. This doesn’t lighten the immense tax burden resting on the shoulders of hardworking Canadians (45% of annual household income, when aggregating all federal, provincial and municipal taxes and “user fees”).
Meanwhile, Canadians are feeling poorer and do in fact have much less disposable income to work with.
Still, in one (electronically conducted) conversation with Jason Kenney, the immigration minister, in the run-up to the last federal election in May 2011, the minister told me, and I quote from memory:
Kenney: “Our government has given Canadians tremendous tax cuts.”
Yours truly: “Not true. You gave them ‘tax breaks’, not the same thing.”
(Followed by complete and immediate silence on Kenney’s part.)
How stupid does our government think we are, I asked the public via the media I usually use. Everyone who cared to reply or comment agreed with me that the Harperites didn’t have a clue about taxes and that they were not the fiscal conservatives Canadians thought they had voted into office (in fact, primarily for that reason, to finally have a truly fiscally conservative government).
Tax breaks aren’t cuts, but public expenditure – and “social engineering“, as John Robson calls it. Conservatives don’t engage in social engineering. As the name implies, this is something socialists do, but not conservatives. (Are you paying attention, Alison Redford?)
The nonsense started with Harper’s reduction of the GST from 7% to initially 6% and finally 5%. Any self-respecting conservative would have kept the GST, a consumption tax, where it was, or actually increased it, while simultaneously cutting personal (not corporate) income taxes substantially.
Instead, what Canadian taxpayers got was the decrease in the GST, tax breaks that don’t serve taxpayers at all and only increase government spending, and a drastic cut in corporate tax rates – whoop-de-do!
At the same time, the Harperites allowed public spending to balloon by at least 45%, the highest acceleration this country has ever seen, and that includes previous corrupt and profligate Liberal governments.
Then, when the global recession began to bite, although it never really sunk its teeth into the Canadian economy the way it did in the US and in Europe, our very own, supposedly conservative, prime minister opted for a major shift into (extreme) left-wing territory by adopting Keynesianism (“stimulus spending”), a flawed left-wing economic theory that its own creator rejected on his death bed. Naturally, the Harper government’s spending went through the roof, tossed off most of the shingles and took out the chimney to boot.
With all that had been going on in terms of spending and misguided fiscal management, Canadians didn’t bother much anymore when they heard that Harper had spent over a billion of their bucks on the silly kindergarten reunion, a.k.a. the G8 and G20 summits. Nor did they bat an eyelash when it was revealed how some cabinet ministers had poured out their, um, the taxpayers’ cornucopias to regale their constituents with expensive gifts that no one, not even the people in those ridings, really needed or wanted.
Seeing so much underhandedness in shuffling around public funds, former prime minister Jean Chrétien must have chuckled to himself and said to Harper, “Good boy. You have learned well from the master … me!”
There have been only very few moments when Harper was sort of upfront with Canadians, such as when he countered criticism of his not being conservative enough by saying that he had to take it slowly (“incrementalism”, “gradualism”) on account of having a minority only.
But, I wonder, what will his excuse be now? He’s got a very comfortable majority. Even if the entire opposition ganged up on him, they still couldn’t bring him down by a vote of no confidence.
Folks, don’t hold your breath waiting for the March budget. Harper won’t suddenly become the fiscally prudent manager you all wanted him to be. He likes rolling in taxpayers’ money so as to spend, spend, spend it. That’s why he loves tax breaks, and hates tax cuts, because the former still keeps all the tax dollars flooding into the treasury before only a tiny fraction is refunded for good, “socially-engineered”, behaviour.
Personal income-tax cuts would leave too much money in the pockets of Canadians, and thus less for him to play around with (read: blow on frivolities).
Surely, we can’t have that!