Canada's Austerity Agenda: It's About the Taxes

by Ronald Labonté | Heathy Policies | Click HERE to read article

The American Jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, once wrote that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. By that account we are becoming less civilized with each new budget cycle. We are being told that we have a crisis of public debt and deficit. We do not. We have a crisis in fair taxation for the public goods that sustain health and civility, and a 40 year uncontrolled experiment in global neoliberalism and free market fundamentalism that has seen the starkest rise in income and wealth inequalities in over a century. Canada is just one of scores of national examples.

Canada began its downward taxation spiral in the 1980s. Marginal rates paid by the highest income earners dropped from 43% in 1988 to 29% in 2010. Corporate taxes fell from 49% in 2004 to just 27% in 2010 (Simms 2013). As taxes as a percent of Canadian GDP declined, so did public spending. Canada now ranks 24th of 34 OECD countries in our overall rate of taxation.