Playing Sleazy Shell Games With Our Taxed Money

A Commentary by Doug Draper

‘Those big-spending Liberals won’t cut your taxes. We will.’

Even if you were doing a poor job of following this spring’s federal election in Canada, you must have heard that message. It was repeated over and over again by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives, and it apparently convinced enough of us to deliver the Conservatives a commanding majority in both the parliament and senate.

Harper chooses user fee hikes and service cuts over income tax hikes

There is no doubt in this commentators mind that there will be billions of dollars in new tax cuts for corporations in this country that are already bathing in bonuses for their top executives and dividends for their shareholders. Those cuts for the rich and super rich have been promised and as sure as the rich get richer and the rest of us get shafted, they will be delivered.

But what about the tax cuts Harper promised earlier this spring for ‘hard-working Canadian families’? Or are those cuts for families going to have to wait, as the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and several other media organizations  have recently reported, until the Harper government balances the budget for years three or four years down the road?

Of course, three or four years down the road brings us close to another federal election – a good time to offer tax cuts to a peasantry that may not have noticed how much it is about to have its pocket picked with more user fees, even while it puts up with more cuts to health care, education, environment and other public services.
“Ottawa says user fee hike not a tax hike,” says a story in the June 9 edition of The Globe and Mail, one newspaper that can hardly be accused of having a  “liberal bias,” by the way. The story goes on to say that slapping user fees on a host of federal services we call pay for directly or indirectly through what we purchase is one of the ways, along with cuts to programs, the Harper government hopes to find at least $4 billion in the foreseeable future to cut the deficit.

Isn’t interesting, by the way, that governments – whether it be the Harper Conservatives in Ottawa or the Dalton McGuinty Liberals here in Ontario – never equate a hike in user fees as a tax hike? Very interesting, indeed, since user fee hikes are even harder on people on lower and fixed incomes, because they have to pay the same amount as someone making more than $100,000 a year. At least, income taxes are progressive, meaning that those who make more pay more. But we wouldn’t want to raise those fees would we? That would be a tax hike, and one that would place more of a burden on the well off.

How much better it is to play a sleazy shell game that has people at the lower end of the income spectrum taking a disproportionally big kick in the pocketbook on user fees.

So let the shell game begin and let’s not here any complaints from those who voted for a Harper government if and when they see services they need cut or have user fees slapped on them.

There is that old saying; ‘If you didn’t vote, you have no right to complain.’ I believe it should be amended to say, ‘If you voted for the Harper government, you have no right to complain.’

We’re in for an interesting four years.

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