Why Is No One Making Canada’s Rich Pay Their Fair Share Of Taxes?

A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

“Only the little people pay taxes.”

–         the late American  billionaire and hotelier Leone Helmsley, who was later convicted and sent to prison on charges of tax evasion.

If you are one of the “little people” in Canada who was fortunate to have any kind of job or pension that produced income for you this past year, you are also among those required by law to file a tax return to Canada’s revenue agency by the end of this April.

Canada’s blind as a bat revenue minster Gail Shea. If she doesn’t know who the country’s biggest tax evaders are, what else doesn’t she know?

You might also know that even if you made as little as $20,000 this past year, which leaves a single person in this country hovering around the poverty level, you have had to give at least some of that income back in taxes. With that in mind, how not nice it is to turn on the CBC or open a newspaper over the past week to reports that at least hundreds, if not thousands of the wealthiest individuals in Canada are able to get away with paying little or no taxes at all by transferring vast sums of money to off-shore tax havens in the Cayman Islands, Barbados and elsewhere.

To make matters worse, the information behind these news reports did not come from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), which is supposed to be acting fairly, but determinedly to make sure everyone is paying their fair share of taxes. It came from a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of news reporters called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist which received a massive leakage of documents exposing tax evaders in the United States and numerous other countries, including more than 400 rich Canadians who have been exporting their money to foreign tax havens.

Then, to add to the Keystone Cop character of all this insofar as Canada’s obviously inept revenue agency is concerned, we had the spectacle of federal Revenue Minister Gail Shea telling reporters in the wake of these revelations that her revenue agency officials “will review any information they receive and aggressively pursue all suspected cases of tax evasion. … And here is the punch-line from the minister of a government whose business it is to know who the tax evaders are and take steps to crack down on them.

“We call on the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to hand over this list to allow our government to crack down on tax evaders,” added Shea without a hint of embarrassment or shame on her face.

Can you imagine that?  Here is national government’s revenue agency asking a group of journalists to turn over information it should already have had in order to do its job. What kind of a pathetic display is this coming from a Harper Conservative government that always promised that it could be trusted to do a better job than the other parties when it comes to managing the country’s finances?

And keep in mind, this is also a government that has recently decided to go to almost any lengths, including following people to the front doors of their homes, to crack down on individuals they feel may be taking advantage of unemployment insurance benefits? Yet it has to go calling on a group of reporters to provide information it should have had on big-time tax evaders who are possibly costing the country tens-of-billions of dollars in lost revenue?

I try to keep the cynic in me in check but it is hard not be at least a tad bit cynical about this one. Indeed, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the reason the government has gone to the trouble to obtain this information itself is because it really doesn’t want to. After all, some of these high rollers sending their treasure to far-off shelters are likely their friends and supporters. Along those lines, with all of the chest-pounding this government has been doing around building more prisons and getting tougher on, when did you ever here it promising to get tough on white collar crime which many criminologists know can do far more damage to the economy than some small-time schmuck trying to clean out a cash register at a gas bar or convenience store – not that I am, in any way, condoning that either.

I’m also not saying that the Harper government is particularly disinterested when it comes to going after big-time tax evaders as there is not much evidence that former Liberal governments made this a mission of theirs either.

Nor am I saying that all of this business of rich people finding off-shore havens to avoid paying taxes is illegal. As reports in the last week have also pointed out, some of it legal in the sense that individuals and corporations, for that matter, are taking advantage of loopholes federal governments in Canada have not seen fit to close.

Yet just the same, for those of us who care about the collective well-being of this country enough pay our fair share of taxes to keep health care, education and other programs and services we all benefit from running effectively, what can one say about a select few in the upper one or couple per cent of earners looking for every way possible not to pay their fair share in a nation that has arguably been pretty good to them?

Frankly, I find myself getting less and less interested in the kind of flag-waving patriotism our federal government encourages we – ‘the little people’ – to engage in each Canada Day while the most well-off among us, there are some out there who care so little about the country that they don’t want to pay taxes in it.

I leave you with the last paragraph from an editorial in The Toronto Start this April 5 that does a better job than I might of summing this whole disgusting mess up.

“The predatory exploitation of gaps in cross-border tax rules,” reads the editorial, “has enabled a small, super-rich elite to shelter their wealth and avoid paying their fair share, leaving working people to shoulder the burden of sustaining the services we all rely on. It’s the kind of unfairness that fuelled the Occupy movement and shakes public confidence in the tax system. In March, the CRA reported on its website that a landscaper, mortgage broker and homebuilder were fined for tax offences. But there was no evidence of the agency going after bigger, offshore fish. That’s got to change.”

The only way it will change, I would stress, is if we little people who pay our fair share of taxes make it clear to politicians in Ottawa that we will fire them out of office in the next election if they don’t take serious steps to close the tax haven loopholes now.

(Niagara At Large invites you to join in the conversation by sharing your views on the content of this post below. For reasons of transparency and promoting civil dialogue, NAL only posts comments from individuals who share their first and last name with their views.)