Now that our elected MPPs are back at Queen’s Park, it’s
pretty clear what the main topic of debate will be for the fall session.
It’ll be taxes: how they are spent, and how they are collected.
On the one hand, there’ll be a lot of talk about the
waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned pay on executive perks at government
agencies like e-Health and the OLG. On the other, MPPs will be weighing
in on the McGuinty government’s plan for a Harmonized Sales Tax (HST).
Your OPSEU Executive Board opposes the HST. Its main
purpose is to transfer the tax burden off Ontario corporations and on to
ordinary citizens. All the same, I do get riled by opposition
politicians who keep calling it a “tax grab.” Why? Because they make it
sound like all of us agree that taxes in general are a bad thing.
Well, I don’t agree.
Taxes fund public services. Not just health and
education, but social services, environmental protection, roads and
transit, and even (lest we forget) help for business. They fund services
we all need, services only a few of us need, and services we may not
even be aware of.
We need taxes. Taxes are a good thing. Speaking for
myself, I like to pay taxes. It let’s me know I’m supporting something
that’s good not just for myself, but for all of us.
In a major
study published this year, economists Hugh Mackenzie and Richard
Shillington found that, “even in the $80,000 to $90,000 household income
range, the benefit received from public services is the equivalent to
about half the household’s private income. An upper-middle-income family
would have to devote half a year’s wages to pay for the public services
its taxes provide.”
In other words, public services – and the taxes that pay
for them – are a bargain.
Between now and next spring, Ontario’s tax discussion
will take place in the shadow of the biggest provincial budget deficit
ever. If no one’s out there talking about taxes as a good thing, the
pressure to slash the deficit through cuts to public services will be
immense.
We can’t depend on politicians to talk up the good
things taxes buy. It’s up to us.
