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Tax malarkey

On Friday, September 25, Stephen Harper appeared in front of a crowd in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, to unveil the Conservative Party’s latest campaign gimmick: a four-year “tax lock” prohibiting any increases to federal income tax, sales tax and what he calls “discretionary payroll taxes,” such as EI premiums. 

Fiscal conservatives, who, alongside their social conservative brethren, make up an important swath of the Conservative base, eat this stuff for breakfast. Indeed, the Conservative campaign slogan “Protect Our Economy” is fiscal and social conservatism rolled into one. You protect something only if it’s under an imminent threat, and, if the Conservatives are to be believed, Canada is currently confronted by a host of deadly foes, foreign and domestic. 

Among these are small tax increases of various kinds proposed by the NDP and Liberals that risk restoring the federal taxes to near their practically Soviet 2008 level. Then there’s the mortal danger that the new revenue will be used by a future non-Conservative government to invest in social programs, childcare or infrastructure. Still more worrisome is the fact that an extremely small number of Muslim women (too small to count, in fact) choose to cover their faces while taking the oath of citizenship. 

Through muscularity and fiscal rectitude, the Conservatives are solemnly pledging to protect us all from these looming disasters. That’s where Harper’s latest tax-lock malarkey comes in. 

If passed, it would join fixed election dates (remember those?) and mandated balanced budgets in the secret elephant graveyard of Conservative promises that are either unenforceable, unrealistic or thoroughly unconstitutional – and all about feeding meat to the party’s ever-ravenous right-wing base. 

Let’s get this out of the way: the federal government cannot legally prohibit itself from raising taxes any more than it can bind itself or any successor government to balanced budgets. The ability to tax and spend belongs to Parliament, which cannot legislate against its own supremacy any more than a hungry person can devour herself. 

This is evidenced by the Harper government’s violation of the spirit of its own fixed election law in 2008, when, faced with the prospect of a vote of non-confidence, it dissolved Parliament and forced an election several years ahead of schedule. 

The new tax-lock legislation, along with the balanced-budget law passed earlier this year, is every bit as arbitrary and non-binding. Actually doing what it purports to do, just like mandating fixed elections or balanced budgets, would require nothing short of significantly amending the Constitution, according to expert opinion on the subject, including that of former parliamentary law clerk Robert Walsh. 

Alongside its abject mean-spiritedness and authoritarianism, the Harper government’s penchant for passing meaningless laws is one of its most distinctive features. As Scott Clark and Peter DeVries wrote in their grilling of Joe Oliver’s balanced-budget law last April, “This is a government which routinely passes laws not to solve problems, but to send messages.”

The same might be said of the various court challenges mounted or provoked by the Conservatives, including their futile attempts to have the niqab banned at citizenship ceremonies and to harden asylum laws. 

They’ve also been fond of introducing hard-right legislation surreptitiously in the form of private member’s bills. Unlike government bills, those introduced by individual members are drafted with the help of the Library of Parliament rather than the Department of Justice, and therefore sidestep constitutional vetting altogether. Whether they pass or fail – and before the Conservatives won a majority in 2011 it was often the latter – or are later dismantled by the courts, they perform an invaluable political function.

Their many calculated acts of triangulation are designed to reassure their staunchest supporters that, despite nearly a decade at the commanding heights of power, they’re still a plucky insurgency fighting the good fight against the Goliath Laurentian establishment while skirting the political fallout that would inevitably result if they meaningfully pursued the most pungent ambitions of the Conservative base. 

Unenforceable or meaningless pieces of legislation like their latest tax-lock proposal are more than just campaign tactics they’re a glue designed to hold the various disparate pieces of the Conservative project together. It doesn’t matter if they fail, because it’s the optics of their failure that count.

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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