Who Pays for Canada?

Taxes and Fairness

E.A. Heaman, David Tough, E.A. Heaman, David Tough, E. A. Heaman

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780228001249
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228002604
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Canadians can never not argue about taxes. From the Chinese head tax to the Panama Papers, from the National Policy to the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, tax grievances always inspire private resentments and public debates. But if resentment and debate persist, the terms of the debate have continually altered and adapted to reflect changing social, economic, and political conditions in Canada and the wider world. The centenary of income tax is the occasion for Canadian scholars to wrestle with past and present debates about tax equity, efficiency, and justice.

Who Pays for Canada? explores the different ways governments can and should tax their peoples and evaluates how well Canada has done so. It brings together a diverse group of perspectives from academia - law, economics, political science, history, geography, philosophy, and accountancy - and from the wider world of activists and public servants. It asks how Canada compares to other countries and how other countries - especially the United States - influence Canadian tax policies. It also surveys internal tax tensions and politics, through the lenses of region and jurisdiction, as well as race, class, and gender. Reasoning from tax perplexities and reforms in the past and the present, it argues that fair taxation requires an informed populace and a democratically inclined public will. Above all, this book serves as a reminder that it is not only what counts as fair that is important, but how fairness is evaluated.

Revealing how closely tax policy is tied to mainstream politics, human rights, and morality, Who Pays for Canada? represents new perspectives on a matter of tremendous national urgency.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• FOREWORD Tax Transparency and Perceptions of Fairness: What It Means, How to Get It, and Why It Matters
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION Broadening the Tax Conversation
• THE COMPARATIVE POLITICS OF TAX FAIRNESS
• 1 Funding the State: Taxation in Canada from a Comparative Political Economy Perspective
• 2 Taxation and Self-Government
• THE HISTORY OF TAX FAIRNESS
• 3 Jealousy of Taxes
• 4 “Set Apart for the Children of Colored Taxpayers of the Entire Town”: Race, Schools, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Chatham, Ontario
• 5 How History Helps Us Think about the Politics of Tax Fairness
• THE ECONOMICS OF TAX FAIRNESS
• 6 How to Sell Tax Reform: Lessons from Canada’s Three Major Postwar Tax Reforms
• 7 The Limits of Taxation for Reducing Income Inequality
• 8 Who Pays for Municipal Governments? Pursuing the User Pay Model
• THE GENDER OF TAXATION AND TAX BREAKS
• 9 Tax Fairness for Families: Evolution of an Idea
• 10 Are Tax Loopholes Sexist? The Gender Distribution of Federal Tax Expenditures
• 11 Gender Inequality and Canadian Fiscal Policy: From “Taxing for Growth” to “Taxing for Gender Equality”
• THE MAKING OF THE MODERN TAXPAYER
• 12 Tax Fairness and the Party System:A History
• 13 Knowledge and Attitudes regarding Taxation
• 14 Exposing the Political Chameleon: Insights into Canadian Taxpayers’ Perceptions of Tax Fairness
• OBSTACLES TO DEMOCRATIC TAX ACCOUNTABILITY
• 15 The Rock Is a Hard Place: Redistributing Wealth in Twenty-First-Century Newfoundland
• 16 Who Dies for Canada? How Settler Colonial Dispossession Funds the State
• 17 Canadians Shaping Tax Havens
• Contributors
• Index