‘Rich people pay lots of tax’ and a ‘woke’ Statistics Canada: How FP columnists saw it in 2024

Read excerpts from columns that appeared in April, May and June 2024 in FP Comment. This in the second instalment in a series

Published Dec 26, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  8 minute read

Ten per cent of Canada population pay more personal income tax than the remaining 90 per cent. Photo by Getty Images

Read excerpts from columns that appeared in April, May and June 2024 in FP Comment. Second in a series.

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April

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh says it’s a disgrace we’re the only G7 or OECD or non-failed-state country that doesn’t have a national school lunch program. He doesn’t seem to realize we’re the most strongly federal country in almost any group of countries you care to name and have a long history of devolved powers as well as an originating constitution that was and remains perfectly comfortable with the notion that local governments — we call them “provinces” — would have responsibility for many things, exclusive responsibility, in fact. Yet now Ottawa is going to put up a billion dollars for lunches and “work with” the provinces on, I guess, whether they should be providing mustard or mayonnaise with the sandwiches or whether sandwiches themselves are too carb-intensive for young minds and growing bodies or speak too much of Canada’s colonial history. (Consider, for instance, the multiple subliminal implications of “white bread.”) — William Watson, April 4

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Do you suppose we’d be having this cross-country pre-budget spending extravaganza tour if Chrystia Freeland were still finance minister? Oh, you’re right: she is. Yes, I think I have seen her in some of those “Where’s Waldo?” tableaux of happy, smiling and above all nodding Liberal MPs you see behind the prime minister as he makes his way across the country, spewing dollars, platitudes and carbon across the land. I worry some of the more enthusiastic nodders will hurt their necks, though they probably have generous physiotherapy allowances in their sweet MP HR deals, probably a massage or two a year and aromatherapy. The nodding is so syncopated they must get instruction in it. Self-respecting adults, elected members of Parliament no less, wouldn’t volunteer to look like such pliable idiots, would they? Chinese President Xi doesn’t get half as much nodding when he makes a speech with his apparatchiks lined up behind him. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll nod in the wrong place and there goes their career. Or worse. — William Watson, April 9

Last week’s budget plan to hike the taxes collected on Canadians earning more than $250,000 in capital gains was simply the latest manifestation of Chrystia Freeland’s long-standing ideological beliefs, outlined in her book Plutocrats, which was subtitled “The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.” The subtitle is false. Global statistics are clear that almost everyone else around the world has gained, not fallen, under the triumph of 20th-century capitalism. Freeland’s budget reflects the idea that governments are the primary driver of economic growth, prosperity and equality. As for the plutocrats, they have their benefits. In Ottawa, the plan is to tax the capital gains of Canadian plutocrats and transfer the funds to the plutocrats running the auto industry. — Terence Corcoran, April 24

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You wouldn’t know it from Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s talk about “fair shares,” but rich people pay lots of tax already. In 2021, the last year for which data are available, the bottom 90 per cent of Canadian taxpayers paid income tax at an average rate of just 12.6 per cent and generated less than half — 45.6 per cent, to be exact — of overall income tax revenues. And both their rate and share would be even lower if child, elderly and other social benefits were subtracted. In contrast, the top 10 per cent of taxpayers paid at an average rate of 29.3 per cent and accounted for almost 55 per cent of personal income tax revenues. Those numbers are worth emphasizing: 90 per cent of taxpayers pay less than half of all income taxes; 10 per cent pay more than half. — Jack Mintz, April 26

May

We are told daily that the food industry, telecommunications and financial markets are uncompetitive sectors and intervention is needed. But a report from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards late last year raises doubts about the effect of competition. It compared the productivity performance of various Canadian corporate sectors since 2000 and concluded that the industries with “the largest contributions to productivity growth over the period were the finance and insurance sector, the wholesale trade sector, the manufacturing sector, the retail trade sector, and the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting sector.” The presence of Canada’s allegedly uncompetitive financial and retail sectors (hello, Walmart, Loblaws and Amazon!) as generators of productivity improvement flies in the face of the competition theme. — Terence Corcoran, May 3

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A sensible course for those who believe investor returns in the grocery business are too high would be to invest in the sector by starting their own stores. One of the activists’ demands is for government to commit to increasing competition in the grocery sector. Why not supply that competition themselves? The activists insist Loblaw’s prices do not reflect current economic conditions. Groceries could be supplied much more cheaply, they say. It sounds so easy, but if it is, they should show us how it’s done. If they can beat all of Loblaw’s prices by 15 per cent without lower quality or convenience, then I, for one, would gladly be a customer. — Matthew Lau, May 7

The man of system, Adam Smith explained, “is apt to be very wise in his own conceit” and “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board.” But people are not chess pieces to be moved around by a hand from above; they have their own agency and if they are pushed in a direction opposite to where they want to go, the result will be misery and “the highest degree of disorder.” That nicely sums up the current government effort to mandate electric vehicles contrary to consumer preferences. The vehicle market is in a state of disorder as the government tries to force people to buy the types of cars many of them do not want, and the outcomes are miserable all around. — Matthew Lau, May 9

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When protesters demand boycotts of Israel, does that include denying themselves access to Israeli inventions that might save their own life one day? Rather than boycott, Canadians should both access and mimic Israeli ideas, talent and techniques to improve our own lagging productivity. — Jack Mintz, May 17

There is no rhyme or reason to the Trudeau government’s climate spending. It will spend massive sums on anything and everything in the name of climate change, from $104 million for home energy efficiency subsidies in British Columbia to a new project costing over $20 million “that will focus on improving gender-responsive and climate-resilient agricultural practices” in Tanzania, to take two examples just from last week. What “gender-responsive and climate-resilient agricultural practices” in Tanzania are the Liberals did not explain. How gender-responsive Tanzanian climate action will benefit Canadian taxpayers who are being made to pay more than $20 million for it, they did not say, either. Are there such things as “gender-unresponsive” climate-resilient agricultural practices? How do agricultural practices, climate-resilient or not, “respond” to gender anyway? And if climate change is an existential crisis, as the prime minister says, doesn’t that mean it will wipe everyone out, regardless of gender? In which case, why does a policy trying to fight climate change have to consider gender at all? — Matthew Lau, May 21

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If you subsidize it, they will lobby. The bigger the subsidies, the greater the incentive to devote resources to lobbying rather than real economic activity. Do you really build an innovative, industrious, self-reliant economy by teaching people the biggest gains come from successfully petitioning government? A nation of extremely skilled supplicants may have its place in the world but it’s not what industrial policy enthusiasts portray. — William Watson, May 30

The monthly labour force survey now produces unemployment rates for nine ethnic groups and races. Statistics Canada has embraced the woke movement’s fixation on race and gender. As Richard Hanania wrote in The Origins of Woke, “the degree of wokeness in a country and what form it takes are contingent on whether and how certain kinds of data are collected.” France simply forbids collecting data on individuals’ race, religion or ethnicity. In contrast, Canada’s chief statistician went full-woke defending expanded race data, claiming it was justified by “real racial disparities in the challenges facing Canadians,” though such problems are better left to the public and their elected representatives. — Philip Cross, May 30

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June

For years, Canada’s sluggish regulatory and policy response to opportunities to increase LNG exports helped shift investment and production to the U.S., which is now the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. A decade ago, dozens of proposals were circulating regarding LNG projects in B.C. and on Canada’s east coast but few went ahead. Canada now has an opportunity to win back some of the global LNG market from U.S. producers, thereby giving a much-needed boost to our prosperity while helping reduce Asia’s dependence on coal. — Philip Cross, June 5

If you go to the CBC website and search “far right,” you get 2,457 hits. If you search “far left,” you get 219, less than nine per cent that number. Incidentally, you get exactly the same totals if you use a hyphen, i.e., “far-right” and “far-left,” which means the CBC search engine is hyphen-blind — though I doubt it’s any other kind of blind, given the corporation’s devotion to identity politics. If you search “far out,” by the way, you get 329 hits, 50 per cent more than for “far left.” At CBC, clearly, they’re much more worried about the far right (and the far out) than the far left. — William Watson, June 20

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While it might be inappropriate to engage in the dubious and junky business of long-term forecasting to launch the 26th edition of FP Comment’s Junk Science Week, here nevertheless is a prediction: History will record that the United Nations has established itself as the greatest organizational perpetrator of junk science in modern times, if not of all time, with current UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres destined to be singled out for his personal contribution to the distorted UN climate alarmism. Since his appointment in 2019, Guterres and the UN have lived up to our standard formal definition of junk science. It occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risk is exaggerated (or underplayed) and “the science” adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda. — Terence Corcoran, June 25

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According to Chrystia Freeland, China’s state-directed policy of overproducing EVs is “anti-competitive” and must be combatted. Ironically, the federal government made a separate announcement last week to combat “anti-competitive” business mergers that lead to higher prices. So if prices are too high, they are anti-competitive; but if prices are too low, they are also anti-competitive. Apparently, only through central planning by the Trudeau government will goods and services be competitively priced. — Matthew Lau, June 30

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