Pay Your Bloody Taxes!

For long time readers of this blog - the following is a familiar rant.

I read in my CBC news of today that Revenue Canada has reported that tax payers owe 44 billion dollars to the Canadian government! That is amount that Canadians, according to their own tax returns, owe. That does not include the billions of dollars that are in dispute - just the amount that Canadians have agreed that they owe. $44,000,000,000 is a lot of money.

To be fair just over half of that is owed by corporations, the same corporations that bemoan our high taxes ( but benefit from our stable economy and social structures) and constantly threaten to relocate elsewhere. But, according to the CBC just under half of that money owed, is owed by individual Canadians.

Can you imagine what it would mean to the hundreds of thousands of students just about to enter a post secondary institutions this fall if their first two years were to be free? Or what even a portion of that much money would mean to First Nation communities in northern Canada who desperately need housing, health services and access to safe drinking water? Or what it could do developing alternatives to building pipelines?

I am not suggesting that we arrest all of these people (although in the case of corporations it is tempting) but surely there is a way of publically shaming individuals to that they change their behaviour and accept the responsibilities for the privilege of living in Canada. If posting (in Ontario) a list of all people who work for the public and who earn more than a $100,000.00 is acceptable, why can't we post lists of who has not paid their taxes. Would people be more willing to pay their taxes if they knew their neighbours were to know if they didn't. It would be interesting to see how many of those who complain about poor health care, roads, schools etc are also those who do not pay their taxes.

I am not sure why, if dads who do not pay child support money can have that money deducted at source, why the government can not do the same with money owed to the Canadian people.

It is rather mind boggling to me that the Government of Canada needs to take some of my hard earned taxes so that they can hire civil servants to make other people pay their taxes.

We in Canada are blessed to live in the part of the world that is relatively free from strive, stress and instability. Even our weather, compared to much of the world is benign. But it cost money to maintain that society, the hospitals, the roads, the schools. Yes - the government makes bad decisions and quite frequently decides to spend money in areas that I would not personally choose to do so - but our society works for most of the people, much of the time because we have made a commitment to collectively take care of each other.

Pay your bloody taxes!!!