Tell your fellow Canadians you are happy to pay more taxes

April 8, 2010

Dear warriors….

Bruce Campbell, head of the CCPA’s national office, wrote a great piece (see here) in the Star on Monday on the need for tax increases and since then the right has been on the warpath – in blogs and elsewhere. A columnist in the Sun newspaper chain –LORRIE GOLDSTEIN – even attacked the op ed despite the fact that it didn’t even run in the chain.  

Write a short letter to the Sun papers if you have one in your area and to the Toronto Star confirming Bruce’s claim that Canadian are willing to pay more taxes in order to maintain and enhance the services we get for those taxes.

Bruce’s op ed also ran in the following newspapers if these are in your area:

Thunder Bay Chronicle, Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Woodstock Sentinel, Stratford Beacon Herald

Toronto Star: lettertoed@thestar.ca
Toronto Sun: torsun.editor@sunmedia.ca

Email addresses to most Canadian dailies can be found here.  

FRAMING:  We always need to frame the tax question in positive terms and not use the right’s framing (tax relief). We pay taxes because that is the price we pay for a civilized society; Canada is one of the best places in the world to live – and taxes are the price of admission; the taxes we pay now to pay for infrastructure, education, Medicare, etc are investments in our children’s future.  Without tax revenue we are in effect starving our own communities of the revenue they need to remain dynamic, viable places.

Some facts and arguments you could use:

• Use the framing above (choose one metaphor) to make your basic pitch: that you are personally willing to pay more taxes if governments pledge to use the revenue for improving the quality of life of Canadians and their communities
• The wealthy in virtually all other developed nations pay higher taxes than they do here – in the US they have two additional tax brackets for high income earners. Bruce’s proposal to have just one for those earning over $250,000 is modest – we should have another for those earning over _____  (you choose a number)
• We are headed for the lowest taxed corporations amongst any developed country – based on arguments from Bay Street that this will increase productivity. But productivity has not increased even though our tax rate is just over half the rate in the US. We should roll back the corporate tax cuts (now at 18% and heading for 15%) to their previous level of 20-25%
• Use some of the figures from Bruce’s op ed below – for instance the tax cuts up to 2009-10 implemented by both the Liberals and Conservatives mean we have $84 billion less EVERY YEAR to spend – enough to wipe out the deficit ($54 b) and have $30 b leftover to spend on child care, Pharmacare, lowering tuition fees, etc.

 

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