1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said it best: “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” More specifically, taxes are the price we pay for the Canada we love.
2. Taxes put out fires, provide our children with education, provide our families with health care, ensure our food and water are safe, create legal safeguards for businesses and employees, provide parks – in other words, provide us benefits every hour of the day, every day of the year.
3. The average Canadian household receives about $41,000 in public services each year (with no mark-up for private profit), a tremendous bargain for the vast majority of Canadians.
4. Past generations paid taxes for what we have today - schools, hospitals, courts of law, roads, public transit, parks. Our taxes today allow us to pass along those benefits to future generations - our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
5. If we ignore, shortchange or postpone funding for social, economic and environmental problems today, the solutions become more expensive in the future.
6. Public sector employees work hard, often in difficult circumstances, to keep government running and provide the public services we need. We need to attract and retain hard-working public employees and pay them fair compensation.
7. Money begets power, which begets more money, and more power. Taxes provide a counter-balance, by softening extreme disparities in wealth, power and benefits.
8. Taxes ensure that Canada can build and maintain the necessary infrastructure – education, health care and transportation systems - to attract investment and businesses, and thrive in a competitive global economy.
9. Taxes make the marketplace work – by maintaining a regulated business environment to protect property rights, enforce fair practices and protect consumers and investors.
10. Taxes allow citizens, residents and businesses to do things together that we could never do on our own. In other words, taxes allow us to be Canadian in the way we live, work and play.
{Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash}