If A Taxpayer Speaks In Canada, Does Anyone Listen?

You say in your piece - "...taxpayers must be ready to invest more money in the CBC..." - which pretty directly implies that we taxpayers have some sort of choice in the matter, that in some way we get asked for our approval concerning the spending of tax dollars, which certainly doesn't seem to be the case to me. I'm trying to recall the last time I was ever asked about anything to do with spending "my" tax dollars (or anything else for that matter) - the last time "we the taxpaying people of Canada" were actually asked about ANY spending going on in the federal government (or any other level for that matter) (elections don't really count - they're just great grab-bag competitions, and the "winners" sometimes do what they say, but more often don't, and ALWAYS introduce new things they never talked about during the election - and it would be a rare person anyway who agreed with EVERYthing one side or the other proposed, so how can they say they know how "we the taxpayers" feel about any particular thing? - and as for this government, well, surely we can recall that they got about 20% of the voting public to agree with their overall program, and how you could extrapolate that into any sort of approval for anything is beyond me, at least "democratically" speaking - modern economics, I suppose, or media misdirection, or apathy, or "we'll do what we want haha", whatever - but to get back to the point, I think that getting my approval is pretty low on the list - more of a laugher, really).

Let me see if I can dredge up a couple of examples.

I just saw in one of your competitor's papers (I'm sure you'll get to it tomorrow) that the MPs are all getting a pretty nice increase in their expense allowances - which of course comes out of "my" (our) tax dollars. Was I asked about this? Haha - this was evidently approved around May 1, and only made public after they'd all headed home for the summer. Me, I would NOT have approved had anyone ever asked me - maybe an increase in the minimum wage for the working poor, now, I could have said "Ok" to - but people making 150 thou a year (and a whole lot of them who just barely started on the job as well, now looking for this!!) or thereabouts like our MPs should just swallow the inflation for now, in my opinion, at least as far as they want people making a lot less money than they are, and who don't have expense accounts to turn to when meeting some friends for a "business" (haha winkwink) lunch, to chip in for it through their tax dollars. But as I said, nobody asked me.

Or what about the $15 billion that's being announced for "defence" spending this week - I sure don't recall being asked about that (yeah, yeah, the Conservatives talked about increased "defence" priorities in the election, but they talked about a lot of things and I don't recall seeing any dollar amounts, and they still only got votes from around 20% of the Canadian voters, which doesn't actually strike me as either a "majority" or a "mandate" for anything - and that the Libs or NDP aren't opposing it or anything doesn't mean, really, diddly squat. Tthe question is, when was I the taxpayer asked directly about this, or whether or not I approved of it? - and the answer, of course, is never (as would be my answer were I ever asked - buying big planes to fly Canadian troops around the world to get involved in places America has messed up would just not be on my list of things we as a country ought to be doing - and that does NOT qualify as "defence" either. "Defence", if you want to check out some dictionary, means someone is attacking you, and you have to - well - "defend" yourself - (and sure as hell no one ever asked me my opinion on "pre-emptive" defence, which seems to be Harper's and Hillier's and the rest's justification) - the last time I recall that Canada was under any kind of attack was around 1812, from - well - you know who, right?) Odd: I haven't seen editorials in the Star (or anywhere else) about "taxpayers having to be willing to fork out $15 billion for new defence stuff" (to follow Big Bro George and his buds aound the world in their little escapades or whatever).

Or let's see - there's a small (haha, slight sarcasm there) item of about 30 billion dollars in the national accounts earmarked for "debt service" we don't see much about in Star editorials or anybody else's but some of us know about - now this has been going on for quite a long time - we've actually spent around a trillion dollars (no misprints here now, that is a million million, or a one with about a dozen zeroes after it - BIG money) on this "debt service" over the last 25 or so years - and during the time the "debt" was being accumulated that all this "service" is being made on, the government had options; they could have used the Bank of Canada as the national bank to either create or borrow the money they needed from at nominal rates of interest, that interest then going back to the national treasury - or they could borrow from commercial lenders at commercial rates. Obviously they chose the latter - and chose to commit MY tax money to "service" charges forever, essentially - a major financial decision, that was very misguided - but was I ever asked about this? Was I ever asked if I wanted to "service" this kind of loan into the forseeable future to enrich "commercial" lenders rather than spending the tax money on things like infrastructure or health care? Well - you know the answer to that one too - not EVER was I ever asked about this. (My answer would have been "What kind of freaking idiot do you think I am, you people? If MY government has a SMALL shortage of income (which was all that it was during the early stages of this debt accumulation), then USE THE BANK OF CANADA FOR WHAT IT WAS CREATED FOR !!!! HOW STUPID ARE YOU PEOPLE?!?!??!" - but of course, nobody asked me, and this huge completely unncessary national debt and continual drain on MY tax dollars is the result. I don't recall you folks at the editorial department of the Star having much to say about this either, come to think of it, even though there's a pretty solid prima facie case for massive fraud floating around here, stuff that would make the recent "sponsorship scandal" look like kiddies day at the park. Which makes me wonder, really, whose side you're really on, overall, but that's a letter for another day.)

Well, that's just three examples, as you well know, I could make a list of hundreds of things - but the bottom line is, can you show me one example - just one! - where any government actually went to the people with one simple thing, and said "OK PEOPLE!!! - We, 'your' government, propose to spend this amount of YOUR tax dollars on this major project - yea or nay?" - sorry, I had to take a laughter break there. You know as well as I that such a thing has NEVER happened. (No, it would NOT be hard to do, with opinion polls coming out the yingyang these days - and we can only assume the reason they don't do it is they KNOW they wouldn't get approval from we taxpayers for most of the stuff they want to do, which raises a lot of other questions about democracy and little things like that, but that would make this letter a bit longer than I know you like to read.)

Which brings me back to where I started - what is this stuff you are talking about, about how "we taxpayers" are going to have to be prepared to spend money on the CBC if we want it improved? We the taxpayers are about the LAST people the government ever asks about stuff like this.

(By the way - if anyone in the government reads this and wonders, the vote of this taxpayer for spending more money on the CBC would be YES!!! - the CBC has a lot of problems and faults, especially after the new management and huge cutbacks of the last few years, but it's still the best general news thing happening in Canada. For those of us who care about such things.)

Say - does it matter if I don't really make enough money to pay taxes? Oh wait - I get nailed for GST when I buy books and other stuff, and that's taxes too, right? Ok - this taxpayer has spoken!

Anybody listening?!?!?!

Dave Patterson
Hat Yai, Thailand [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on June 28, 2006]

Note: Editorial: Time to revi...