CTF increasingly presents decontextualized statistics

By Lethbridge Herald on September 2, 2021.

Editor:

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has gotten into the bad habit of throwing out numbers without context. Thus, in an August 26th opinion, they wrote that the average family pays $20,000 more in taxes in inflation adjusted dollars than in 1961. 

When I read this, I wondered why they chose 1961 as their baseline year. Five minutes of research gave me the answer: 1961 is the year that all the provinces had agreed to the federal Medicare plan, which at the time was called the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act. 

Full implementation didn’t come until 1968. The CTF’s baseline year therefore predates Canada’s public health care system as we know it today. 

According to the World Bank, our governments spend about $5,000 per person on health care. 

I’m not sure how large the CTF’s average family is, but it’s clear that most, if not all, of the difference in taxes between 1961 and now is due to Medicare, which I suspect most Canadians would be loath to give up.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation could play a useful role in public discourse, but instead they have increasingly resorted to appealing to the cheapskate in all of us (myself included at times) by presenting decontextualized statistics on taxes paid without ever talking about the services those taxes pay for. 

The equation is simple: Canadians want services; services cost money. 

Talking about how much services cost and whether we want to consider adjustments in service levels in return for lower taxes is a useful exercise in democratic debate. 

Throwing around numbers about how much we pay in taxes without discussing the necessary adjustments in government expenditures that would accompany tax reductions, not to mention the impact of those reductions on Canadians is, at best, disingenuous.

Marc Roussel

Lethbridge