Government has no business granting special privileges to ‘good’ charities.

Robson, A12

Apparently I was wrong. Canada doesn’t need a simpler tax code, more government humility or more basic fairness. Quite the contrary. Experts say.

Specifically, the Post reports, deep thinkers are plying federal Liberals and the bureaucracy with advice about creating complex new mechanisms to encourage the private sector to get sucked into the morass of the welfare state. I believe they didn’t phrase it that way. Rather, the idea is to “unlock billions in private cash for a range of programs that could help the homeless get off the street or boost the incomes of Indigenous Peoples,” with the glorious added benefit that it “shifts the financial risk from taxpayers to investors in the delivery of social programs.”

Which would appeal to investors because… wait for it… the new tax wrinkles would shift the cost right back to taxpayers. Abracadabra. Free money. Not.

The “most ambitious of five ideas” presented to Employment and Social Development Canada, a preposterous name for a state organ, was to let charities become involved in for-profit business to some extent. Which the feds have already been at in a small way since 2016, along with identifying some 69 firms as “social enterprises” because they have very noble purposes or practices, including “a 35- yearold Halifax bakery that employs marginalized people, and an online sock store that donates a pair for each one ordered.”

I could poke fun at the likelihood that government would, in practice, know who’s naughty or nice, or likely to make money. Instead, let me argue that it is wrong in principle for it to try.

Ethical practices are a good thing, and often effective marketing tools. But do we really think the government can, or should, “pick winners” when i t comes to morality any more than profitability? Sure, t hey should jail people who cook the books. But is it their call whether it’s better for a business to give away socks or keep its prices lower so you have more to put in the Sally Ann kettle?

I certainly scoff when the Post reports that the federal government has “launched a $ 4- million social impact bond to prod private investment into a program aimed at helping Canadians manage high blood pressure, and sent the lead minister on the file to the U.K. on a fact-finding mission.” I get the junket. But will it really lower our blood pressure to see Ottawa make the tax code more complicated, especially for this trivial amount?

As people have rightly objected here as elsewhere, whenever the government introduces a tax break, refundable credit or loophole, it does not drop manna from heaven upon the virtuous. Rather, when one person pays less into the treasury because the state smiles at them, some other chump or chumps pay more. So the argument here is not against giving a goody-goody bakery free money. It’s against the whole concept of charitable status, which redistributes rather than creating wealth.

Here let me urge the practical as well as moral simplicity and clarity of the “render unto Caesar” attitude regardless of your religious convictions. The proper role of the state is to protect from force and fraud a space within which citizens can pursue their dreams, not to pass judgment on which dreams are nicer or more realistic.

It does not matter whether they are the dreams of entrepreneurs, wonks, dogooders or preachers. Government’s job is to ensure that a building is legally owned or rented and not unduly noisy or smelly or a fire trap. It is not to determine whether people inside are making good airplanes, thinking deep thoughts, singing nice songs, running an admirable soup kitchen, or preaching the true Gospel, and to give them money if they are.

Long ago, charity in Canada was primarily private, with grudging government aid available as an unappealing backstop. But as the state’s pride and aspirations swelled, it elbowed aside service groups, benevolent societies and religious hospitals, thus helping wither civil society while fostering dependency. Now, instead of climbing out of the resulting hole or simply pausing to reflect, it seeks to pull others in via tax breaks to help dig it out.

Surely there comes a point at which a public sector that can’t build an icebreaker every two decades, or figure out why people use baroque tax code provisions to limit their tax liability, should reconsider whether it really has all the answers, including knowing who the really virtuous people are to whom others should be obliged to tithe. Instead its conceit and ambition continue to grow.

I doubt this particular initiative will be more than a damp squib in practice. But as long as the high and mighty think our problems i nclude an i nsufficiently complex tax code and too little ham- fisted social engineering, our problems of governance and charity will keep getting worse.