Get ready for the ‘tax the rich’ smokescreen

It will follow COVID spending spree as night follows day

Beware the second wave, because it’s coming as surely as night follows day.

No, we’re not talking about some future mass outbreak of COVID-19 in Canada, although that’s entirely possible, given the long history of pandemics across our planet.

Instead, it’s that second dastardly item captured in Benjamin Franklin’s famous pronouncement: nothing’s certain in life except death and taxes.

Did you really think there wouldn’t be a piper to pay? Not when Ottawa’s shelling out $260 billion more than it’ll bring in this year alone; while Alberta’s borrowing will spike by probably $25 billion.

The eventual result will be the biggest bill ever handed to shell-shocked Canadians, though it won’t be sold as such. Politics is about getting elected, so telling the truth is akin to wearing a MAGA hat for your campaign brochure photo shoot.

So what better way to get the hoi polloi aboard the “more taxes” bus than making it appear they won’t shell out anything extra themselves. Yes, political labels denote different camps, but when it comes to simple selfishness, we dine from the same dish.

Therefore, tax the rich is where it’s at.

Behind the scenes, that policy’s already being studied. The parliamentary budget office just published its in-depth look at where the wealth is in Canada and such research wasn’t done on the off chance one of its crowd might someday appear on Jeopardy!

Pensions, homes, mutual funds, stocks and bank accounts — it’s amazing, adding them up, how many families are millionaires. In fact, the richest one per cent of Canadian households — those with more than $5.5 million in such assets — hold a quarter of this country’s wealth.

And, as that leaves 99 per cent of Canuck families outside looking in, it’s not surprising a recent poll on who should pay to fund the pandemic battle overwhelmingly picks those wealthy one-per-centers.

Why not, indeed? Yep, let that lot pay the freight; they won’t miss it.

Except such folk didn’t get so rich by being patsies for any taxman. Their money is likely locked into a business empire’s stock, while any personal wealth is spread across generations through family trusts. Or, legitimately or not, salted away in jurisdictions outside Canada.

And, at the first sound of the taxman’s footsteps, they’d be off. When you have a hundred million in spare change, you don’t stand in line at some Caribbean country’s immigration stand, pleading for entry.

And, hey, once tax-domiciled elsewhere, you can always nip back to good old Canada for five months each year (perhaps there are those among the super-rich who’ll balk at missing January in their home and native land? Nah, maybe not).

So while it sounds wonderfully painless, this whole “tax the rich” smokescreen is exactly that.

Because it augurs establishing a precedent for going after assets as opposed to simply income. And, while the rich have the resources and hired help to bypass this cash grab, middle-class Canadians don’t. Yes, in the end, it is you they’re really coming for. Like a turkey, you’re just getting fed sweeteners for the eventual feast.

So once wealth taxes, inheritance taxes and their ilk are introduced they’ll grow like weeds. That one-per-cent annual wealth tax on those with more than $10 million will soon be hiked to three per cent as the target group’s reduced to five. That’s how government works.

Eventually, that nice old lady, who bought a Mount Royal home with her husband 55 years ago, raised a family, saw them leave and then her husband die, is sitting on a property worth $3 million. She’s deemed a multimillionaire, yet can hardly pay the city’s yearly rates. And now Ottawa wants another annual due, under the wealth-tax banner.

Oh, dear. Maybe it’s best to simply sell up after all and check into one of those nice continuing-care homes. Yes, she thinks, that’s a secure way of spending my final years.

Chris Nelson is a regular columnist for the Calgary Herald.