Bad date
Beware the blandishments of tax-cutting Prince Steve
BY Ellen Russell and Amanda Dale
Illustration by David Anderson
Real friends will warn you that tax cuts are like blind dates. No matter how disappointing the last one was, you still hope the next will make your dreams come true. Harpers Conservatives want to seduce you with their tax cuts. But before you get too serious about Prince Steve, remember: as with most slick pickup lines, flowery tax-cut promises may not tell the whole story.
Sure, Harpers giving parents $100 every month for each child under six years old but its taxable. Or theres the annual child tax credit of $310 per child annually. Well, sort of. If you have enough income to qualify, you can make full use of this tax credit. Really low-income parents wont get anything, but high-income families will qualify for every cent. Meanwhile, we all know that $100 per month, plus maybe $310 per year, is not nearly enough to pay for child care, on which parents can easily spend more than $1,000 per monthif they can find it.
But there is more. In the last two budgets the government created about $26.5 billion in tax cuts. By emptying the treasury with his fiscal speed-dating, there is a strong possibility that Harper will have to ramp up spending cuts to pay for them.
Hes waiting until after he gets you to the altar to break the bad news. Once he has the majority he wants, he can start chopping spending with no pesky opposition parties to bother him. But this is no real surprise: Harpers last election platform promised a whopping $22.5 billion in spending cutsmost of which he still hasnt divulged.
After the Conservatives have you where they want you, and the spending cuts start to hit big time, friends will point out that you should have seen it coming. And to think you really believed him when he said hed changed from that old ideological meanie!
But there are signs of what is to come. Last fall, funding was reduced or eliminated for the Court Challenges Program, Status of Women Canada, literacy groups and other progressive organizations. But painful as they were, those moves didnt really save all that much money. Cutting $5 million from Status of Women devastated that struggling institution, but in the grand scheme of the federal budget, it was peanuts. We just dont spend enough on womens issues to make much difference to the federal bottom line. Even if Harper closed Status of Women entirely, it wouldnt even start to pay for the more than $5 billion that the first GST cut costs every year.
He has tried to make it up to you. Budget 2007 re-announced money pledged to the Status of Women last year, thanks to pressure from Canadian womens groups. But most of the regional Status offices are shut for good. Oh yeah, and did he mention that he changed the mandate of the Womens Program at Status of Women? Promoting womens equality is now a no-no: funded groups are not allowed to do advocacy. Please ladies, no politics!
Looking back, youll begin seeing the patternthe one your friends warned you about: the fall 2006 cuts were a kind of trial balloon to test your tolerance for attacks on the social policies that most rankle Conservative Party supporters. By cutting Status of Women and other lippy watchdogs of democracy, Harper was trying to silence the voices that would object to more widespread cutting of social programs later.
And dont count on any legal challenges if spending cuts culminate in Charter violations: by ditching the Court Challenges Program, Harper has ensured that those whose rights are trampled wont be able to have their day in court unless they can afford their own high-priced lawyer.
When youve fallen for the tax-cut sweet talk and the honeymoons over, the real cost of the tax cuts will be evident. But then it will be too late to stop Harper from trashing social programs in Canada.
Dont you hate it when your friends are right?
