By Beryl Wajsman
Monday, April 30, 2007
"Mahatma Gandhi's concept of civil disobedience - satyagraha - championed the moral right to disregard unjust laws, including unjust taxation. One of his great victories was in successfully leading Indians against the British-imposed salt tax. Gandhi wrote, 'The laws of the state are to be obeyed not out of fear of sanctions, but out of a consideration that they are good for the welfare of society. In order to register protest against the actions of the law-makers, each free man and woman is open to withdraw their co-operation from the state by disobeying such laws whose breach does not involve moral turpitude.' Citizens are beginning to feel that co-operation in paying taxes is involvement in moral turpitude."
After months of talk from the Tremblay administration of the urgent need for more revenues from the people of Montreal because of constricting city budgets and restrictive provincial funding, news breaking over the past week has put the lie to all that. It is fitting that it comes in tax season when so many question the moral authority of governments at all levels to continue their profligate pilferage of our pockets to fund programs that no one demanded and no suffrage affirmed.
Despite constant complaints that he could not get Quebec to cough up more money for essential services, the Mayor somehow managed to get $130,000,000 from federal and provincial coffers for two "legacy" projects involving the Bonaventure expressway and the Museum of Fine Arts. Despite the announcement of a $140,000,000 civic budget surplus and the Mercer study showing Montreal to be cleaner than most cities including Toronto, Montrealers will still be choked under the yoke of the highest taxes since the Dor regime that drove almost 20% of small businesses out of the downtown core, and will still be subject to patently transparent money grabs such as the "cleanliness" fines ranging from $400-$1000 that will penalize Montreal citizens, merchants and building owners if they don't clean the public parts of city sidewalks. But the cherry on the cake was the announcement late last week that despite a 59% spike in revenues from parking meters for the year preceding the recent 300% meter hikes, the city will maintain these odious increases.
Montrealers are right to ask some tough questions. With all this cash why can't the city manage it's most fundamental responsibilities? The roads are still a mess. Not with litter and dirt. With potholes the size of tooth-loosening canyons. The transit system is in gridlock. Not for lack of buses and trains. For lack of proper planning. Street gangs terrorize certain districts. Not because the police aren't bold and able. But because the city bosses have them giving out jaywalking tickets in "politeness" campaigns. Garbage and snow removal are haphazard at best. Not because we don't have the equipment. Because this administration can't effectively deal with its groaning bureaucracy.
Deflecting Montrealers' attention with nanny-state engineering won't cut it any longer. Legislating niceness is not only not nice – it's not fooling anybody anymore. The Mayor's office can't even answer why its director of communications issued a letter in February insisting that the city needed the meter hikes because it was desperate for an additional $1.8 million for its cleanliness campaign and we now find out that the hikes will give an additional $20 million – and that's above the 59% revenue jump. Didn't the city know it before? Was nobody home at the accounting office or is it just more business-as-usual lies? I guess everyone at City Hall was too busy riding the new Laval metro extension that came in some $350 million over budget. To add insult to injury, the day after the massive parking revenue bonanza was revealed, the city announced that yet another $500,000 was being allocated for the ongoing restoration of the Sir Georges-tienne Cartier statue that is now going to cost $3,000,000 and is entering its third year of work.
Where's the money's going? Why all the overruns? Who's responsible for ignoring core priorities? There aren't any straight answers.
While the Mayor is awash in cash for his pet public works, he is taxing citizens to death for the necessities. And this tax season is a particularly bad one for this administration to be playing these games. A joint report from the Centre for Tax Studies and the Fraser Institute has just demonstrated that when we add sales taxes; custom duties; alcohol, tobacco and entertainment taxes; municipal levies, etc…governments take 46% of our gross incomes. Jason Clemens, the Fraser Institute's director of fiscal studies, just released another report that shows that the costs for individual and corporate preparation of tax filings and the federal government's administration of the tax system is approaching $30 billion annually. That's almost 18% of the federal budget!
Mahatma Gandhi's concept of civil disobedience - satyagraha - championed the moral right to disregard unjust laws, including unjust taxation. One of his great victories was in successfully leading Indians against the British-imposed salt tax. Gandhi wrote, "The laws of the state are to be obeyed not out of fear of sanctions, but out of a consideration that they are good for the welfare of society. In order to register protest against the actions of the law-makers, each free man and woman is open to withdraw their co-operation from the state by disobeying such laws whose breach does not involve moral turpitude."
Citizens are beginning to feel that co-operation in paying taxes is involvement in moral turpitude. Especially when we remember that Canada's Income Tax was instituted as a temporary measure to finance World War I. Many great revolts started over money. Does the Boston Tea Party ring a bell? All levels of government are exciting the people's disgust in fiscal affairs. But Montreal's administration is exciting the people's contempt. And that's just one small step away from satyagraha.
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