Charlene O’Connor thinks Canada has a taxation problem.The Scarborough office manager and mother of 12-year-old twins is taking courses to become a tax preparer in time for next spring’s filing season. She is well-versed in the nuances of how taxes play out in a family’s household budget. And she is concerned and annoyed — both at what she sees before her in the federal election campaign, and at what she is learning in her tax class.Her frustration speaks to the electoral game around the tax system, where every campaign leads to layers and layers of new tax goodies that benefit a small group of key voters. They have piled on for years, with each successive government reluctant to streamline the system because of the political blowback that comes with cancelling a tax break.Now, she sees one boutique tax credit after another being offered up as a way to make everyday life easier for families, ostensibly to help them make ends meet.And it bugs her, because she knows first-hand from her own household experience and from her studies in the classroom that they don’t really work.“Every time I hear it, I’m irritated,” she says.She senses intuitively what many a tax connoisseur knows: Our tax system in increasingly complicated, with no clear, overriding goal in sight. And as political leaders arm-wrestle to prove who is the most generous to voters, the federal tax base is eroding without a discussion about what it is they are trying to achieve.To wit, both the Liberals and the Conservatives have offered up $6-billion, across-the-board income-tax cuts for all and decorated their offerings with an array of tax credits and finely tuned boutique tax cuts that strike at the heart of key blocks of voters. Children’s sports, public transit, clean technology, parental leave, disabilities, seniors, youthful fans of museums — there’s a sliver of special tax treatment for many different demographics.Tax cuts in a ti ...
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