by ALEX HEMINGWAY
Like their counterparts everywhere, Canada’s superrich cream off wealth from the working class while resisting paying taxes. In the age of COVID-19, this state of affairs is more obscene — and more unpopular — than ever. It’s time to tax Canada’s rich.
Canada needs to get serious about taxing the rich to reverse the rise of extreme inequality, blunt the concentration of economic and political power, and create ongoing streams of revenue to fund badly-needed public services.
A wealth tax is one important tool to accomplish these ends, but it will require breaking with a status quo that narrowly serves the interests of Bay Street (Canada’s equivalent of Wall Street) and the wealthy few.
We Cannot Afford the Rich
Canada’s richest 1 percent control 26 percent of our wealth. Eighty-seven of the country’s richest families together hold more wealth than the bottom twelve million Canadians combined. Each of these richest families hold, on average, 4,448 times the wealth of the typical family.
The dynamics of extreme inequality have continued to unfold during the pandemic. The wealth of Canada’s richest twenty billionaires has ballooned by more than $37 billion since the March 2020 lockdown came into effect, while millions of workers lost their livelihoods.
This comes as no surprise since leading Bay Street figure Bill Morneau has been serving as minister of finance for most of the past five years. The interests of economic elites have long been well-represented in Ottawa.
Yet it’s increasingly clear to Canadians that no individual or corporation becomes wealthy without an enormous collective effort, both by workers and through public investments in social and physical infrastructure. The massive wealth of this country rightfully belongs to all of us.
If we can harness more of this wealth together, Canada is rich enough to implement universal public childcare and pharmaceutical drug coverage, transform our broken seniors’ care system, build affordable housing for all, and transform our energy system in the face of a worsening climate crisis.
Indefensible and Inefficient
Extreme economic inequality is not only unjust in itself, but research increasingly shows that it directly worsens health and social outcomes and puts a drag on economic growth. A growing body of economic research affirms the need for taxing the wealthy.
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