Poilievre learns from past mistakes on tax reform – Philip Cross in the Financial Post

This article originally appeared on the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.

By Philip Cross, July 12, 2024

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre recently said that if elected he would appoint a task force to examine tax reform. He said the group would be made up of “businessmen, inventors, farmers and workers” and would be given a mandate to simplify and reduce taxes. It is notable that Poilievre eschews an expert task force or Royal Commission, like the 1966 report headed by Kenneth Carter, to examine the tax system. Taxes are too important to be based on a John Rawls-style thought experiment about what an ideal tax regime would look like.

Poilievre has the political savvy and historical insight to avoid asking the opinions of academics and economists, who would inevitably recommend moving from income taxes to consumption taxes, such as the GST or carbon taxes. Tax reform has to be based on changes that Canadians are willing to tolerate, given that millions of households and businesses have made long-term plans about their work and investments conditioned by expectations of the taxes they will be forced to pay.

Previous efforts to reform the tax system have proven disastrous for the governments in power, especially when they were based largely on theory and taxpayers were not widely consulted. Canadian history is full of examples of how tax reform ends up failing if it does not gain broad public support.