Which Side Are You On? Eby’s Election Moment

Full props to David Eby. His modest proposal to have the highest-earning British Columbians pay a little more in taxes is good policy and offers a brave challenge to the right-wing anti-tax narrative.

The reaction was predictably hysterical. Interest groups such as the Fraser Institute and the shadowy Canadian Taxpayers Federation have spent decades trying to convince the public that all taxes are bad and government is inherently wasteful and useless.

That makes a rational discussion of tax policy near impossible. Most politicians — like the Conservatives’ Lorne Doerkson, who has promised no new taxes — accept the frame.

Eby didn’t. The tax changes are modest and apply, the NDP says, to the four per cent of British Columbians with the highest taxable incomes.

If you’re earning less than $190,500, like most of us, there’s no change.

If you have $250,000 in taxable income, you’ll pay an extra $1,190 in tax. Less than $25 a week.

No one likes to pay more for anything. But for an individual earning more than five times the median income in B.C., the tax increase doesn’t seem harsh or oppressive.

Nor does a new bracket for people with more than $1 million a year in taxable income.

Critics will point to waste and inefficiency in government. But based on my experience, that is equally true in the private sector.

Taxes are the price we all pay for services such as health care, schools, support for seniors and police.

The groups pushing the anti-tax, anti-government narrative ignore that reality — perhaps because the people who fund them can afford private health care, private schools and their own security.

B.C. is now a low-tax jurisdiction. For a two-income family of four with $150,000 in household income, the total provincial taxes are the second lowest in the country, higher than only resource-rich Alberta. It’s the same for a single person with $100,000 income, who pays about $2,000 less in taxes than they would in Ontario.

The Conservative Party of BC, predictably, denounced the tax increase. “At a time when British Columbians desperately need more doctors, David Eby has revealed his plan to drive doctors out of our province,” the party said.

Which is just silly. The notion that a doctor would pick up and move to another province or country over a small tax increase makes no sense. Especially if the revenue, as promised, goes to the health-care system and lets doctors work more effectively.

On Tuesday, Doerkson also presented the Conservatives’ law and order platform. It called for hiring 1,000 more police, prosecutors and judges.

That would cost somewhere between $150 million and $200 million a year. With no new taxes, where would that money come from?

Eby and the NDP could have been bolder.

Emily Lowan and the Greens have proposed a wealth tax, aiming to ensure that people who have amassed substantial assets pay more. If you have $50 million in assets, for example, the Green plan would require tax payments of about $1 million per year.

It’s not radical. Californians are voting this fall on a measure, fiercely opposed by the uber-rich, to tax wealth.

Eby’s proposal, much more modest, poses an important question: Which side are you on?

Doerkson and the Conservatives have chosen to side with people with incomes of more than $1 million per year, claiming that asking them to pay more in taxes is wrong.

Eby and the NDP have challenged the notion that all taxes are bad and raised the idea that we all, as a society, have a responsibility to pay what we can for the valuable government services we receive.

Which might be a pivotal moment in this election.