Keep climate a national priority
On Tuesday, with six days to go before election day, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party released its platform. It’s a thin offering with fewer than two dozen pages of ideas, fewer still if you cut the many photos that fill out the page below or beside the text. The platform fails to meet the moment.
You can tell why Poilievre waited so long to share it, or may wonder why he bothered to release it at all — it’s thin gruel, costed by way of magical thinking and full of more than one questionable proposal. And while there is plenty to criticize about the Tory plan, one promise stood out as so egregiously foolish and gimmicky that it ought to be disqualifying on its own, calling into doubt if the Conservatives really want to govern at all.
If elected, the Conservatives are promising to cut taxes, “never” raise them again and pass a “Taxpayer Protection Act” that would “ban new or higher federal taxes without asking taxpayers first in a referendum.”
Set aside whether it’s wise to cut taxes now and to promise you won’t raise them in the future. All major parties are promising personal income tax cuts and only the NDP is keen to raise them — even then they’re focused on the wealthy, those with a net worth over $10 million. Focus, instead, on the idea that a government ought to bind itself through a referendum law in a democratic system which is predicated on the right of parliament to have a say in spending decisions. And ask yourself what this promise implies in theory and how it would work in practice. You’ll see that the Tories are out to lunch.
Poilievre’s referendum promise is rooted in the Western, populist tradition of Preston Manning and the Reform Party in which he was raised. It’s also rooted in his doctrinaire commitment to a neoliberal economics obsessed with low taxes and limited state capacity. The theory behind it is that the people ought to directly decide how much government they wish to bear by way of taxes, because that’s how to get the purest expression of the popular will. The assumption is their answer will be “very little.” The referendum requirement itself, at least in theory, is meant to disincentivize governments from even trying to raise taxes by throwing up a roadblock. Referendums in this country tend to have a poor track record of success, after all.
The whole thing is bunk. In the Westminster parliamentary system, governments can’t pass ordinary statutes that bind future governments. That’s the whole point of having a government: to decide what ought to be done despite what past governments — and the opposition — might think. If the Conservatives were to win and pass this law, it could be repealed or amended by the next government. In theory, that could come with a political cost if the law proved to be popular, but practice suggests otherwise.
A quarter-century ago, the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris in Ontario passed the Taxpayer Protection Act, 1999. It placed limits on raising taxes, requiring a referendum on future taxes or, as TVO’s John Michael McGrath put it, “an extremely specific promise made during an election campaign.” McGrath points out the law was ultimately “toothless,” as governments skirted or amended their way around it. It’s unlikely most Ontarians know it even exists. That’s the best-case scenario: a law that is useless, ignored and forgotten. Not a great way to govern.
The referendum law would also be offensive to Canadian elections. Governments are supposed to pass policies and laws they believe will be in the public interest. We get governments through elections to return members of Parliament, a subset of whom will make up the executive and govern as long as they have the support of the legislature. They don’t need to ask further permission from the population to do the job they were sent to Ottawa to do.
Indeed, it’s wildly inefficient, not to mention costly, to try to run a government through direct democracy at scale. How do you plan on paying for that? Taxes? If so, I have bad news for you!
Why is Poilievre even bothering to run if he wants to farm out that responsibility to the people? And why stop at referendums on taxes? Why not require a referendum on increasing military spending, defunding the CBC or cutting the public service? How about one on draconian crime and punishment laws or building pipelines? The answer, in practice, is the Conservatives think they can pull the wool over the eyes of voters with a populist gimmick masquerading as a serious concern for pocketbooks. It’s equal parts lunacy and cynicism.
On top of being costly — and bureaucratically burdensome, something you’d think the tax-axing, government-efficiency-obsessed Conservatives would care about — referendums are typically blunt, divisive policymaking tools. If they are to be used at all, they ought to be reserved for extraordinary measures, such as major constitutional changes or other foundational amendments to the rules of the game.
The history of using referendums to limit taxes also speaks against the Conservative promise. In 1978, California passed Proposition 13, which amended the state’s constitution through a ballot initiative to place limits on property tax increases and to force the legislature to require a supermajority of two-thirds to enact future state tax increases. The measures in Proposition 13 have cost the state hundreds of billions in foregone revenue, led to lower school funding, decreased the quality of public services, and increased wealth inequality. In sum, the worst, if unlikely, scenario with Poilievre’s law is that it works as designed.
While Conservatives love to present themselves as the party of “common sense,” their referendum proposal ought to disabuse anyone of the idea they’re anything close to it. If the party doesn’t want to raise taxes while in government, they can choose not to do so. They don’t need a law for that. But at the rate they’re going, with ideas like this, they won’t need to worry about it either way, because they’ll have a hard time forming a government.
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