The beginning of this week marked the deadline for most Canadians to file their taxes.
But there’s a segment of the population unlikely to have been handing over the last shoebox full of receipts or sweating over a calculator.
That’s because when it comes to taxes, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
On a global scale, the leaked Panama Papers have drawn attention to the vast sums of money being sent by the worldwide wealthy to offshore tax havens to avoid paying taxes.
But according to Canadians for Tax Fairness, Panama doesn’t even make it into the Top 5 of preferred tax havens for wealthy Canadians and corporations eager to avoid the taxman’s reach.
Those honours go to Barbados, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda.
And let’s not forget the Isle of Man, the preferred tax shelter used by a
KPMG-authorized scheme to shield a number of wealthy clients. When the Canada Revenue Agency got wind of it, a deal was cooked up that allowed those clients to pay the taxes owed but avoid substantial penalties.
Most of the tax avoidance schemes fall into grey areas of probably legal but ethically dubious. But the government can and should do more to close these loopholes big enough to drive a Brinks truck through.
For the millions of regular Canadians who work hard and diligently pay their taxes every year, the existence of such schemes undermines the basic premise of the system and leaves us with the feeling that only dupes pay taxes.
This isn’t a sentiment on which a civil society can be built.
– guest editorial from the North Shore News
