The curious career of the ‘taxpayer’ in Canadian public life: Delacourt
2016/02/04 5 Comments
Good piece by Susan Delacourt on the use of the word ‘taxpayers’ vs ‘citizens’ (I prefer the latter):
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not fond of the word ‘taxpayers’ as a synonym for Canadian citizens.
“Unless you say ‘service-receivers’ at the same time as you say ‘taxpayers,’ you’re only giving half the equation,” Trudeau said in an interview with me last week. “The idea of ‘citizen’ involves both benefits and responsibilities, and I like that a bit better.”
I can’t say I’d be unhappy to see a little less casual use of that word ‘taxpayer’ in politics. Bob Rae, the former interim Liberal leader, would occasionally ‘correct’ reporters in scrums when they asked how some policy would affect taxpayers. “You mean citizens,” Rae would say.
The idea of citizenship as a two-way relationship with government seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent decades. Whether it can be revived is an interesting question.
Seeing citizenship as a send-and-receive equation, for instance, also gives us another way to look at Trudeau’s conversations with 10 Canadians on CBC TV the other night.
While all the attention was on what Trudeau had learned from the questioners, I kept wondering how much the questioners themselves were learning about government. Did they come away with their views changed on what we require of political leadership?
CBC did a good job of choosing people with tough questions; not one of them was able to walk away from the Trudeau encounter with easy answers. The prime minister has taken a bit of flak in some quarters for offering too little in the way of comfort or solutions, but that’s an occupational hazard in modern politics. If the answers were easy or quick, wouldn’t someone have offered some by now?
One thing is certain — none of those people came to the Prime Minister’s Office simply asking for their “taxpayers’” money back.
There are all kinds of good reasons to keep reminding politicians that the money they’re spending is public money — a better term, it seems, than “taxpayers’ money”. And the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has served as a useful check on reckless spending over the years.
But taxing and spending are not the sum total of running a country, despite how that rather limited view has been hammered into popular political culture over the years. If they were, those ten citizens who met Trudeau the other night could have been sent away with a nice cheque as a parting gift.
Susan Delacourt takes us on an etymological tour of the word “taxpayer”
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
One of the most philistine and evil bits of rhetorical trickery was to replace the word ‘citizen’ with the word ‘taxpayer’. This slight of hand was designed to gut and discredit the core sense of community and fellowship which lies at the basis of a national identity and national solidarity.
Short, pithy, and bang-on.
Hmmmm. The problem with using “citizens” in place of “taxpayers” is that non-citizens living in Canada pay taxes too. Unless you take the position that Canada’s non-citizens are simply future citizens and can thus be included in the social contract – the position the US government takes with regard to Green Card holders….
The Canadian model generally assumes and encourages all permanent residents to take-up citizenship. Historically, some 86 percent have done so, although the rate has declined recently, reflecting in part policies designed to make citizenship “harder to get and easier to lose.”
I think being a ‘citizen’ implies responsibility for and an investment in the historically evolving community which is a nation. Being a taxpayer, as an individual, does not, necessarily imply that long-term investment; some individuals and corporations pay taxes in jurisdictions – sometimes in several jurisdictions – to which they owe little or no loyalty and in which their – psychological, cultural, historical – investment can often be minimal. The poor sometimes pay no taxes at all – are they not “citizens”? That said, those who do pay taxes, and are not or not yet citizens, should, certainly, have their rights and interests protected by the law. The ‘taxpayer’ concept implies a purely utilitarian and egoistic attitude to the community – no loyalty, no responsibility, no continuity, no depth. By this I do not mean that I think higher taxes, other things being equal, are a good thing; au contraire! Being a taxpayer – or potential taxpayer – is part of one’s role as a ‘citizen’. Being a citizen implies duties as well as rights; not so with the ‘taxpayer’ concept.