The curious career of the ‘taxpayer’ in Canadian public life: Delacourt

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”