Who Pays for Canada? Taxes and Fairness ed. by E. A. Heaman and David Tough

Abstract

Reviewed by: Who Pays for Canada? Taxes and Fairness ed. by E. A. Heaman and David Tough Dimitry Anastakis Heaman, E. A. and David Tough eds. – Who Pays for Canada? Taxes and Fairness. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020. 424 p. A few decades from now, historians may look back upon the "taxation turn" of the 2010s as an important historiographical interjection within Canada's evolving new political history. The troika of monographs produced by Elsbeth Heaman, David Tough (co-editors of this volume), and Shirley Tillotson (a contributor), have effectively reexamined and reframed how we think about taxation, the relationship between individuals and the state, and the very notion of fairness in society. Collectively, and whether they realize it or not, they have created a "taxation school" subfield, one which has sparked a vibrant historical debate that has deep implications for how we understand many of the questions that drive Canadian political economy today. Who Pays for Canada: Taxes and Fairness is a welcome addition to this newly established taxation canon. With five sections and 17 chapters that cover topics in comparative politics, history, economics, gender, "the making of the modern taxpayer," and "democratic tax accountability," the collection boasts a breadth of scholarly approaches that includes historians, philosophers, geographers, economists, political scientists, and business and law school professors. Despite this wide range of contributors and perspectives, the interdisciplinarity and accessibility of this volume is a strength. It aims at "setting new standards for interdisciplinarity and town-gown conversations" in a manner that avoids "insider baseball" (p. 19). And the collection largely succeeds. The preface, by former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, and the introduction, "Broadening the Tax Conversation," set the tone and convincingly make their case for the book's interdisciplinary approach. In places, Who Pays for Canada? reads less like a traditional historical edited collection, and more like a special issue on taxation from the pages of Canadian Public Policy, or some such economics- or policy-driven publication. That's a good thing, and provides a refreshing, and frustratingly rare, expansion in the ambit of historians. Bridging the historical with the applied, as has been done in the collection, could stand to be pushed further outside of the academy, too. Wouldn't the Bank of Canada and Canada's ministries of finance be better served by having a few more historians or other types of scholars in their number, and a few less economists? This book's expansive range of convincing chapters only adds to any conviction in that regard, and it provides a great example of activist history in the policy realm. This activism is reflected in the book's two main currents. Many of the chapters examine ideas of taxation, forcing us to think about taxation as a conceptual notion, one that shapes, and is shaped by, history, comparative politics (across countries, and provinces), party politics, emotion (jealousy), knowledge, perception, and, above all, questions of fairness. Re-thinking taxation reveals the intellectual, psychological, and emotional shape of taxation, and how the humanity of taxation policy has been used (or abused) to influence who pays, who does not, and why that matters. At the same time, the book provides a refreshing connection to the material realities of ordinary Canadians, and how taxation shapes everyday existence. [End Page 200] Chapters that explore the taxation implications upon schooling, municipal government, families, gender, region, and colonialism provide insights into how tax regimes impact people, classes of people, and places, and how those impacts are uneven and unevenly distributed in society. This current, too, is about fairness, and how the policies and politics of taxation can shape the most fundamental notions of governance, identity and, of course, inequality. Ultimately, both currents, and all the chapters in the collection, remind us that history can show us that there are alternative paths and different ways of thinking about and implementing taxation policy to make it fairer, less unequal, and better for all Canadians. In that regard, this book, and the historiographical interjection from which it springs, should not only be read by historians, but all humanists and social scientists who are engaged with the work of creating...