Norbert Cunningham: Use new approach for some taxes

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Every April, New Brunswickers and Canadians across the nation are reminded of the hard truth about all governments: if people need essential services and want other really important ones that make their lives and society better places to live, the bill bust be paid, and and that’s generally done via taxes. It’s inevitable.

Taxes designed to affect people’s behaviour began with“sin taxes” on alcohol and cigarettes. They go way back. But today, we have others similarly trying: carbon tax (it’s mere semantics to call it a ‘price on carbon,’ the goal is to make fossil fuels so expensive people will switch to alternatives). It matters not that many will get what they pay back, it’s still a scheme to achieve a goal. So many hate it, logically, because outside the biggest cities, they have few good alternatives and too few materializing. Why not, instead of trying to change behaviour, always an uphill struggle, set goals to directly provide the alternatives people need to reach success? It’ll still cost taxpayers, but the more direct route is more likely to produce better results, faster. The complicated carbon taxes merely riles people up..

Putting a price (read tax) on things to change people’s behaviour is a limited approach at best. And slow to work. Yet economists and politicians love it. Why? We put a price on cigarettes so high it created a black market that’s pretty much forced cigarette firms into other ventures. And it took decades to get results even though we knew of the harms of smoking. Why? And we only ‘almost’ eliminated smoking, suffered high health care costs to deal with its eventually deadly effects, and still have a thriving black market and from 10-15 per cent of the population still smoking, depending where one lives. Alcohol sin taxes are just a cash cow for governments. They spend much more selling the addictive drug (one of the most addictive) and far less treating or curbing its use. The multiple, different costs of alcohol abuse to the province are massive, from health care to domestic violence to other crime and homelessness. Now we’re vigorously pursuing marijuana profits. Our taxation system fails if the purpose is to provide essential services and improve society.

Look at how negligent our governments, provincial and federal, have been in allowing new products that we know from the outset are undesirable and problematic for health to simply be put on sale with zero oversight or regulatory process to ensure they aren’t seriously damaging for users. Then a decade or two later, despite warnings all along, governments begin trying to tax the life out of them. Two merit highhlighting: vaping and caffeine-infused ‘energy drinks with such high levels they’re dangerous to health and addictive. The costs, for huge profits by a few entrepreneurs, is high for the rest of society. Addictions, health care treatment, and even premature deaths. Why do we not require strict approval processes, including for safety, as we do with new medicines? Pharmaceutical approvals can cause controversy at times too, but it’s far better than none at all, and when harms are discovered, change is required.

Why do we not devise a logical approach? Treat these products like the drugs they are before allowing even one sale. Disallow the unacceptably dangerous.

This is not an issue of unduly curbing the freedom of capitalists to develop new products. The issue goes right back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. He warned of abuses of greed or things like these that harm society.

Ottawa and provinces are about to double taxes on a single 30 ml container of vaping juice from the present federal tax of $7 to $14 when the provinces take the same amount. Why not just ban the poison? Vaping coats one’s air passageways permanently, and often fast. Quitting does not allow lung function to improve. That makes it an especially unacceptable product.

Norbert Cunningham is a Brunswick News columnist and a retired editorial page editor of the Times & Transcript