HARPER’S TAX LOCK NEEDS DOSE OF REALITY

You know that an election campaign has been going on for too long when the best that a party leader can muster up on a slow news day is a promise that, if elected, he will pass legislation to ban himself from doing what he has already promised not to do.

Stephen Harper’s pledge to enact a four-year “tax lock” that would prohibit the federal government from increasing anything from income taxes to the GST to “discretionary payroll taxes” such as Canada Pension Plan and employment insurance premiums is purely symbolic because the Conservative leader knows full well that such a piece of legislation is meaningless in real terms.

To understand just how seriously such laws are taken, look no further than the fixed-date election law introduced and passed by Mr. Harper’s government in 2007, which requires a general vote to be held every four years. That certainly didn’t get in the way of his Conservative government going to the polls sooner in 2008 and in 2011.

Or he can take his cue from Alberta’s Fiscal Responsibility Act, passed by the Ralph Klein Conservative government in 1999, which forbade the province from running deficits. It was dropped fewer than 10 years later by a subsequent Conservative government.

As an economist by training, Mr. Harper understands that no government can hamstring itself with laws that unduly constrain its ability to respond to the vagaries of a global marketplace and unforeseen circumstances that affect even the best-crafted budgets and financial plans.

While Mr. Harper ideologically may abhor tax hikes of any kind or to have governments operating in red ink, there can arise circumstances, such as the 2008 global financial crisis, when some flexibility is necessary to avoid larger economic and social upheavals.

Mr. Harper found it necessary to rack up $150 billion in debt then and, despite the best of intentions, could find himself having to hike CPP or EI premiums should demand or poor investment returns on funds require employers and workers to ante up more.

The alternative is to deny or reduce benefits for more Canadians or rack up debt — something for which he has excoriated Justin Trudeau over the Liberal leader’s plans to invest in infrastructure with borrowed billions.

Whatever rhetoric Mr. Harper spouts to explain his fanciful promise of a “tax lock” — a notion that seems to have been lifted from British Conservative Leader David Cameron’s April promise to voters there — such legislation will not bind him or a future government from hiking any tax or fee.

While the Canadian Taxpayers Federation suggests it will increase the “pain level” for a future politician who wants to overturn the law, consider how much discomfort Mr. Harper felt over retroactively changing the access to information law to prevent the RCMP from being charged with illegal withholding and destruction of gun registry records.

This promised law is meaningless politicking, especially when Mr. Harper cannot even spell out the consequences that await anyone who fiddles with his tax lock.

... the Conservative leader knows full well that such a piece of legislation is meaningless in real terms.