Define "Fiscal Disaster", You Fucking Idiots

Rick Dykstra does the right thing, Liberals show their oportunism

In federal politics, St Catharines Conservative MP Rick Dykstra is a one-man revolution.

“Let me do something revolutionary, something politicians don’t do,” Dykstra announced during the course of his debate with Liberal candidate Walt Lastewka. (NDP candidate Julian West resigned over a skinny dipping incident, but oddly enough could still win the riding.) He then apologized for his party's about-face on taxing income trusts. “We made a commitment. We didn’t keep that commitment, and for that I apologize to the people of St. Catharines.”

Lastewka's previously demonstrated not-so-classy side reemerged again when he mustered the temerity to demand an apology for Ralph Goodale.

“I would hope when [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper comes into town, he will apologize not only to Mr. Goodale but the people of St. Catharines and the people of Canada and put forward an action plan,” Lastewka announced.

The Liberal party national office also insisted that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty should apologize for the "fiscal disaster" that emerged from the decision to phase in taxes on income trusts.

This leads one to wonder precisely how the Liberal party defines a "fiscal disaster".

Certainly, Stephen Harper did decide not to tax income trusts. But following that promise, as Dykstra noted, many of Canada's largest corporations began to discuss converting themselves into income trusts in order to skirt their taxpaying responsibilities.

Should that have happened, individual taxpayers either would have had to carry a larger portion of the federal tax burden, or kiss public health care and social services good-bye.

Taxing income trusts in order to take away the incentive for Canada's largest taxpaying corporations to convert was, sadly, the only responsible thing to do. Which leads one to ask an important question.

The expressed Liberal position on income trusts, in many ways, carries the same subtext as the Liberals' 1993 promises to abolish the GST. After all, the Kim Campbell Progressive Conservatives had already paid the political price for the GST, so what would the sense really have been in abolishing a perfectly good source of revenue?

If the Liberals manage to defeat the Conservatives in this federal election (a prospect still well within the range of possibility), it will at least partially be because the Conservatives have paid the political price for taxing income trusts.

Liberal governments being as thirsty for revenue as they've historically tended to be, why would they keep their promise and forgo all of that precious, precious revenue? Especially considering that Stephane Dion has spent the last 18 months decrying the lost revenue from the Harper government's tax cuts, and is proposing a Green Shift plan that would inevitably mean a further still loss of revenue?

And even if Canadians could expect the Liberals to keep their promises, that other, more important question emerges:

What would they do to prevent larger corporations from converting to income trusts? How would they protect the revenue stream so necessary to maintain Canada's most vital social programs? Could they really be so irresponsible as to simply let it slip away?

No matter how one slices it, the lost revenue from corporate taxation -- and the inevitably accompanying loss of public health care and social services -- would be a much greater fiscal disaster than taxing income trusts.