Every spring, a collective groan rolls across Canada. As the April tax-filing deadline approaches, the prevailing cultural mood is one of dread, resentment, and strategic avoidance. We are conditioned to view this annual ritual as a loss—a subtraction from our personal wealth, confiscated by a faceless bureaucracy.
This reaction isn’t accidental. It is the product of a 40-year rhetorical project that has successfully branded taxation at federal, provincial, and municipal levels as a “burden.” We have normalized the idea that money in our pockets is “ours” and money in the public purse is “wasted”—or at least “inefficiently” spent.
This narrative is not just cynical. It is corrosive to the very idea of democracy.
It’s time to reframe taxation. Taxation is not a penalty. It’s the practical mechanism by which we establish an architecture of care. It allows us to extend compassion beyond our immediate family to people we will never meet, ensuring that care is not a luxury product, but a common right. It is also something we do for ourselves, so we can have access to care when we need it.
The language of “relief”
Language shapes reality. For decades, politicians across the spectrum have campaigned on promises of “tax relief.” The metaphor is powerful because it is visceral: you need relief from a headache, a disaster, or a heavy weight. By framing taxes as an affliction, the logical conclusion is that the goal of good governance must always be less of them.
When we obsess over “taxpayer rights” rather than “civic responsibilities,” we erode the solidarity required to fund universal programs. We forget that the “relief” of a tax cut often results in the “burden” of crumbling infrastructure, longer ER wait times, and underfunded schools.
Public spending buys us freedom from fear. It buys us the freedom to move through a safe city on public transit. When we pool our resources, we can purchase things together that even the wealthy could not afford alone: a national park system, a pandemic response strategy, a universal pension plan.
When we starve the state, we don’t liberate the individual, we raise the cost of living. We replace progressive taxation with regressive user fees, tuition hikes, and private insurance premiums. We trade a bill based on ability to pay for a bill based on need—a trade that always punishes the poor and working class.
Funding the care economy
For too long, we have viewed the economy as a machine that produces widgets, while viewing care—health, education, child care, as well as disability and elder support—as a drain on that machine. In reality, care is the economy. It is the soil in which all other productivity grows.
Taxation is how we pool our resources to fund this care at scale. It is not merely paying for a nurse’s shift; it is funding the vast, invisible infrastructure that makes their work possible. It is the medical school that trained them, the publicly funded research that developed the treatments they administer, and the hospital network that stands ready for any emergency. This level of coordination—building systems rather than just buying services—is something that private charity or individual wealth simply cannot replicate.
These things are not “government waste.” They are acts of solidarity operationalized by the state. When we underfund them, we are not “saving money.” We are engaged in an act of collective neglect. We are choosing to let our neighbours slip through the cracks so we can keep a slightly larger percentage of our paycheque.
Confronting the crisis of trust
Of course, asking progressives to embrace taxation encounters a hard reality: not every tax dollar buys care.
For many on the left, the reluctance to defend taxation isn’t born of selfishness, but of profound distrust. It is difficult to feel a swell of civic pride when we see public funds diverted to expand defense spending, subsidize fossil fuel pipelines, or cover the costs of corporate handouts.
This skepticism is valid, but it requires a reality check.
While headlines rightly focus on controversial spending, the vast majority of our federal budget still serves the public good. It is true that current spending plans mean defence spending is projected to rise significantly. Yet even with the aggressive pivot toward military spending, transfers to persons (like Old Age Security and the Canada Child Benefit) and transfers to other levels of government (primarily for health care and education) make up more than 50 per cent of all federal spending.
For every dollar that goes to a project we oppose, many more go directly to keeping our neighbours housed, healed, and fed.
If we withdraw our moral support for taxation because we dislike specific line items, we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The cruel irony of “starving the beast” is that the “beast”—the militarized, corporate-aligned aspects of the state—is rarely the part that starves. When revenue drops, fighter jets are rarely the first item cut. The first casualties tend to be libraries, schools, transit, and health care.
We must learn to hold two difficult truths at once: our democracy is deeply flawed, captured by interests, and often disappointing—but it remains our best bet. Collective spending is the only lever powerful enough to push back against the privatization of everything. We cannot cede the terrain of revenue to those who want to dismantle the state. We pay taxes not to endorse every decision of the government of the day, but to keep the lights on in the public sphere so that we have a democracy left to fight for.
From taxpayers to citizens
How do we shift this narrative? It requires a change in culture.
We need to stop apologizing for taxation. Progressive rhetoric often falls into the trap of framing taxes solely as a correction for extreme wealth. While taxing the one per cent is an economic and moral imperative, relying exclusively on this framing risks validating the idea that taxation is, at its core, a penalty. We cannot build a supportive tax culture if we treat the contributions of working and middle-class people as a tragedy. Regardless of the bracket, we need to stop viewing these payments as a loss, and start defending them as the necessary architecture of a fair society.
Calls to “tax the rich”’ ring hollow in a society that inherently distrusts the state. The wealthy know this. They rely on general anti-tax sentiment to stall reform, knowing that so long as the average citizen hates the taxman, the billionaire remains safe. To break this deadlock, we must change the narrative for everyone, not just the top bracket. When everyone embraces taxation as a tool for collective care, we remove the social license the wealthy use to opt out.
Imagine if we viewed tax season not as a government raid, but as a harvest festival. A moment where we collectively gather the resources required to educate the next generation of children, to heal our sick, to house our neighbours, and to transition our economy away from fossil fuels.
There is a profound dignity in contributing to the common good. There should be pride in looking at a new library, a functioning hospital, or a protected green space and saying, “I helped build that.”
The next time a federal, provincial, or municipal politician promises you “relief,” ask them what part of our care infrastructure they plan to dismantle to pay for it. And when you file your return this year, try to view that final number not as a loss, but as your stake in a fairer, kinder, and more robust Canada.
