Tax Freedom Day

In a letter to the editor printed of the current issue of Maclean’s, Niels Veldhuis, “Director of Fiscal Studies” for the Fraser Institute, accuses me of missing the point with my criticisms of tax freedom day. Of course we get benefits from taxes, he graciously concedes. The question Canadians want to know, he writes, is: “Are we getting value for our tax dollars?” As he goes on to claim, the point of tax freedom day is to provide Canadians with “an accurate and easy to understand estimate of their total tax bill.”

Only the Fraser Institute could see it as a bad thing that we spend less of our income on basics like food and shelter than we used to