Taxing the Market Citizen: Fiscal Policy and Inequality in an Age of Privatization

Focusing on Canada, Philipps argues that recent efforts to revise important facets of the income tax system are best understood through the lens of privatization. By promoting personal responsibility, the tax code is contributing to the erosion of the ideal of social citizenship and replacing it with a new model of market citizenship

Discursive Deficits: A Feminist Perspective on the Power of Technical Knowledge in Fiscal Law and Policy

Decisions about taxation and government spending have great political significance: they affect the distribution of income and wealth and the nature and degree of class, gender and other social inequalities. However, tax and budgetary issues are frequently constructed as technical matters that can be resolved rationally according to economic, mathematical or other ostensibly neutral principles. The author examines the debate around budget deficits and recent sex equality challenges to the income tax system, and argues that both illustrate how technical discourses tend to deny the normative content of fiscal law and policy and to disqualify political opposition to the prevailing fiscal order as irrational, ideological and inexpert. The paper concludes by examining the discursive strategies of feminists and others interested in fiscal change. The author considers how feminists might respond to, and even harness, the power of technical knowledge in struggling for tax and expenditure reforms while also challenging the oppressive features and depoliticizing tendencies of such discourses

Strategic Research Planning in a Law School Setting

Strategic planning processes are by now familiar in many Universities and law faculties. Most often these operate at the highest level of generality and are aimed at articulating an institution’s overall strengths, direction and priorities for growth or improvement. The tools of strategic planning can also be deployed to focus attention on a specific dimension of a law school’s profile such as its research mission. This short paper will describe the effort to develop a strategic research plan at Osgoode Hall Law School, and will share experience about the challenges and potential benefits of such an enterprise

The Supreme Court of Canada\u27s Tax Jurisprudence: What\u27s Wrong with the Rule of Law

This paper reviews the history of the Supreme Court\u27s tax jurisprudence focussing on the Court\u27s ongoing struggle to define its proper institutional role in the creation and interpretation of the tax laws. An emprical overview is first presented to document the changing nature and volume of the Court\u27s taxation caseload through history, and this is related to the evolution of Canada\u27s fiscal system. Selected judgments from differing periods are then examined to illuminate how the Court has conceived its role in the adjudication of tax issues. The author suggests that tax decisions have been strongly informed by a classical liberal vision of the rule of law and an overriding concern to protect taxpayer liberty, understood as the right to hold private property free from arbitrary state interference. This vision is closely linked to a history of strict construction of tax statutes and of toleration for tax avoidance, fuelling the endless action and reaction referred to by Estey, J. In the Supreme Court\u27s landmark ruling in Stubart. In recent decades the Court has increasingly acknowledged the state\u27s interest in promoting values such as positive liberty and substantive equality through the tax system. However the author concludes that it has yet to formulate an interpretative stance that fully reflects such values. The challenge ahead is to reconceptualize the judicial role in tax cases to balance traditional individual liberty concerns with the need to protect the integrity of the tax system. This challenge is presented most starkly by the so-called general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR) enacted in 1988 and now on its way to the Supreme Court. The GAAR departs from a long tradition of piecemeal loophole-plugging by Parliament and instead gives a wide authority to the Courts to determine the legal limits of tax avoidance. As such the GAAR directly confronts the issue of judicial role. It calls for a new working relationship between legislative and judicial branches to repair the tax system\u27s chronic vulnerability to the creative manoeuvres of tax planners. The GAAR invites the Supreme Court of Canada in particular to become a more active, open partner in crafting a tax law that equitably and effectively advances Parliament\u27s policy design

The Globalization of Tax Expenditure Reporting: Transplanting Transparency in India and the Global South

This paper traces the rise of tax expenditure reporting in countries of the Global South, with a particular focus on India. It investigates why and how policy makers in some low and middle income countries are now moving to adopt a budgeting practice that originated in wealthy Western nations in the 1970s. I discuss the potential advantages of this trend, but also argue that there is a need for its champions to face up to some challenges and potential disadvantages of transplanting this form of fiscal transparency into different national contexts. These include methodological and political challenges that are well known to Western observers but are seldom fully acknowledged in the literature advocating adoption of tax expenditure reporting by developing countries. In addition, the chapter questions whether generic prescriptions are sufficiently attuned to local political, economic and institutional circumstances that may diminish the value of OECD-style tax expenditure reporting to receiving countries

Discursive Deficits: A Feminist Perspective on the Power of Technical Knowledge in Fiscal Law and Policy

Decisions about taxation and government spending have great political significance: they affect the distribution of income and wealth and the nature and degree of class, gender and other social inequalities. However, tax and budgetary issues are frequently constructed as technical matters that can be resolved rationally according to economic, mathematical or other ostensibly neutral principles. The author examines the debate around budget deficits and recent sex equality challenges to the income tax system, and argues that both illustrate how technical discourses tend to deny the normative content of fiscal law and policy and to disqualify political opposition to the prevailing fiscal order as irrational, ideological and inexpert. The paper concludes by examining the discursive strategies of feminists and others interested in fiscal change. The author considers how feminists might respond to, and even harness, the power of technical knowledge in struggling for tax and expenditure reforms while also challenging the oppressive features and depoliticizing tendencies of such discourses

Income Splitting and Gender Equality: The Case for Incentivizing Intra-Household Wealth Transfers

In all countries that use the individual as the basic unit of taxation, tax policy makers must contend with the problem of spousal income splitting and the dilemma it poses for gender equality. On the one hand income splitting opens a back door to joint taxation of couples, with its troubling labour market disincentives for second earners. Yet attempting to prevent this type of avoidance planning by ignoring inter-spousal transfers for tax purposes disrespects women’s individual agency over property to which they hold legal title, and may close off one source of economic power for those who do the bulk of unpaid work. This tax policy issue thus engages fundamental, normative debates about the meaning of gender equality and whether it is possible to enhance women’s access to markets while also valuing and compensating their unpaid contributions. The paper argues that a way through this dilemma is to differentiate between forms of income splitting that enhance the economic autonomy of a lower-earning spouse and those that entail no meaningful sharing of economic power but merely reduce tax for the transferor. While the former should be aggressively constrained, a gender-equality case can be made for more liberal treatment of genuine intra-household transfers, if combined with other measures that reduce the costs to second earners of entering paid labour. The paper criticizes recent Canadian reforms that expand the scope for notional income splitting, without demanding any real redistribution of underlying assets or income