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OAK BAYNEWS
EDITORIAL
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - OAK
BAY NEWS
Penny Sakamoto Group Publisher Kevin Laird Editorial Director Laura Lavin Editor Oliver Sommer Advertising Director
The OAK BAY NEWS is published by Black Press Ltd. | 818 Broughton St., Victoria, B.C. V8W 1E4 | Phone: 250-480-3239 • Fax: 250-386-2624 • Web: www.vicnews.com
OUR VIEW
Adults taking over Halloween
Iconic imagery of Halloween tends to be ghosts and jack-o’-lanterns and all things creepy and frightening, but it’s also the sounds of little kids at the door shouting “trick-or-treat” and collecting candy. But our favourite non-statutory holiday is changing, for better or worse, from a kid-centric night to a big party weekend for adults to blow off steam as an alter-ego. For people that think there are fewer kids coming around their neighbourhood to collect candy, they’re probably right. Kids of trick-ortreating age peaked more than a decade ago and has steadily declined (about 3.7 million now versus 4.1 million in 2002, according to Statistics Canada). Instead, places like Value Village and innumerable Halloween pop-up stores are seeing steady year-over-year growth in readymade adult Halloween costumes and spooky paraphernalia. A Scotiabank poll estimates on average B.C.’ers will spend more than $80 per person for Halloween get-up and candy, making the scariest night of the year a popular and healthy business. Candy sales in October across Canada are the clear winner at $360 million last year, but costumes sales and rentals nearly doubled over the past few years to a $40-million business. Like the evolving nature of Halloween, annual mayhem and property damage has largely gone down across Greater Victoria thanks to many municipalities regulating and imposing safety courses on people using fireworks, or banning fireworks altogether. Police departments maintain a heavy presence on the roads during Halloween and its closest weekend (Saanich police say Halloween beats out New Year’s Eve for call volume), but fewer fireworks and stronger enforcement has meant a drop in fire department callouts. Some people may grumble about a nanny state and taking their explosive fun away, but taxpayers benefit when their emergency services aren’t spending the night chasing spot fires from Roman candles. Tomorrow night little ghouls will be walking the neighbourhoods, but Halloween only really becomes scary when the big ghouls misbehave.
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2009
Perils of an ‘entitlement state’ out “regional development” and With the B.C. and federal other funds to every part of the governments once again struggling country. to climb out of deep But I did not know that operating deficits, it’s a Industry Canada grants good time for the release were handed out to pizza of Mark Milke’s book Tax parlours (including the Me, I’m Canadian. remote pizza-starved vilAn update of the same lage of Kamloops), or to title published 12 years help open gas stations ago, the book retains the or convenience stores history of taxes in Canada, in Kelowna, Vernon and detailing how Canada’s tax Chilliwack. system was initially built Milke makes a useto mimic the United States system in the late 19th Tom Fletcher ful point for B.C. about royalty rates for timber, century. B.C. Views natural gas and other Beyond the history, it resources. They are is mostly new material. resource rents, and if they are too Included are chapters on the global high the tenants will move out. meltdown of 2009, the surge of penReducing them isn’t a subsidy, espesion liabilities as the baby boomers cially if it leads to big revenue gains retire and the flawed logic behind as B.C.’s unconventional shale gas the “Occupy” and “Idle No More” incentives have done. protests. On the Occupy movement: The Some readers will immediately note that Milke works for the Fraser infamous “one per cent,” who in Canada earn $250,000 a year or Institute and was previously B.C. more, earned 10 per cent of all director of the Canadian Taxpayincome and paid 20 per cent of all ers’ Federation. But the book is not taxes in 2010. The bottom 73 per just an argument for cutting taxes. cent of tax filers paid just 17 per It also dismantles persistent myths cent of all taxes. About a third paid that income taxes are illegal, and launches a broadside on what Milke no tax at all. On Idle No More: When calls “Canada’s corporate welfare Attawapiskat Chief Teresa Spence carnival.” played to the Ottawa media with Many people will be able to idenher soup strike, former Liberal tify some top names in the governleader Bob Rae suggested a nearby ment subsidy game: Bombardier, diamond mine should share more General Motors, even poor old revenue. Rolls Royce Canada. Some will also Milke omits the substantial supbe well aware that our supposedly port and employment that mine tight-fisted Conservative federal provides, and glosses over the misgovernment has continued to pour
guided blockades that disrupted that and other job-creating enterprises. But he does detail the disastrous effects of passive resource wealth bestowed on impoverished aboriginal communities, and contrasts it with the success stories of reserves that build their own enterprises through hard work. On public sector pensions: Milke notes that historically, public employees traded higher wages for better benefits and job security. Now their wages are generally higher, and taxpayers have to cover their personal pension contributions (as a portion of those wages) as well as the employer contributions, plus the “defined benefit” payout, which has to be subsidized far beyond what the pension fund can support. On the debt-financed welfare state, there are memorable observations, like this one: “For the record, the generous Quebec welfare state and its ostensibly more progressive model are paid for in part with the taxes of other Canadians; Quebec is merely the North American equivalent of Greece.” The recent B.C. political crisis over adoption of the harmonized sales tax showed that there is too much emotion and too little knowledge about how taxes work. This book is a step towards addressing that. –Tom Fletcher is legislature reporter and columnist for Black Press and BCLocalNews.com Twitter: @tomfletcherbc tfletcher@blackpress.ca
“... Quebec is merely the North American equivalent of Greece.”