From Cake or Death, 2007:

Give Me Taxes

What’s a sure thing? My husband’s love is a sure thing. Or is it? How unfashionable to suggest that it might be. But if not, we’re left with crotchety, big-bellied Benjamin Franklin’s doubtless gout-inspired “death and taxes.” He was wrong.

Death is a hateful dragnet, except when it’s a blessed release, a tidy designer Seconal death surrounded by those you love (notice how I didn’t insert the standard “family” there? I will never candycoat things for you.) I always think of the lotos-eaters in Ulysses. You can get high reading Tennyson’s rendition of them. Death, mmmmmm. Even auto-erotic asphyxiation sounds bloody good, as long as you don’t realize toward the end of the best orgasm you ever had that you’ve gone too far this time and your funeral is going to be hugely embarrassing for people who actually liked you and a hoot for people who didn’t.

But taxes are great. (Darling editor, what follows isn’t entirely new; I’ve been saying it for decades, but it’s my book.) I may be alone in this opinion but hear me out, please. I’m a fan of civilization, and taxes enable civilization. To put it another way, taxes grease the skids of living well.

Other people say loudly, endlessly, tediously that they hate taxes. They haven’t considered the alternative, so let’s embarrass them by doing that. They’d prefer to live in sod houses and spend their days combining a drop of oxygen and two drops of hydrogen so they can have homemade water rather than have it piped to their homes by tax-supported civilization. Fine, if it keeps them occupied and far away from me.

But I do not like to see civilized Canadians falling for sodbuster notions.

Right-wing people have many obsessions but their main one is taxes.

(This is a shame; wouldn’t it be splendid if they were obsessed, simply single-mindedly blind, about something useful like clean water for the planet? Or making sure no one could graduate from high school without having read all of Shakespeare, and that includes memorization? Think how much higher would be the level of abuse they could then level at the rest of us. I dream.)

They think taxes should be cut to absolutely minimal levels, if that. I don’t know why free Canadian health care for all bothers them so much. You pay your medical fees in taxes or you owe them (yeah, sue me) to some lousy cheese-paring corporation that doesn’t care about your privacy or indeed the success of your operation and the smooth running of your spleen, whatever that is. You pay your doctor one way or another; why get hung up with the name you write on the cheque?

To them, taxes are tapeworms, “bubble bubble toil and taxes,” as Shakespeare’s witches didn’t put it, sneaking into your home to steal all that is good. If you didn’t pay Canadian taxes, you could have Porthault sheets instead of Yves Delorme is the neocon message to the rich. Without taxes, the middle classes could have CuddleDown sheets instead of Martex. Without taxes, the working poor could have sheets. Without taxes, the poor could have a mattress on the floor and the homeless could have nicer cardboard

This is absurd. I pay taxes. I love taxes. When you work, the government yanks it off your paycheque. When you write, as I do, you take your receipts to Joan, my accountant, and give her a blank cheque made out to the Receiver General. The government uses it to do all the stuff I’d rather not think about.

Tax. A short word, but as Lynne Truss, punctuation queen, says of the apostrophe, it is an abused little shrimp-shaped thing, brutally misunderstood.

Yet truly the word “tax” trails clouds of glory.

When I was a child, I assumed the world, including my body, was run by tiny people in uniform. They carried electricity in buckets to feed the lightbulbs, lit invisible campfires inside the oven and pushed at my hair from inside my head to make it grow.

Later, I learned this was nonsense. There were no elves cycling madly inside the car engine. (Ironically, after globalization, it was no longer nonsense. Little people did indeed beaver away in sweatshops worldwide to make my jeans and toothbrushes.)

Taxes ease our daily lives in ways we take for granted. They pay for new combed-concrete sidewalks, traffic lights, sewers, garbage pickup, nicely dressed diplomats so we don’t show up at the G-8 in golfing shorts, ferries, fish in general, nuclear power plant inspection, protecting the provincial flower (“Leave that wild rose alone, ma’am), libraries, white-coated people who spring into action when you contract flesh-eating disease, building codes, schools, dangerous-toy advisories, keeping cable companies in line, clean air, truck inspections for airborne wheels, loan forgiveness, autopsies, massage therapy, campgrounds, divorce, licence plates so you can track the guy on the cell phone in his Humvee who hit you, fluoridation, teacher training, privacy, universities, fair elections, fire trucks, child guardianship, hazardous waste control, name changes, hostels, museums, protocol (see golfing shorts), trees, zoning, high-tech passports, standards in general, notary publics, noise control, organ donation, human rights, disability, drainage, bingo permits, boating safety, French language services, neighbour encroachment, aboriginal business aid, art galleries, adoption, jury duty, cemeteries, soil quality, spills response, tattoo parlour inspection, bank deposit insurance, street lighting, commercial ship registry, victim assistance (“there, there”), SIN numbers, joint rescue (water and air, nothing to do with knees), aerial mapping, pesticide disapproval, and savings bonds.

Without taxes, you’d have to do all of the above yourself. Sure, you can contract it to the private sector, but if you’ve ever watched the Sopranos, the Mob isn’t actually any good at garbage collection. Landfill is just a means of corpse disposal.

Fine, cut my taxes and I’ll pick a task. I’ll take “spills response” and use recycled paper towels. Oh, you say the spill covers 2,000 hectares and it’s sticky, oily and toxic? I thought you meant coffee. Somebody call the feds. I’m a taxpayer!

Here in Canada, we believe in the public good, as in “good for all the public.” (I’m quietly humming “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” as you read this.) We don’t believe in private affluence and public squalor. We like to balance those two things.

Whenever you get upset by taxation, think of an ill-considered purchase. Then figure out what that cash could have contributed to, had it been in government hands. A gleaming new hip for my mother? Excellent CBC television? An ice rink for kids on the reserve?

Paying taxes is a means to a good end. Can we do it with a lighter heart, please?