Which side are you on? Eby the election moment

Full props to David Eby. His modest proposal to make the highest-earning British Columbians pay a little more in taxes is good policy and offers a brave challenge to the right-wing anti-tax narrative.

The reaction was predictably hysterical. Interest groups like the Fraser Institute and the shadowy Canadian Taxpayers Federation have spent decades trying to convince the public that all taxes are bad and government is inherently wasteful and useless.

This makes a rational discussion about tax policy almost impossible. Most politicians – like Conservative Lorne Doerkson, who has promised no new taxes – accept the framework.

Eby didn’t. The tax changes are modest and apply, the NDP says, to the four percent of British Columbians with the highest taxable incomes.

If you make less than $190,500, like most of us, there is no change.

If you have $250,000 in taxable income, you will pay an extra $1,190 in tax. Less than $25 per week.

No one likes to pay for anything anymore. But for an individual earning more than five times the median income in BC, the tax increase doesn’t seem harsh or oppressive.

Nor is a new bracket for people with more than $1 million a year in taxable income.

Critics will point to waste and inefficiency in government. But based on my experience, this is also true in the private sector.

Taxes are the price we all pay for services such as health care, schools, support for seniors and police.

The groups pushing the anti-tax, anti-government narrative ignore this reality—perhaps because the people they fund can afford private health care, private schools, and their own security.

BC is now a low tax jurisdiction. For a two-income family of four with $150,000 in household income, the total provincial taxes are the second lowest in the country, higher than only resource-rich Alberta. It’s the same for a single person with $100,000 in income, who pays about $2,000 less in taxes than they would in Ontario.

The Conservative Party of BC predictably denounced the tax increase. “At a time when British Columbians desperately need more doctors, David Eby has revealed his plan to drive doctors out of our province,” the party said.

Which is just stupid. The notion that a doctor would accept a small tax increase and move to another province or country makes no sense. Especially if the revenue, as promised, goes to the health system and allows the doctors to work more effectively.

On Tuesday, Doerkson also presented the Conservative Law and Order Platform. It called for hiring 1,000 more police officers, prosecutors and judges.

That would cost somewhere between $150 million and $200 million a year. Without new taxes, where would that money come from?

Eby and the NDP could have been bolder.

Emily Lowan and the Greens have proposed a wealth tax to ensure that people who have accumulated substantial wealth pay more. If you have $50 million in assets, for example, the green plan will require tax payments of about $1 million per year.

It is not radical. Californians will vote this fall on a measure vehemently opposed by the Uber empire, for the sake of the tax empire.

Eby’s proposal, much more modest, asks an important question: Which side are you on?

Doerkson and the conservatives chose to sideline people with incomes of more than $1 million a year, claiming that asking them to pay more taxes is wrong.

Eby and the NDP challenged the notion that all taxes are bad and raised the idea that we all have a responsibility as a society to pay what we can for the valuable government services we receive.

Which may be a key moment in this election.