I'm Jim Hackler, from the social responsibility committee of the First Unitarian Church of Victoria. I had no idea that Mrs. MacDonald would be presenting today. This is strictly a coincidence.
We are concerned that politicians tend to be very apologetic about taxes, as if they are somehow things we should not be using and that it's much better to give income back to people so they can buy stuff. In western civilization in recent years we've seen that things that really matter to quality of life have largely come from the use of tax moneys to do something for the community--public libraries being an excellent illustration.
We don't find that private enterprise necessarily deals with some of these issues. We rather regret this tendency to seduce voters by giving money back to them instead of using it in a constructive manner.
Let me try to deal with the issue. We talk about how we collect taxes. We don't collect taxes haphazardly; we have a reason for it. We tie those taxes to the goal we're trying to achieve. You develop pension plans on the basis that people who are working can prepare for their pensions. You don't go out and decide on these taxes independently.
With respect to the public transportation issue, we have the dilemma that most people drive cars. They want to pay very few taxes. They want to have cheap gas and big highways with nobody on them. Everybody else can ride bicycles and use public transportation. That's unsustainable, of course
Hopefully, intelligent political leaders will try to convince the majority of these people who drive cars that they can't continue to be subsidized as they are now. They have to help in subsidizing cost-efficient things like rail traffic, which we know is much more efficient than other forms of transportation. Somehow you have to divert funds from those people who want to drive their cars to a public transportation system that is efficient. How that is done requires leadership rather than followership.
Let me go to one other specific illustration on how one might change things at the corporate level. Obviously corporate lobbies will play an important role in government. How do you resist that? We saw an illustration from the Toronto Stock Exchange a number of years ago where they resisted providing information to shareholders. Finally they gave in and the corporate salaries were revealed, as the New York Stock Exchange had done.
There are other steps. For example, we have an unlimited amount of salary dollars for CEOs that can be written off as expenses. A rational policy might limit corporation expenses to a salary for a CEO that is, say, 20 times the median salary paid to the rest of the people in the corporation. About $1 million or so should keep the wolf from the door for some of these people. Beyond that it should be money taken directly from shareholders. Then shareholders might say, do I really want this to continue?
In other words, a modest change in the way we tax corporations might bring about some long-range gains. What I'm basically saying is similar to what my colleagues have said. The social good should be weighed.
Applying taxes to the public is not going to be a straightforward process; it's going to be manipulative, opportunistic, what have you. There will be double taxation. When corporations complain about it, they're just joining the crowd. Double taxation is going to be part of the game. We're going to have opportunistic taxation. We can live with that, but how do you do that in such a way that you get a decent social payoff?
At the present time, we are giving in to a variety of pressures, rather than having social good being the highest goal.