Hello friends!
I took a dive into my vault and pulled up one of my favourite columns from February 7, 2004. While I’m personally thrilled the writing holds up, I’m also a bit bummed the sentiment still holds true. Other than a few small tweaks to account for the passage of 7,088 days, including the removal of dated references, the column is as it appeared in the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it gets you thinking.
The photo, by my husband, photojournalist Michael Hawkins, is from Wicked Ideas’ inaugural event, in 2012, which I cheekily titled What’s the Future (WTF) Saint John? More on that in the next column. Cheers, and as always, thank you for reading – Lisa
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We have been taxpayers for too long; it is time for us to become citizens again.
Listen to the rhetoric of politicians, and you’ll soon hear a familiar refrain that echoes through all their speeches, regardless of political party.
To them, voters are taxpayers. It is a word with great significance because it is a word that has changed the way we look at government and the way government looks at us. Being a taxpayer means worrying about money – your money – and how it’s being spent.
Call a voter a taxpayer, and you give them ownership of the public treasury and invite them to question if they are getting their money’s worth from their government.
And therein lies the challenge governments now face. We have become a community of individuals – individual taxpayers – and each of us has a shopping list of how we think government should be spending our money. But that’s not supposed to be the sole point of government. It isn’t there to serve our individual needs; it is there to reflect our collective beliefs and priorities.
Three decades ago, when the federal government and the provinces were battling huge deficits, it was important to give Canadians ownership of that overburdened public purse. If citizens thought of themselves as taxpayers, they might understand the challenges of balancing a budget and might be more sympathetic to politicians forced to make deep cuts to government programs. Politicians desperate to control spending needed citizens to add deficit-fighting and debt reduction to their list of collective priorities.
For the most part, it worked.
When then-federal Finance Minister Paul Martin released his February 1995 budget, his message was stark: Canada had a $42-billion deficit, and the country needed to get its deficit under control if it hoped to continue to support the social programs Canadians valued. So Mr. Martin cut, and cut deeply, eliminating $6.2 billion from the federal transfers to the provinces that paid for health, education and social programs. He reigned in spending, and he preached fiscal prudence. Canadians, for the most part, accepted his premise.
Yes, they said, governments should learn to govern within their means.
Here in New Brunswick, then-premier Frank McKenna grabbed hold of that message too, and he cut spending, reduced the province’s deficit and told New Brunswickers government could only do so much.
He was followed by Premier Bernard Lord, who talked about managing smarter and most people, regardless of their political pedigree, nodded and agreed he couldn’t let spending get out of control. Today we hear similar rhetoric from premiers across Canada.
We are taxpayers, after all, and we like to hear our politicians acknowledge that they are spending our money, not the government’s money.
But now, 30 years after Canadians were asked to think of themselves as taxpayers, our political leaders are experiencing the unexpected consequences of this change in attitude.
There isn’t enough money, particularly at the provincial and municipal levels, to pay for all the government’s services and programs. Governments are telling us they need to make some tough choices.
However, in a country with provinces and communities of individual taxpayers where each of us watches to see if we are getting our money’s worth out of government, how do politicians sell people on a broader vision? By talking to citizens. But first, we must reclaim that title and the responsibilities that go with it.
A citizen is a part of their community, they are involved in shaping its development, and they are impassioned about its future. We are all citizens of somewhere, and we all have a responsibility to ask ourselves what kind of somewhere we want.
We’re accustomed to hearing political leaders and billionaires of a certain age talk about leaving a legacy. Pfft. I’m far more interested in knowing what legacy each of you wants to leave to your special somewhere.
The very act of asking yourself that question and then deciding to act upon it is an act of leadership.
It is time for us to consider our shared legacy to the generations that follow us.
It is time to be citizens again.
