At the start of tax season, Québec solidaire Sunday reiterated its call for the Legault government to introduce a single tax return to reduce the “bureaucratic duplication between Revenu Québec and Canada’s tax authorities” that is costly each year.
Posted at 1:26pm Updated at 2:26pm
“Each year, when tax season arrives, citizens and businesses waste time and money filling out two returns when absolutely not necessary. […] Maintaining the system is like throwing our public funds out the window,” insisted MP Sol Zanetti, the party’s sovereignty official.
Québec Solidaire claims, based on calculations by the Institute for Research on People’s Self-Determination and National Independence (IRAI), that the cost of “administrative duplication between Revenu Québec and the Canada Revenue Agency is costing us nearly $425 million a year.”
MP Zanetti says that a uniform tax return would ultimately also and above all mean “less paperwork, less spending and more simplicity for everyone”. More broadly, his party also believes the measure would allow “protecting the integrity of the process of automatically collecting support payments.”
PHOTO EDOUARD PLANTE-FRÉCHETTE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVE
Quebec Solidarity MNA Sol Zanetti
Lack of will?
Mr Zanetti denounces the Legault government’s lack of will on this file. “François Legault’s failure on the health record is further evidence that we must maintain a balance of power with Ottawa,” he says, arguing that “the best way to maintain that balance of power is autonomy to fight tax evasion,” which Ottawa gave up by signing treaties with tax havens”.
In 2015, François Legault’s CAQ, then still in opposition, advocated the establishment of a uniform tax return. “This idea consists of reaffirming Quebec’s autonomy in this tax sovereignty, had supported the Speaker of Parliament François Bonnardel, now Minister of Public Security. Today, with computerized administration, having a single tax report would become even easier. »
The Liberal Prime Minister Philippe Couillard examined the possibility of advancing to the end of his term, but nothing came to a head. The Parti Québécois also support the implementation of the measure in the rest of the provincial scene, as does the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa.
Quebec is the only Canadian province to have filed two tax returns since Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis introduced the provincial income tax nearly 70 years ago, in February 1954.
With the Canadian Press