Law Commons^™

The Changing Structure Of The Canadian Tax System: Accommodating The Rich, Neil Brooks

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The Canadian tax system underwent fundamental reform in the late 1980s. The principal effect of this reform has been to disable the tax system as an effective policy instrument for the redistribution of income. The fact that these reforms were an integral part of the larger neoconservative agenda to roll back the economic borders of the state and shift more power from the public to the private sector, is widely acknowledged. This paper simply illustrates how pervasively neoconservative ideology has influenced tax policy analysis. Every traditional objective of the tax system (to assist in reallocating resources, stabilizing the economy, and …