The premiers' conference last week added its voice to the growing chorus clamouring for tax cuts. But these tax cuts will benefit only the rich and the corporations, and will mean cuts in services for workers and the poor.
"We are poised to follow the Americans," said David Perry of the Canadian Tax Foundation. "We've been talking about tax cuts. It's basically a matter of money and the size of the tax cut that's in question."
But look at the American example. The lower taxes there are the flip side of massive inequalities in health care and an almost non-existent welfare state.
Health care in the United States is dominated by the private sector. As a result, some 44 million Americans have no medical insurance, and that figure is growing by one million a year.
The pressure to privatize health care in Canada is already increasing every year. From 1992 to 1998, the amount of health care paid for out of individuals' pocket increased from 26 per cent to 31 per cent.
If the tax cut bandwagon gains speed, then so will the bandwagon to continue privatizing health care.
The toll of this shredding of health care grows every day.
The Canadian Medical Association Journal has published a study tracking the health records of 7,009 babies born in Toronto.
During the last 15 years, the length of hospital stay after childbirth has shrunk to two days or less, after an uncomplicated birth, from stays of four to six days. Hospitals are here, as everywhere, striving to cut costs.
But the study shows that babies discharged from hospital less than two days after birth are nearly twice as likely to be sick and readmitted.
"We're doing this without very good evidence that early discharge is really a benefit to the patients," said lead researcher Dr. Michael Lock.
Years of cuts are strangling health care. The call for massive tax cuts from business is just a smokescreen to continue savaging social services.
But premier after premier is nonetheless calling for more and more tax cuts.
Mike Harris of course led the charge.
But Lucien Bouchard, who last year was re-elected on a promise to protect Quebec from Mike Harris-style politics, stood at his side repeating the same mantra.
And the opposition from the NDP premiers was weak in the extreme. British Columbia's Glen Clark said there should be tax cuts, but not for the rich. But that dodges the issue of where the whole tax cut push is coming from.
It is corporate Canada that is leading the charge. The federal government has a surplus that may be as big as $15-billion. The corporations and their Tory friends are drooling at the prospect of using this surplus to slash their taxes. Just as the premiers' were meeting, the Royal Bank published a report documenting the size of the surplus, and demanding massive tax cuts.
And when you look abroad, you can see why they are so insistent on these cuts.
Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland and Turkey have all slashed the taxes the Royal Bank cares about the most -- corporate taxes -- to levels below corporate taxes in Canada. Canadian corporations want to feed at the same tax-cut trough as their competitors abroad.
The people who really need a tax cut are Canadian workers, whose incomes have stagnated or declined for most of this decade.
What about the Liberals' promise to kill the GST? We should kill inequitable taxes like the GST, and we should tax the corporations to fund the social services that are groaning under the strain of years of cutbacks.