On March 30, 2006, CBC'sThe Current with Anna Maria Tremonti aired a program that resonated deeply with some of the ideas put forward by Hawken / Lovins in Natural Capitalism, particularly the material in their chapter "Capital Gains." On p.164, they write:

Taxes and subsidies are, in essence, a form of information. At the most basic level, they cause change. Everybody in the world, whether rich or poor, acts on price information every day. Taxes make something more expensive to buy, subsidies artificially lower prices. Thus, when something is taxed, you tend to buy less of it, and when you subsidize, you reduce prices and stimulate consumption. A practical step in moving toward radical resource productivity would be to shift taxes away from labor and income, and toward pollution, waste, carbon fuels, and resource exploitation, all of which are presently subsidized. For every dollar of taxation that is added to the cost of resources or waste, one dollar is removed from taxes on labor and capital formation.

At the time (late March/ early April), well-off university students in Paris mounted the barricades in opposition to new labour legislation that would have made it easier for employers to hire (and fire) employees. What's the connection to taxes, you ask? Well, taxation is typically onerous for employers when they go about the business of hiring more people. It's usually easier to automate something or other, since the "something or other" (machine) can be written off as a capital loss. Plus, you don't get taxed as much on resource consumption (eg. use of electricity or fossil fuel to run said machine), whereas you do have a greater tax burden when you hire people. The French legislation was a clunky first-go at trying to make it easier (less punitive) for employers to hire people, in particular the disadvantaged youth of the Parisian banlieue. The advantaged students of the Paris downtown, however, didn't see it that way.

We don't have that problem here, in BC, where we currently live under the most retrograde labour laws in the civilised world -- child labour, for example, is legal from age 12 and up, and first-timers in the job market have to accrue a whole bunch of hours before they even qualify for what is, in our current economy, a measly minimum wage.

But I digress...

The point I found interesting in the above quote is the statement: "Taxes and subsidies are, in essence, a form of information." And that's where it connects back to the CBC's "The Current" show. Scroll down on this page to parts 2 and 3 to listen to the March 30 show. As the introduction explains, the show is about cities:

For the past three days on The Current, Anna Maria Tremonti has been anchoring a global take on what makes cities work and what makes them wilt---from the mega-metropolis of Buenos Aires, Argentina. And from there we heard stories about innovative ways of dealing with garbage in Singapore, the clash of rich and poor in Mumbai, and about bicycle woes in Shanghai----among many other tales of the cities.

Well, it's our job today to bring these stories home. And to apply some of the lessons learned from abroad, to cities here in Canada. Because despite this country's expanse...more than 77% of Canadians live in cities. And the first item on our urban agenda is housing, arguably one of the most contentious issues facing city-dwellers from St. John's to Victoria.

Our guests were Glen Murray, the former mayor of Winnipeg, who's now a Toronto Star columnist, and partner at Navigator Consulting. He's also a visiting fellow at University of Toronto.

Brigitte Shim is an award-winning architect who taught at Yale, Harvard and Lausanne, Switzerland, and she's currently a professor of architecture at the University of Toronto.

And John Lorinc is an urban affairs journalist and author of The New City: How the Crisis in Canada's Cities is Reshaping the Nation.

All three were in our Toronto studio.

Some of the speakers talked about how our current tax structure is skewed against cities, which was the pointMike Harcourt also stressed in an April 8, 2006 newspaper article:

Harcourt advocates flipping the power pyramid and giving communities the ability (which means a greater share of taxes) to shape their futures. But how would that work in a place like the capital region, where we already have 13 communities charging off in 13 different directions? Metchosin and its West Shore neighbours have dramatically differing views on growth (leading to the classic headline "Many are Colwood, but few Metchosin.") As the current housing boom proves, cities can grow in only three ways -- up, out, or not at all, and the last option pushes prices higher than they already are. How will sustainability principles stand up against that kind of reality, all around the world?

In Canada, consumers pay a provincial sales tax (PST) as well as a goods and services tax (GST). In BC, they add up to 14% together. But when I hire a carpenter to fix my doors (and pay a GST for his services) or when I buy a pair of shoes (and pay PST and GST), none of those tax revenues flow directly to the community I paid the taxes in. It doesn't matter if I shop in Victoria (or buy services where I live, in Victoria), or if I spend my money elsewhere. My consumption doesn't figure into the locale, from a consumer tax p.o.v. The cities don't get to collect any of the consumption taxes (PST or GST) -- they go to the province or to the feds, but not to the cities, which are expected to pay for infrastructure, etc., through property taxes, and to beg, hat in hand at the various provincial or federal ministries' doors, for funds.

Obviously, a city can't keep paying for everything by taxing property and business owners to the hilt. We could use some new information via tax reform.