Those numbers are national averages, and are skewed by high-tax provinces like Quebec. They’re also skewed in the U.S., but I don’t think the difference between regions is quite as severe - maybe Texas vs California or New York, but I’m not sure.
The numbers cited by the OECD are very close for the average worker (29.7% in the U.S. vs 30.3% in Canada), but the numbers are also out of date. Since then, taxes in Canada have come down, and in the U.S. they’ve gone up.
These numbers don’t include the size of the deficit, which has to be included as an implicit tax. Canada’s deficit in 2010 was 5.5% of GDP, while the U.S.'s was 10.6%. If you add the respective deficits to tax revenue, then in 2009 Canada had a total of 35.6% of GDP, while the U.S. was 35.3%. However, since 2009 Canada has been trending towards a balanced budgets, while the U.S. is not on track to balance the budget for decades, if ever.
It gets worse, because Canada’s future liabilities are much smaller than the U.S.'s. Our social security system is fully funded. The U.S.'s is not. Our health care system is facing cost challenges but nowhere near those of the U.S. social security system.
In summary, Canada’s fiscal picture is relatively stable, and we are trending towards lower or stable taxes. Our tax system is more stable, as it relies more on broad based sales and excise taxes and less on extracting a lot of money from a small percentage of the population. The U.S., in the other hand, is increasingly reliant on deficit financing, a large percentage of the population pays no federal income tax at all, and its entitlement promises are on track to cause either bankruptcy or significantly increased tax rates.
If you don’t like those cites, Wikipedia has a list of four different freedom indices and how the various countries rated on them.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland where the only countries to score ‘free’ on all indices. The U.S. scored behind Canada in economic freedom and the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.
How does any Canadian depend on Canada’s defense forces? There is only one country on Earth that poses any credible potential threat to Canada, and we ain’t interested in being one. Canadians do not depend on America’s defense forces, either. The only thing from which America defends Canada is Mexican immigrants, and we do that just by being in the way.
A major source of unfreedom in both Canada and the US: government price controls, subsidies and marketing monopolies. These receive very little press attention (how many folks even know how milk marketing works in Canada? Or for that matter the Patented Medicine Price Review Board?) but has at least a thousand times greater impact that hate speech laws on most people’s actual lives.
The importance of what Sam is saying here simply cannot be overstated. Comparing tax loads without considering debt is like calculating your budget without considering any bills you’re going to owe next week.
The U.S. public debt is all deferred taxation. Okay, it could be deferred spending cuts, too, but the long term implications are effectively identical; it is simply money that has to be taxed later to pay for things being purchased today. There’s no avoiding it. An assessment that Canadians pay higher taxes that ignores debt/deficit is precisely as insane as saying that I made myself richer by getting a payday loan to afford my cable bill.
But getting off the slight sidetrack ,of course both countries are free countries. “Freedom” is relative and some ranking system that puts both in the top ten or twenty or whatever of the world’s 200 countries is simply acknowledging that both are free countries. Neither is perfect; abortion rights are occasionally curtailed in the USA, and every five or six years some lunatic steps over the hate speech line in Canada. Yeah, yeah, they’re free countries all the same.
“Canadian content” regulations are requirements placed on broadcasters using public airwaves to insert a certain amount of Canadian-originated content. For instance, a licensed FM station used to have to air a certain percentage of songs by Canadian artists. Maybe they still do, I’m not sure.
This was an irritation to people when CanCon rules were introduced in the 1970s because Canadian stuff really sucked. On the music side, Canadian artists were mostly ignored by the media until they had a hit in the USA; on the TV side, Canadian shows were almost uniformly cheap and horrible. Nowadays, though, it’s not the issue it used to be. The growth of Toronto as a media and cultural center has allowed Canada to produce more high-quality TV shows, and CanCon seems to have actually had the desired effect in music; Canadian music artists are all over hell’s half-acre and can get huge here first. It’s inconceivable that you could have had a success story like The Tragically Hip in the early 1970s; nobody would have played their music if they weren’t first a huge deal south of the border. But they came out long after CanCon and have sold about ten higajillion albums/song downloads and play to sold out stadiums, despite being really popular only in Canada.
Anyway, this isn’t a restriction on freedom any more than the FCC’s rule that you can’t show tits on network TV or say “fuck.”
Absolutely. These are the kinds of regulations that have a major impact. But I think the U.S. is worse now. Crony capitalism seems far more entrenched in the U.S. these days. Laws are passed regularly that have the specific intent of punishing some people in the market and rewarding others. In addition, the U.S. regulatory environment seems to be increasingly politicized - companies who support various state and federal governments seem to be treated differently in some cases than those who are more associated with the other side.
An example would be the extreme prejudice with which the Obama administration has gone after Gibson guitars, or the NLRB’s refusal to allow Boeing to build a factory in a right-to-work state.
The other thing that would really worry me as an American is the general breakdown of rule of law. You have a Congress that is required by law to pass a budget every year - but which hasn’t done so since Obama was first elected. Obama just got slapped down by a circuit court for improperly making recess appointments to the NLRB, but the administration has said it will ignore the ruling.
Liberals here used to worry about the ‘imperial presidency’ when Bush was President, but Obama has taken it to a whole new level. Transparency is down, and Obama seems to be trying to increasingly bypass congress by using bureaucratic rule-making and executive orders to do what he wants. That should be very troubling for liberals and conservatives, because he’s setting precedents that the next President will no doubt continue - even if he’s in the other party.
When you have a regulatory system that is so complex that it’s almost impossible to avoid breaking the law, and you then give bureaucrats and prosecutors wide discretion on where and when those laws will be enforced, you start to look more like a banana republic than a great democracy. The U.S. isn’t there yet, but it’s showing increasing signs of heading in that direction.
Many liberals including myself gave that same exact warning when W was in office; the RW never wanted to hear it. “They would not listen, they did not know how – perhaps they’ll listen now.” – Don McLean
Yes, CanCon regulations are still in place. It’s been a while since I’ve read them, so I’m unsure of TV percentages, and the percentages for French-language TV and radio; but I do know that it’s 35% for radio.
I would like to see to what extent can-con laws have kept Canadians behind the times in the digital age. I can’t help but think that Netflix Canada and Amazon’s Canadian Kindle store were delayed in part because they had to jigger their content to meet Canadian content rules.
Likewise, our Canadian versions of cable networks like Discovery lack some of the programming that the American versions have, and some shows like Mythbusters seem to be delayed for long periods of time before airing here. I find that stuff extremely annoying. Of course, there are also issues of licensing and copyright and such that get in the way, but Can-Con laws have to be part of it.
The same is probably true of some products that are available in the U.S. before they come to Canada because of our requirements to have all materials in French as well as English. That was probably a bigger deal a few decades ago. Today it’s a global economy and most products are designed for localization of language right from the start. Packaging costs may cause the price to rise a bit, but that’s probably about it.
Sam, you’ve been reading too much Ezra again. ;). Pretty much none of that is accurate.
First off, there is a clear difference between a human rights commission and the human rights tribunals. The commissions are the investigative bodies, the tribunals are the adjudicative bodies. A commission does not have the power to adjudicate complaints. Their function is to investigate complaints to see if they have merit. The only final ruling that they can make is to dismiss a complaint as unwarranted.
If they think a complaint has merit, they can try to get the parties to settle it voluntarily, through discussions and mediations, but if that doesn’t work, the commission can’t rule on the complaint. All it can do then is refer it to the Tribunal, which is a separate, independent body, for a full hearing on the complaint. The Commission presents the complaint and argues the case for the complainant, while the other party argues its defence. It is the Tribunal which decides if the complaint is proven or not.
As well, there is an extremely well-established body of law in Canada called administrative law, which applies to all administrative agencies, including human rights commissions and tribunals. If an admin agency fails to follow the principles of fair administrative law, they are subject to judicial review by the courts. That applies to human rights commissions and tribunals.
In addition to complying with the principles of admin law, human right commissions and tribunals are required to comply with the human rights codes. They have to follow the procedures set out in the code by the legislatures and they have to apply the substantive law set out in those codes with respect to discrimination. They are also only allowed to give remedies which are set out in the code.
Once the tribunal rules on a complaint, the unsuccessful party has a right to appeal to the courts, including all the way to the Supreme Court. That Court has held that a tribunal decision is not entitled to any deference from the courts. The courts are the final decision-makers on the interpretation of human rights laws, and once the courts rule on the meaning of a particular provision in the codes, human rights commissions and tribunals are required to follow those rulings.
With respect to the staff of a commission, since their function is to investigate complaints, not to rule on them, they do not have to be lawyers. However commissions normally have lawyers to give advice to the staff and to the commission itself on the proper interpretation of the code. Sometimes the lawyer is a permanent staff lawyer employed by the commission, sometimes the lawyer is in private practice but on retainer to the commission. The commission itself normally has a lawyer on it.
Tribunals, as the adjudicative body, are normally composed of lawyers.
Finally, with respect to the meaning of hate publications, the leading case on that issue was a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the early 90s. The Court gave a very strict interpretation to the meaning of hate publications. All human rights commissions, tribunals and lower courts are bound by that decision. If they don’t follow it, they are subject to being overturned on appeal.
If you need to find a reason for Netflix’s poor showing in Canada, the more likely cause, or at least the place Netflix is trying to place the blame, is high broadband costs and data limits. The head of content of Netflix said that Canadians had “third world access” to the internet, and called the price of data plans in Canada “a human rights violation”
