Canadians Can Be Unruly, See For Yourself

Shirley Tillotson, Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy (2017). Kim Brooks Some of my favourite tax scholarship steps outside technical detail and speaks to how tax systems promote or are informed by higher-order values. So, I welcome Shirley Tillotson’s magnificent and richly researched new book on the era between the enactment of Canada’s federal income tax law in 1917 and its heady 1960s reform period, which saw taxpayer-citizens actively debating the contours of democracy through the vehicle of tax reform. At its heart, the book is about what we can learn about democracy from our engagement with taxation and how our democracy can be enhanced when we find ourselves talking about taxes over coffee. A historian could learn a lot about tax history from reading iterative drafts of legislation, department of finance notes, house of commons debates, and parliamentary committee reports: indeed, some have. Tillotson…

Read more detail on Recent Administrative Law posts –

This entry was posted in Administrative law and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply