Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 by E.A. Heaman (review)

Those of us who keenly feel our inadequacies as economic historians are reassured by Elsbeth Heaman's claim that her latest book is a cultural history of taxation. In this way, those of us grown used to the idea that the history of Canada can be written without dealing with the history of taxation at all are brought face to face with the race, class, and gender dimensions of a question we have been quite happy to leave to our colleagues in the economics department. The publication of Tax, Order, and Good Government marks a turning point in our understanding of the first half-century of the country because Elsbeth Heaman has created a coat of many social, cultural, and economic colours stitched together by the history of taxation.

The book is characterized by the complexity of its simplicity. The author begins with a deceptively simple point that is on the money: John A. Macdonald's National Policy – that is, the tariff – was a tax. She then complicates the simplicity by pointing out that the National Policy was not just about revenue; it was politically intended to provide enough revenue for the federal government to stay clear of taxpayer anger and protest. The acquiring of that revenue was based on the tariff, a clientelist indirect tax that involved the blatant transfer of money from the poor to the rich. At the heart of book, therefore, is how and why of what Heaman calls Macdonald's quasi-imperialist project broke down in the first half century of Confederation.

In the decades following Confederation, Macdonald's government was able to hide behind the tariff by making fairness in taxation a local issue that focused on the inability or refusal of the poor to pay their taxes. In this way attention was diverted from the clientelism and corruption of the rich and redirected squarely on racialized minorities who were perceived as not paying their fair share. In her chapter on British Columbia, Heaman reveals that taxes were collected at gunpoint, the Chinese engaged in tax riots, and the attempt to collect poll taxes from Aborginal People living off reserve ultimately failed. Living up to her promise to deliver a cultural history of taxation, Heaman powerfully evokes the ways in which Chinese evasion of tax paying provided the pretext for racist whites in BC to deny the Chinese rights of citizenship.

The chapter on Montréal most powerfully evokes Heaman's claim that it is the "desperate pleas of the poor for relief" that give the book "its moral centre." (17) Heaman chronicles, in French and English, the anguish of desperate Montrealers unable to pay even a meager water tax. The figures are astonishing; in 1903 alone, 31,270 households were in arrears on their water taxes. (229) Warrants for seizure were issued in astonishing numbers, into the tens of thousands in some years. This was the municipal government, the level of government charged with keeping the poor from starving: a responsibility of which the federal government had washed its hands. The genius of Heaman's analysis is that it takes an issue, taxation, that many of us had dismissed as a bourgeois concern, and uses it as a vehicle to bring us face to face with brutal poverty and dispossession.

But the story does not end there. In taxing directly everything from dogs to water, municipal authorities had to engage taxpayer anger and, in the process, demonstrate fairness. In Montréal, the works of progressive businessman H.B. Ames (author of The City Below the Hill) and journalist Jules Helbronner made major contributions to a fiscal reform movement that led to the creation of "a widespread popular movement for social and economic reform." (330) Fiscal reformers insisted that a tax system must be based on moral and social considerations, and these considerations increasingly worked their way upwards into the federal realm.

The...