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As for the tax ruckus, there are any number of valid conservative critiques that could be offered: the government’s proposals are too complex, too intrusive, too costly and so on.

If the party were feeling extra adventurous, it might even offer, you know, positive alternatives: perhaps reducing the incentive to incorporate, by closing the gap between the small business rate and the top personal rate, or a more broad-based reform of the tax system that would address a number of distortions and inequities at one go, rather than picking just one.

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But that is not what we have heard from the Conservatives on this. What we have heard instead is a full-throated roar of protest at the very idea of asking the owners of private corporations to pay the same tax as their unincorporated counterparts earning the same income, coupled with a transparent and sadly successful effort to persuade the entire small business sector, incorporated or no, that they are under “attack.” On this issue, as on the first two, the temptations of cheap demagoguery have apparently proved overwhelming.

I know, I know: it is the duty of the opposition to oppose. No one is suggesting they shouldn’t. Perhaps they are under no obligation even to propose their own solutions, as cynics insist, but discharge their duty merely by slamming the government’s. Fine — but if you do, you cannot also ask to be congratulated for your “positive message.”

Scheer’s pandering on these issues might be more easily dismissed if it was not of a piece with his other dalliances with expediency, whether his defence of supply management in Quebec — he may well have won the leadership on the votes of a few hundred dairy farmers who joined the party for the purpose — or his batty proposal to take the GST off home heating oil (it is not enough, apparently, to oppose taxing carbon: people should be given a tax incentive to burn it).