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In 1960, I filed my first income tax return – a simple-six page document. After calculating federal tax, I added 49 per cent of that for the province. It took less than 15 minutes.

But year after year, government after government, things have changed. The current tax package has 170 pages, much of it incomprehensible to the ordinary citizen.

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Only 75 pages are sequentially numbered. Federal and provincial pages are muddled up together. Where there is an entry be made, the taxpayer may be referred to another (un-numbered) page, sometimes to a third one. Line 317 is followed by lines 362, 395, 363, 398, 369 and 313 in that order.

You think MPs do their own tax returns? I remember in the 1970s, the then-minister of national revenue told a news conference she didn’t do hers. I doubt other MPs are different. Do they even understand the finance legislation they pass yearly?

You think MPs do their own tax returns? Do they even understand the finance legislation they pass yearly?

It used to be that the tax return showed no tax payable on the first level of income, a higher rate on the next level and so on. This was easy to understand. Then the government of the day replaced it by an obscure system of “non-refundable tax credits.” The finance minister said this made the system “more progressive.” Actually, it merely added one more complication to the tax return. Yet, all the minister had to do for progressiveness was change the income bands for the various levels of tax