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Apparently I was wrong. Canada doesn’t need a simpler tax code, more government humility or more basic fairness. Quite the contrary. Experts say.

Specifically, the Post reports, deep thinkers are plying federal Liberals and the bureaucracy with advice about creating complex new mechanisms to encourage the private sector to get sucked into the morass of the welfare state. I believe they didn’t phrase it that way. Rather, the idea is to “unlock billions in private cash for a range of programs that could help the homeless get off the street or boost the incomes of Indigenous Peoples,” with the glorious added benefit that it “shifts the financial risk from taxpayers to investors in the delivery of social programs.”

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Which would appeal to investors because… wait for it… the new tax wrinkles would shift the cost right back to taxpayers. Abracadabra. Free money. Not.

The “most ambitious of five ideas” presented to Employment and Social Development Canada, a preposterous name for a state organ, was to let charities become involved in for-profit business to some extent. Which the feds have already been at in a small way since 2016, along with identifying some 69 firms as “social enterprises” because they have very noble purposes or practices, including “a 35-year-old Halifax bakery that employs marginalized people, and an online sock store that donates a pair for each one ordered.”