Politicians don’t often let facts get in the way of an effective partisan argument — but the Harper Conservatives are more brazen than most in distorting basic truths to make their case.

Take the Harperite analysis of what went wrong in Greece. Reacting to the plunging prospects for the Canadian economy, the Prime Minister’s Office has tried to shift the blame to the NDP and the Liberals by saying it’s a bad time for Canadians to take “unnecessary risks” on irresponsible types like NDP Leader Tom Mulcair.

“Thomas Mulcair is offering the same high-tax, high-debt policies that created the type of chaos we see in Greece today,” the PMO said in a recent statement.

Huh? Did I hear that right? Anybody who has read anything longer than a CNN headline on the Greek crisis knows that Greece’s problem has been that taxes have been too low, not too high.

Tax evasion in Greece has been endemic for years, with billions of euros in tax arrears, much of it uncollectible. Greece’s problem has not been high taxes but the fact that avoiding and evading taxes has become a national sport. In the latest bailout agreement with its creditors designed to keep Greece in the eurozone, one of the key elements was the imposition of higher taxes, including an increase in the value-added tax on most goods and services to 23 per cent from 13 per cent.

But the PMO doesn’t really care about the truth, so it simply makes up this nonsense about Greece’s problems being somehow linked to what Conservatives regard as source of all economic evil: taxes.

The Harper government has worked to reshape Canada and its values in two broad fields: in Canadians’ attitudes towards the very idea of taxation and in efforts to tilt the criminal justice system away from rehabilitation and towards revenge. And like so much of the Harper world view, it all amounts to a slavish copy of U.S. right-wing Republicanism.

Focusing on low taxes is great politics. It’s also a really dumb way to run the economy of an advanced industrialized country. Focusing on low taxes is great politics. It’s also a really dumb way to run the economy of an advanced industrialized country.

The Conservatives have made tax reductions a keystone of political success: cutting the GST by two points; throwing around boutique tax credits for ballet lessons, karate classes and volunteer firefighters; and, most recently, allowing income-splitting for higher income couples.

Their economic brand, the Economic Action Plan, has long been subtitled ‘A Low-Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth’. Everything is seen through the prism of taxation. Canadians are no longer citizens or voters — just taxpayers. The idea of helping Canadians prepare better for retirement through an expansion of the Canada Pension Plans ends up getting tarred by the Harper machine as a “payroll tax”. Efforts to deal with the impact of climate change through a carbon tax get the same treatment.

Pierre Poilievre, the Tories’ chief propaganda minister and Summer Santa Claus, welcomes visitors to his website with the following invitation: “Click here if you think taxpayers should keep the money they earn.” The implication is that we really shouldn’t be paying any taxes at all.

Focusing on low taxes is great politics. It’s also a really dumb way to run the economy of an advanced industrialized country. Getting taxes right is a complex balance. Raise them too high — particularly taxes on income — and you risk creating disincentives for productive work, which can make your economy uncompetitive. Set them too low and you threaten the social programs and public goods that are fundamental to our values as a society — things like universal Medicare, safe highways and a sound education system.

In the U.S., where the low-tax gospel has become ingrained in the political system, the damage is there for all to see. The inability to raise the federal gasoline tax — it’s been stuck at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993 — has exaggerated the country’s infrastructure deficit by impoverishing the road system and mass transit services while discouraging energy conservation. At the same time, budget shortfalls at the state level have resulted in large tuition increases at state universities, leading to high student debt and contributing to America’s sorry record on social mobility.

So far, the Harper Conservatives seem to be delivering low taxes while still providing most of the government services and entitlements that we all value. But that’s largely because the federal government doesn’t deliver the really expensive programs — like health care — and has washed its hands of a long-term role in designing their future by unilaterally setting a funding formula that will keep its transfers under strict control, no matter how much it actually costs the provinces to deliver the services.

The upshot is that Ottawa is in fine fiscal fettle going forward, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office, which last week reported that Ottawa’s outlook is so rosy that it can afford to increase spending or cut taxes significantly over the coming decades. The provinces and municipalities, on the other hand, won’t have enough money because of the impact of an aging population on health-care costs. A solution would be to increase federal transfers for health or shift tax room to the provinces, says the PBO. But such is the allergy to taxes (look what happened to Vancouver’s proposed regional transit tax) that politicians everywhere are reluctant to move in that direction.

As for federal opposition leaders, they too have been spooked by the low-tax mantra coming out of the PMO. Tom Mulcair vows he won’t raise personal income taxes or even reinstate the GST at the old 7 per cent level if the NDP is elected. He only talks about bumping up the corporate tax rate. Justin Trudeau has jumped on the low-tax bandwagon by vowing middle-class tax cuts — to be financed by higher taxes, but only for the wealthiest one per cent of Canadians.

No matter what happens on October 19, a thoughtful debate on taxation and the optimal way of balancing taxation and spending in the future is not likely to happen. Pity.

Alan Freeman is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He came to the U of O from the Department of Finance, where he served as assistant deputy minister of consultations and communications. Alan joined the public service in 2008 after a distinguished career in journalism as a parliamentary reporter and business journalist for The Canadian Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. At the Globe, he spent more than 10 years as a foreign correspondent based in Berlin, London and Washington.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.