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Maxime Bernier has raised eyebrows with his latest promotional gambit — an Instagram invitation to Canadians to call him Mad Max, with the Conservative leadership candidate’s head Photoshopped onto an image of the unhinged road warrior.

Among the things Bernier says make him crazy is a Liberal government that “shrinks our paycheques with high taxes.” Yet there is nothing deranged about the solution he proposed Thursday.

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Bernier’s plan suggests a root-and-branch overhaul of Canada’s income system, raising the personal exemption level from the current $11,474 to $15,000, thus relieving 1.5 million low income Canadians from paying federal income tax. Further, he would abolish the current tax brackets, replacing them with one 15-per-cent band for those earning between $15,001 and $100,000 (encompassing more than 80 per cent of taxpayers), and one 25-per-cent band for those earning six figures or more.

As a result, he said, every taxpayer in Canada would pay less.

The cost to the treasury is estimated at $30 to 35 billion, but that is before accounting for savings from eliminating some of the tax credits that riddle the system, or from any shifts in behaviour that may result.

“Several of these boutique tax credits are essentially politically motivated subsidies adopted to buy the support of some specific groups at the expense of the rest of the population,” said Bernier Thursday — and he should know, since he was a minister in the government responsible for creating the “absurdly complicated mess” (his words) that we enjoy today.

It is an intriguing prospect. But it is not as novel as it appears at first blush.

Paul Boothe, a fellow at the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity at the University of Toronto, recalls his time as deputy minister of finance in Roy Romanow’s NDP government in Saskatchewan.

The province was faced with a brain drain to Alberta, which had its own 10-per-cent flat tax. Romanow’s government overhauled its system by reducing the number of tax brackets and raising the personal exemption, just as Bernier is now suggesting.

One argument against Bernier’s proposal is that it makes the tax system less progressive — that is, rates don’t increase in lock-step with income.