Costs and benefits

The Globe and Mail reports on an effort to wring some extra money out of Canadian citizens living abroad:

As Ottawa finally begins to review Canada's citizenship policy -- one of the most generous in the world -- critics are calling for a special tax for overseas Canadians...

This summer's $94-million evacuation of 15,000 Lebanese-Canadians from war-torn Lebanon finally prompted Ottawa to announce a review of Canada's citizenship policy. Immigration Minister Monte Solberg won't divulge details about the review, but he has said it is time to review the obligations of citizens who live abroad while drawing on Canada's social programs.
Mr. Kurland advocates the introduction of a special new tax for non-resident citizens. Canadians who have been living overseas for more than five years should pay $500 for a passport, he said.
This idea has also been endorsed by John Chant, a retired Simon Fraser University economist, in a study titled the Passport Package, released this month by the C.D. Howe Institute...

Such a tax would raise about $200-million a year, based on the estimate that 80 per cent of the 2.7 million overseas Canadians would choose to maintain their citizenship.
The policy would be less cumbersome and bureaucratic than requiring Canadians living abroad to pay income taxes.

It's obvious why the idea could be a winner among the Cons, combining a ready excuse to start cutting into the nature of Canadian citizenship with a flat-dollar tax system. But for those same reasons, the policy looks to have serious flaws from a less reactionary standpoint.

On the question of treating citizens equally, the plan would appear to set up highly differential treatment based on relatively trivial distinctions. There's no apparent reason why a four-year degree abroad should have no impact on one's citizenship while a further year of work would render a person un-Canadian (subject to payment of a special levy). Meanwhile, a person could easily be resident elsewhere while still making substantial contributions to Canada over the course of visits - a factor which would go completely unaccounted for in an analysis based solely on residency. And the problems with those distinctions are all the worse where (as appears to be the case in the proposal) the effect of non-residency and non-payment is the loss of citizenship outright.

Of course, there is another possibility: that the payment (or non-payment) would affect only the citizen's passport itself, rather than citizenship status. But in that case, the plan either provides an excuse for Canada's government to utterly neglect Canadian citizens abroad based on their lack of a single document, or serves as nothing but a cash cow if Canadians abroad will still receive proper support from Ottawa in the absence of a passport.

Meanwhile, even if it could be assumed that there's a sound basis to divide up citizens based on their recent residency, the flat tax structure can only be seen as yet another attack on progressive revenue collection. Under the usual guise of labelling any analysis of ability to pay as too "cumbersome and bureaucratic" to be worth bothering with, the scheme would present a virtually nonexistent cost of business for anybody using Canadian citizenship as a commercial jumping-off point, while imposing a potentially serious burden on dual citizens living in poorer countries and/or living abroad for reasons other than profit. Which can only help to tilt Canada's already money-heavy immigration policy toward further prioritizing wealth over all other factors.

Accordingly, it'll be for the best if the proposal isn't taken more seriously than it deserves to be. But it remains to be seen whether the Cons will want to take the opportunity to move toward a couple of their ideological goals - regardless of the obvious problems with doing so.