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Originally Posted by Sr. Mints
Compulsory voting. All eligible citizens aged 18 and over are required to enroll and vote in federal, provincial, and local elections. Failure to vote would result in a fine. You file taxes? You vote.
I don't know why 20-30% voter turnouts chap my ass so much, but it does.
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Honestly speaking, I'd want to lower the age where you are allowed to vote (ie: 12 or 14). I'm OK with them being in a separate pool for tracking purposes, but if you don't get people involved younger, they are more likely to end up not caring as they grow older.
Let them vote when they learn about it in grade 6 or 8 or whenever. This might also help to attract better pools of talent into politics longer term.
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Originally Posted by Huntingwhale
This one is needed and it's embarrassing we are stuck following the German model of sending stuff by paper and other outdated 70s methods. To be fair, Netfile has been a godsend the past few years, but it's still not good enough. Filing taxes should not be the burden or ordeal that it is.
When I lived in Poland, filing taxes was a 2 mintue process once you figured out what to do. Your employer and banks/investment firms/other financial accounts submit everything on your behalf and upload everything to the tax portal. You log in, click a few buttons, fill in your bank info, confirm the docs, done. That's it. Got my refund a few weeks later.
To make it even better, when I went back to visit last year, I simply logged into my PL mobile banking app and it triggered the filing for the previous tax year automatically. Didn't even have to log into the tax portal. Logging into the bank app did it all for me. The refund was deposited a few days later. Literally all I did was log into the banking app to make sure it still worked and I ended up having a bunch of bonus money for my trip.
God forbid we make it easier for citizens to file something the government can already automate to be done automatically. But I guess way to much revenue to be made for people who file late.
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Agreed. I'm also OK with ensuring that if you don't review or respond, the auto filing comes with an admin fee of like $150-200 bucks or whatever. Therefore, there is an incentive for taxpayers to review/respond and submit credits to lower their taxes owing.
However, auto filing would also require a significant increase in withholdings on income to ensure a taxpayer always in a refund position to reduce certain administrative headaches for the CRA. Perhaps you could also have it that the withholdings are higher, but each month if you log into the portal, you can see the YTD info registered to you and request the withholdings reduced for the month after. This way, the taxpayer wanting more favorable tax treatment to their situation has to be more engaged, vs the lazy tax payer never dealing with their stuff basically has to pay a fee for someone else to manage their affairs.