This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Philip Cross, March 15, 2024
The Ontario Court of Appeal last month ruled unconstitutional the Ford government’s 2019 legislation limiting public-sector pay increases to one per cent a year for three years. The government was trying to control a budget deficit of $8.7 billion at a time when the average negotiated increase in the public sector was 1.6 per cent. The court ruling substitutes judges’ views for those of elected officials.
The proliferation of such rulings is leading more and more Canadians to conclude the judicial system is violating the fundamental principle of “no taxation without representation.” This happens whenever an unelected judge dictates to governments how they must manage public money, which is the rightful, and should be the exclusive, purview of elected officials, who, unlike judges, must explain to the electorate how they have balanced competing demands on public funds.
Elected representatives’ control of spending and taxes is a bedrock of democracy dating back to Magna Carta in 1215. As Financial Times economics correspondent Martin Wolf observed in his 2023 book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, “The ability of an elected legislature to determine what, how, and how much to tax is … the most fundamental feature of a democracy.”
Magna Carta’s limits on the power of the king became entrenched over time. In his chapter of The 1867 Project, the Post’s John Robson outlined how the idea of no taxation without representation was reinforced in 1407, when the “people’s representatives confronted the lords over a money bill, insisting the Commons had primacy” and the King and House of Lords ceded control of spending and tax bills. The principle’s roots grew deeper during the English Civil War when Charles I tried to impose “taxation without representation through dodges from forced loans to collecting ‘ship money’ even from inland towns,” according to Robson.
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