{"id":393383,"date":"2022-01-12T22:40:30","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T19:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/i-have-questions-about-le-unvax-tax\/"},"modified":"2022-01-12T22:40:30","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T19:40:30","slug":"i-have-questions-about-le-unvax-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/i-have-questions-about-le-unvax-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"#I have questions about le unvax tax"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#I have questions about le unvax tax<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Paul Wells: There’s at least a decent case to be made for Fran\u00e7ois Legault’s plan to tax unvaccinated Quebecers. But don’t be surprised if he drops the idea.\n <\/div>\n
\n I admit I was kind of intrigued when Fran\u00e7ois Legault, the Quebec premier who\u2019s never short of new ideas, announced he\u2019s thinking about levying a \u201chealth contribution\u201d\u2014essentially, a hefty tax\u2014against Quebecers who aren\u2019t vaccinated. As you\u2019ll have heard, thinking<\/em> about it is so far all Legault is doing. At the Tuesday news<\/a> conference where he announced it, the premier was unable to answer basic questions: how much do you have in mind? (More than $100, he said, but\u2026 that\u2019s all he said.) When does it start? How do you collect the levy? (Through the tax system, he said, which raises a lot of second-order questions.) Would people pay once, or for as long as they stay stubborn? And the big one: is this constitutional? \u201cWe\u2019re working on the legal part,\u201d Legault said cheerfully. Welcome to the new Quebec-made electric vehicle for everyone. We\u2019re working on the engine and the battery.<\/p>\n

But I felt like making at least a minimal case for Legault\u2019s unvax tax. Start here: it\u2019s a new idea. Federalism used to be a system for testing new ideas in multiple jurisdictions so the best ideas could be shared and the bad ones weeded out. And Legault\u2019s tax, or fee, or contribution, seeks to do, directly, what a lot of governments are doing with exquisite timidity: make it clear that there are social<\/a> and economic costs to this endless lockdown, and the people who are playing by the rules\u2014masked, vaxxed, boosted, isolated, bubbled\u2014are getting a bit tired of hearing the unvaxxed mask-around-my-chin set call themselves martyrs to freedom. Especially when the main justification for an umpteenth round of new social restrictions is an intensive-care capacity that is strained, disproportionately, by people who are proud of turning down vaccines but a bit more relaxed about accepting life-saving treatment.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0It\u2019s time to switch to an N95 mask in the battle against Omicron<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What\u2019s to be done about this? Well, on the centre-right, some people are blue-skying about a public-private mix in health care<\/a> provision, which I\u2019m afraid would represent a highly unlikely cultural revolution and which, even if it happ<\/a>ened, would sure take time to implement. Others, like Emmanuel Macron, want an essentially never-ending, but decorously piecemeal, harrassment program<\/a> against the unvaccinated. Macron used a colourful term, \u201cemmerder<\/em>,\u201d but his plan is actually timid: if the unvaccinated are the main problem, why not face it, and them, head-on?<\/p>\n

Early objections to Legault\u2019s scheme are not entirely persuasive. Andr\u00e9 Picard says a tax would be punitive<\/a>. Well\u2026 sure? It would be designed to be punitive. Andr\u00e9 lists several current or potential measures that limit what the unvaccinated may<\/em> do, contrasting it with this levy that they would have to<\/em> pay. Among the people who probably won\u2019t find this a persuasive difference are the unvaccinated, who already feel plenty puned. Then he says \u201cdenying health care to the unvaccinated\u201d would be \u201cwrong-headed.\u201d Maybe. Except it\u2019s already happening<\/a> in isolated cases in a lot of places due to defensible triage considerations.<\/p>\n

And more to the point at hand, Legault\u2019s fee wouldn\u2019t<\/em> deny anyone health care. It\u2019s like a tip jar for swearing: if you do the societally disapproved thing, or decline to do the societally approved thing, you have to put a quarter in the tip jar. But if your lungs give out, you still go sailing through the front door at the local hospital. (Assuming there is one<\/a>.) In fact, whenever Quebec government lawyers get around to working on the legal part, this disconnect between the fee and the health-care system might be what saves the whole scheme: at no point during any Quebecer\u2019s interaction with the health-care system would any levy be demanded as a condition<\/em> of receiving care.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0All the good politicians are in Montreal<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So: Legault\u2019s scheme has the virtue of broad conceptual clarity\u2014some folks are holding everyone else back, so they should pay for the privilege\u2014even if it\u2019s a thicket of confusion on the details. It might even be legal. And as a notion, I fail to find it particularly horrifying. \u201cThere\u2019s this guy running a government who wants to tax behaviour\u201d is not exactly a man-bites-dog novelty.<\/p>\n

But I still think Legault\u2019s unvax tax is poorly conceived. And I won\u2019t be at all surprised if he abandons it before implementing it.<\/p>\n

When you think about it, it\u2019s easy to imagine why Legault would be interested in penalizing the small number of Quebecers who refuse to be vaccinated. He\u2019s had a pretty good few years penalizing small numbers of Quebecers. That\u2019s at least the effect<\/em> of his proposed reinforcement<\/a> of Quebec\u2019s language laws, and it\u2019s pretty clearly the point<\/em> of his law denying some public-service jobs to people who don\u2019t dress the way Legault would have. A lot of people don\u2019t like either law, 21 or 96, but they\u2019re way outnumbered in Quebec, and Legault almost always prefers to side with most Quebecers against some Quebecers. There\u2019s at least a soft populism there that can be unnerving but that also helps explain his political success.<\/p>\n

Indeed, few things are likelier to get under Legault\u2019s skin than the suggestion that he doesn\u2019t know where M and Mme Average Quebecer live. There was a weird moment last year when he seemed not to know what the average rent was. He came in for some ribbing from the opposition parties. Hey, bigwig airline executive turned premier, bet you don\u2019t know how much milk costs either.<\/em> It freaked him out<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m proud to say I come from the very middle class,\u201d he objected. \u201cI still have many friends who come from the very middle class. I take care to stay close to the people and I\u2019m very connected to reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, during a winter when he\u2019s coming under increasing criticism for imposing unpopular and dubiously effective restrictions on everyone\u2014Quebec\u2019s notorious COVID curfew first among them\u2014it\u2019s not entirely out of character for Legault to look around for a pariah group he can dump on instead.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0The roadblock to full pandemic recovery: \u2018Pockets\u2019 of unvaccinated Canadians<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I just think this time he might have chosen poorly.<\/p>\n

The classic Legault out-group is one whose characteristics are pretty set\u2014people who weren\u2019t raised in French, or people whose conception of their faith includes strong ideas about wardrobe. Borders around those groups aren\u2019t porous. You can\u2019t accidentally become an anglophone or an observant Muslim, and you don\u2019t exit those groups without effort. So it\u2019s easy, I think too easy, to set up a politically advantageous us-and-them dynamic.<\/p>\n

But \u201cthe unvaccinated\u201d designates a group that shrinks every day. Even now, after a year of vaccine drives, it\u2019s not coterminous with obstinate conspiracy-theory-driven refusal to be vaccinated. Which helps explain why even the thrice-vaxxed, well-masked, tight-bubble civic leaders in COVID virtue often have a hard time working up real anger against those who aren\u2019t yet playing along. Ideally, after all, we all hope we\u2019re only months away from a world in which these distinctions will no longer be salient, because the coronavirus will\u2014knock on wood, again\u2014be fading from its unwelcome role as the main global influence on social organization.<\/p>\n

Despite the recent and understandable frustrations of the fully-vaxxed, I don\u2019t think vaccination status offers a steady, durable context for us-against-them politics of the kind that Legault plays well. Add in all the logistical challenges of applying his policy, and I won\u2019t be at all surprised if he simply drops the idea. Here again there would be precedent<\/a>.
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