Paul Wells: There is at least a decent case for François Legault’s plan to tax unvaccinated Quebecers. But don’t be surprised if he drops the idea.
I admit I was a little intrigued when François Legault, the premier of Quebec who is never short of new ideas, announced that he is thinking of levying a “health contribution,” essentially a hefty tax, against Quebecers who aren’t vaccinated. as you may have heard, thinking this is all that Legault is doing so far. At Tuesday’s press conference announcing it, the prime minister was unable to answer basic questions: How much does he have in mind? (More than $100, he said, but… that’s all he said.) When it starts? How is the tax charged? (Through the tax system, he said, which raises a lot of second-order questions.) Would people pay once or as long as they remained stubborn? And the big one: is this constitutional? “We’re working on the legal part,” Legault said cheerfully. Welcome to the new electric vehicle made in Quebec for everyone. We are working on the motor and battery.
But I felt like making at least a minimal case for Legault’s nontaxable tax. Start here: it’s a new idea. Federalism used to be a system for testing new ideas in multiple jurisdictions, so that the best ideas could be shared and the bad ones eliminated. And Legault’s tax, levy or contribution seeks to do, directly, what many governments are doing with exquisite timidity: make clear that there are social and economic costs to this endless lockdown, and the people who are playing by the rules. (masked, vaccinated, boosted, isolated, bubbled) are getting a little tired of hearing the unvaccinated with a mask around their chin calling themselves freedom martyrs. Especially when the main justification for yet another round of new social restrictions is an intensive care capacity that is forced, disproportionately, by people who are proud to refuse vaccines but a little more relaxed about accepting lifesaving treatments. lives.
What to do about it? Well, in the center-right, some people are blue sky over a public-private mix in health care provision, which I fear would represent a highly unlikely cultural revolution and, even if it did occur, would surely take time to implement. Others, like Emmanuel Macron, want an essentially endless but decorously fragmented politics, bullying program against the unvaccinated. Macron used a colorful term, “pissing off”, but in reality his plan is timid: if the unvaccinated are the main problem, why not face it, and them, head on?
Early objections to Legault’s scheme are not entirely convincing. Andre Picard says a tax would be punitive. Well… are you sure? It would be designed to be punitive. André lists several current or potential measures that limit what the unvaccinated may do, contrasting it with this tax that I’d have to to pay. Among the people who probably won’t find this difference persuasive are the unvaccinated, who already feel pretty grounded. He then says that “denying medical care to the unvaccinated” would be “wrong.” Maybe. except that it is it’s already happening in isolated cases in many places due to defensible classification considerations.
And more to the point at hand, the Legault rate I would not do it deny anyone medical care. It’s like a tip jar for swearing: if you do something disapproved of by society or refuse to do something approved of by society, you have to put a quarter in the tip jar. But if his lungs give out, he still flies out the front door of the local hospital. (assuming there is one.) In fact, whenever Quebec government attorneys get to work on the legal side, this disconnect between the fee and the health care system could be the saving grace of the entire scheme: at no point during the interaction of any Quebecer with the health care system. Would a lien be required such as condition to receive care.
So: Legault’s schema has the virtue of broad conceptual clarity: some people are holding everyone else back, so they should pay for the privilege, even if it’s a tangle of confusion in the details. It might even be legal. And as a notion, I don’t find it particularly horrible. “There’s a guy running a government who wants to tax behavior” isn’t exactly a man-bites-dog novelty.
But I still think Legault’s unvax tax is ill-conceived. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you abandon it before implementing it.
When you think about it, it’s easy to imagine why Legault would be interested in penalizing the small number of Quebecers who refuse to be vaccinated. He’s had some pretty good years penalizing a small number of Quebecers. That’s at least the effect from his proposed reinforcement of the Quebec language laws, and it is quite clear the point of his law that denies some public service jobs to people who don’t dress as Legault would. A lot of people don’t like either Law 21 or Law 96, but they are outnumbered in Quebec, and Legault almost always prefers to side with the majority of Quebecers against some Quebecers. There is at least a soft populism there that can be disconcerting but also helps explain his political success.
In fact, few things are more likely to get under Legault’s skin than the suggestion that he doesn’t know where M and Mme Average Quebecer live. There was a strange moment last year when he seemed to not know what the average rent was. Came in for some jokes from the opposition parties. Hey great airline executive turned prime minister, I bet you don’t know how much milk costs either. That scared him. “I am proud to say that I come from the middle class,” he objected. “I still have a lot of friends who come from the middle class. I take care of being close to people and I am very connected to reality.”
So, during a winter in which he’s coming under increasing criticism for imposing unpopular and dubiously effective restrictions on everyone – Quebec’s notorious COVID curfew first among them – it’s not entirely out of character for Legault to seek out a pariah group by that you can dump into place.
I just think this time I might have chosen wrong.
Legault’s classic outgroup is one whose characteristics are fairly set: people who weren’t raised French, or people whose conception of their faith includes strong ideas about dress. The borders around those groups are not porous. You can’t accidentally become an Anglophone or an observant Muslim, and you don’t get out of those groups effortlessly. So it’s easy, I think too easy, to set up a politically advantageous us-and-them dynamic.
But “the unvaccinated” designates a group that shrinks every day. Even now, after a year of vaccination campaigns, it doesn’t match the stubborn refusal to get vaccinated fueled by conspiracy theory. Which helps explain why even thrice-vaccinated, well-masked, bubble-tight civic leaders by virtue of COVID often have a hard time generating real anger against those who aren’t yet playing along. Ideally, after all, we all hope to be just months away from a world in which these distinctions will no longer be salient, because the coronavirus (knock on wood, again) will fade from its unwelcome role as the leading global influence on social organization. .
Despite the recent and understandable frustrations of the fully vaccinated, I don’t think the state of vaccination offers a stable and enduring context for us-versus-them politics of the kind that Legault plays well. Add in all the logistical challenges of enforcing your policy, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you just dismiss the idea. here again there it would be a precedent.
Reference-www.macleans.ca