First it was Tax Freedom Day, a propaganda effort by the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation to highlight how much government taxes take from the average Canadian every year.
By the CTF calculation, the average Canadian has to work until June 6 to pay for the federal, provincial and municipal tax haul.
Then came Food Freedom Day, an event organized by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture to mark the day the average Canadian has earned enough to pay for the year’s grocery bill.
The CFA will announce next week that this year, it calculates the groceries bill will be paid for by Feb. 12, the same Food Freedom Day that has held for the past four years.
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The CFA has taken the “freedom” idea further, calculating that Canadians on average earn enough to pay the farmer income share of the yearly grocery bill by mid-January.
On Jan. 25, Canadian unions got into the “freedom day” act.
Canadian Labour Congress economists calculated that after years of corporate tax cuts, Corporate Tax Freedom Day falls on Feb 1 this year — the day when the corporate sector will have earned enough to pay all its annual taxes to all levels of government.
Another federal corporate tax cut implemented Jan. 1 by the Conservative government means corporate tax freedom day will fall sometime in January next year.
This will be good news for the railways, fertilizer, chemical and other farm input supply corporations that supply goods and services to farmers.
So here’s a suggestion for the CFA or other farm organizations: Never mind how quickly Canadians earn enough to pay their food bill; why not calculate an approximate time of the year when farmers in an average year (whatever that is) earn enough revenue to pay their costs?
Let’s call it Farmer Freedom to Earn A Profit Day.
Despite recent good times, for some farmers and some sectors in some years, that day will never arrive and certainly not predictably.
It would be a difficult calculation to make, varying by sector and by farm, but even a notional idea of when Farmer Freedom to Earn a Profit Day could be a powerful public relations marker for how well the sector is doing.
