Dear Minister Oliver:
Thank you for your reply (on paper) to my letter to you of April 30, 2014 in which I asked your government to support a bill similar to Private Member’s Bill C-363 (2011), an Act respecting Conscientious Objection to the use of taxes for military purposes, which would allow me to direct that all my taxes be spent only for peaceful purposes.
In your letter you said, in part, “Allowing taxpayers to direct their tax dollars to only certain programs and services would be neither democratic nor practical. It would effectively mean, for instance, that wealthier Canadians who pay higher taxes would have a greater say in the functioning of the country, through their decisions about which programs and services to fund (or not to fund) … Allowing each taxpayer to allocate his or her taxes among the many government programs and services would be tremendously complicated, and would make funding for ongoing government services less reliable, making it more difficult to plan and deliver those services effectively.”
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