Andrea Horwath needs a billionaire onside

Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is asking that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal minority impose a new slightly higher tax rate on Ontarians making more than $500,000 a year.

Linda McQuaig, Opinion, The Toronto Star:

It’s hard to fight a class war without a billionaire onside. Hence Andrea Horwath’s dilemma.

The Ontario NDP leader has thrown down a gauntlet of sorts — demanding, or at least politely requesting, that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal minority impose a new slightly higher tax rate on Ontarians making more than $500,000 a year.

The move is a small toe-in-the-water toward restoring the progressivity that’s been stripped out of the Canadian tax system. But it’s also a bold unlacing of the stays on the political bodice that has confined mainstream Canadian politicians for the past few decades.

Of course, U.S. President Barack Obama is paving the way.

But it’s easy for Obama; he has a billionaire backing him up. It’s doubtful Obama would have had the audacity to suggest the rich should pay tax rates as high as their secretaries had the idea not been suggested by Warren Buffett, one of the richest men alive.

Obama has even dubbed his proposed new tax the “Buffett Rule” so that it’s clear this isn’t just some idea thought up by the president of the United States; it has the full clout and authority of a billionaire.

Horwath, on the other hand, is out there riding bareback, taking on the most powerful forces in Canada all by herself, showing more boldness than this country has seen in a while.

The guns are out for her. On CTV, businessman Jim Doak described Horwath’s tax as “ethnic cleansing” of the rich.

Similarly, Wall Street titan Stephen Schwarzman denounced an attempt by Obama to close a tax loophole for hedge funds managers as “war — it’s like when Hitler invaded Poland.”

Another possibility is that higher taxes on the rich aren’t about war or ethnic cleansing, but about restoring the social contract that used to bind society together.

If Horwath can make that point with boldness and conviction, she might even succeed without a billionaire watching her back.

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