Prelude to Saro Persaud and "First Nations Taxation"

 

In the following post, Saro Persaud examines “international” taxation in Canada with reference to First Nations among other nations in Canada and in that connection how First Nations taxation is administered.  The situation of “first nations” in relation to other “nations” within Canada reflects  parallels unconstrained by the typical domestic Canadian political and constitutional context for discussions about First Nations. Saro Persaud is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University who is engaged in very interesting work about how First Nations taxation meshes with the federal and provincial tax regimes with which we are more familiar.  It is almost trite to observe that Canada effectively is an “international” national tax world in microcosm.  “International tax” is of course nothing more (or less) than the reconciliation of intersecting fiscal needs / imperatives and tax claims of “nations” – usually typical national political jurisdictions but there are parallels in the relations of “subnations” to “nations” within a political jurisdiction and to other “nations” via the “nation” of which it is a “subnation”.  The federal, provincial and municipal levels of government have national and sub-national tax jurisdiction of various kinds, as do First Nations in Canada.  Indeed, Canada is comprised of nations within nations.  In other contexts, this reality has been addressed concerning the effectiveness and elasticity of taxing powers in relation to the affected “nation’s” available tax base (see, for example, Richard M. Bird and J. Scott Wilkie (contributing authors), Chapter 2 Tax Policy Objectives in Tax Policy in Canada, Heather Kerr, Ken Mackenzie and Jack Mintz, Eds., (Toronto:  Canadian Tax Foundation, 2012), notably the section dealing with “multilevel” taxation).  Another example is Part 400 of the Income Tax Regulations which allocates and assigns tax jurisdiction among the provinces for purposes of the provincial corporate tax abatement on a formulary basis but also using markers of tax jurisdiction typical for the allocation of taxing rights among countries.

 

Scott Wilkie