Ottawa to give IRS information on Americans living in Canada

Headline from the Globe & Mail, February 5, 2014

I am one of the million-strong contingent of American citizens living in Canada. I moved here in 1968 and have always resided here since that time. I spent one summer back in California in 1969 mostly, as it turns out, winding down some aspects of a social life that had run its course and was becoming irrelevant. Since then, I have made brief forays into the US, either to visit relatives and a few friends of increasingly long standing, or as part of an annual ritual motorcycle ride, a ritual that disappeared in the rear-view mirror of carbon consciousness a decade or so ago. I became a naturalized Canadian Citizen in 1974.

Due to a recent reinterpretation of US tax law, it turns out that I am delinquent in my filings for the IRS in the US, something to which I hadn’t given the slightest thought, not having generated any income in the US since I worked part-time in a gas station on the corner of Scott and Lombard Streets in the winter of ’67-’68. I did my university schooling here in Canada, worked a variety of part-time and summer jobs, always in Canada, and spent three decades toiling in the belly of the public education system, retiring to my office and garden almost eight years ago.

I don’t mind at all paying my fair share to support the common enterprise that is a nation and all the possible good it can do when citizens get together to provide the services that make life livable for all, and while I certainly don’t agree with much of the way the spending goes, particularly of late, I happily jump through whatever hoops are necessary to pony up what the law says I ought to: withholding at source ensures that I don’t often need to cut a cheque, but when that happens, I do so in the knowledge that I am fulfilling my responsibilities as a citizen, the price of the rights I am supposed to enjoy.

What I do mind, and what no one should have to go through, are unnecessary hoops and bureaucratic bumpf such as the IRS is now proposing, nay, demanding. OK, it’s the law, but we have to ask ourselves why the process can’t be streamlined in such a way that the process doesn’t need to be duplicated on two sides of the border. This is to catch people who are hiding income from the IRS to evade taxes. I don’t fall into that category. I don’t believe that the IRS has any claim to any of the income that I’ve generated in Canada over the last 46 years. Under the right circumstances, I would be happy to attach my Social Security Number to a declaration from Revenue Canada that I had no earnings subject to US taxes, and be done with it.  It’s clear that such will not be the process.

So the real pinch is that Revenue Canada is going to share my information with the IRS as a matter of policy. There are those who will posit that this is already happening, and that recent revelations of the actions of the NSA, CSIS, CSEC and who knows who else pretty much tell the tale that nothing that any of us does is cloaked from the broadly defined security establishment. This would certainly not have been the case when I first came to Canada, and there have been manifold occasions where the government of this country has more or less thumbed its nose at our neighbours to the south, particularly in instances where they weren’t being particularly good neighbours. Our current government is all of a piece with the corporate lobbyist-run show in DC, and, in fact, seems to be trying to outdo our American cousins at the game of enabling a Monopoly-style game of locking down the economy, and eventually all of society. I suspect that most Canadians have changed much less in this direction than their government, but the trend to intrusiveness and dishonesty is so widespread among those who direct our affairs that it seems to matter increasingly little what ethical positions might be held by the mass of Canadian citizens. Richard Newell, the infamous King Biscuit Boy out of old TO wrote a song that seems to characterize what’s become of our fair land: You Don Tore Your Playhouse Down Again