A majority of Canadians think the rich are skipping out on paying taxes.
A new poll from Mainstreet/Postmedia released Saturday suggests 81 per cent of respondents believe the top one per cent of Canadians are not paying their fair share.
The poll comes not even a week after the release of the Panama papers, in which over 350 Canadians were shown to be involved off-shore banking to evade paying taxes.
“There is a public sentiment against wealth, and the perception of influence it buys,” Mainstreet president Quito Maggi said in a press release.
“Recent revelations in the Panama papers show a pattern of tax avoidance and evasion that confirms what many people believe about the super-rich and that is driving these results.”
Despite that, only six in 10 Canadians believe off-shore tax havens are damaging our economy, according to the poll.
“Experts estimate there is over $100 billion in assets in these foreign tax havens that cost the federal government an estimated $7.8 billion in revenues every year,” Maggi explains.
READ MORE: Panama Papers: Why should Canadians care?
The poll also suggested that 44 percent of people believed our country’s politicians were influenced by the top one percent (categorized as those who make over $454,000 a year), while 33 per cent believed they were either “not too influenced,” or “not at all influenced” by the rich. The rest of Canadians weren’t sure.
When asked to clarify, respondents believed the Conservatives were the most influenced, and the Greens were the least.
Despite the close link with the document leaks, Panama wasn’t the country Canadians believed was most associated with tax avoidance and evasion; that honour went to the Cayman Islands. (Though Panama did come in a close second.)
Lack of financial literacy could play into results
Questions about whether or not Canadians have used legal means to avoid paying taxes showed something surprising, according to Maggi.
“It should also be noted that these numbers reveal some lack of financial literacy in the distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion,” he said.
Tax avoidance is when Canadians use legal means to reduce the amount of taxes they pay, including putting money into TSFAs and RRSPs and claiming transit or childcare expenses as deductions.
“Further research would be required to determine to what extent the literacy plays in to these opinions,” Maggi speculated. “It’s likely that to some extent, people feel the tax system has more deductions for those who make more.”
The Mainstreet/Postmedia poll surveyed 2,513 Canadians, and has a margin of error of +/- 1.95 per cent, 19 times out of 20.