Larry Patriquin
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Inventing Tax Rage
Misinformation in the National Post
During the National Post’s first year of publication, it claimed that Canada’s supposedly exorbitant taxes were causing great damage to the economy and had produced a form of “tax rage” among the middle class. In contrast, Larry Patriquin suggests that the paper’s writers were engaged in a dubious form of “reasoning” in order to promote an ideology that mostly benefits the wealthy. This involved presenting the Post’s aspiration for tax cuts as the “agenda of the people” when, as this book demonstrates, the vast majority of citizens receive little or no benefit from low levels of taxation. In advancing its case, the Post published a stunning collection of factual and logical errors that were incessantly repeated in editorials and columns. Yet in 2000, the federal Liberal Party surrendered completely to the bogus “tax rage” invented by the Post and, as a result, the Liberal’s fiscal policy became inseparable from right-wing platforms.