They say two things in life are unavoidable: death and taxes. The free-market Fraser Institute has decided to take on one of these in a new video that aims to show just how much of your income is taxed by the government.
And they're doing it with a narrator who sounds vaguely like Morgan Freeman, an actor whose voice is synonymous with wisdom and sensitivity. Neither of which describes this video.
Just about everything is off about "Taxes: A Canadian family's biggest expense." Sure, the graphics are pretty, and there's nothing inherently wrong with pointing out how much money you fork out in taxes.
But the way they put it, it sounds like we should have a problem with levies like liquor and tobacco taxes, or that it's somehow surprising that 14 per cent of our pay goes to income taxes.
Or, horror of horrors, that seven per cent goes to sales taxes (it's actually 13 per cent in Ontario and five per cent in Alberta, but anyway).
Sure, taxes are expensive. But, well, we need them for services like health, transit and infrastructure! They're an inevitability, not the inconvenience that the institute would like us to believe.
And aesthetically, the video just doesn't work. The narrator's voice is paired with music that sounds like a poor imitation of Philip Glass' score for "Koyaanisqatsi."
The elements clash. It's not just lousy advertising, it's bad art.
We now eagerly await the institute's invective against death.
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