Like other Canadians, Manitobans Ernie and Charlotte Wiens are getting ready for tax season. Unlike the majority of others in this country, they won’t pay all they owe the federal government.
Instead, they will withhold the amount that goes for military spending and send it to Mennonite Central Committee, a faith-based humanitarian agency.
“We do it because of our Anabaptist/Mennonite faith,” said Ernie, 77. “We believe in peace and non-violence and don’t want our money used for military spending.”
The couple, who retired from farming in 2020, have been diverting the military portion of their taxes, due to their religious beliefs, since 2007.
For the 2023 tax year, they will hold back about 6.5 per cent — the amount of the federal budget estimated to be used for military purposes by Conscience Canada, an organization that supports those who have a conscientious objection to supporting preparations for war.
“We never hide the fact we do it,” said Charlotte, 74, noting they send a letter to the Canada Revenue Agency, their local Member of Parliament and the leaders of all federal parties.
Since starting the practice, the Wiens have held back about $9,000 from their taxes.
The idea for war tax resistance in Canada dates to 1981, when Winnipeg Member of Parliament Stanley Knowles and five other MPs published a letter that said, in part: “In times of military conscription, exemption from service in the military can be claimed on grounds of conscience, and alternate service is approved. It should be equally possible to claim exemption from paying for war preparation and an alternative provided.”
Conscience Canada was created in 1983 to advocate for ways for Canadians to legally divert taxes to peaceful purposes. Since that time, it has supported calls for the creation of a peace exemption that would enable people to divert funds to the promotion of peace.
In Parliament, at least a dozen private member’s bills have been proposed for the creation of such an exemption. The last time was Bill C-363 in 2011, “an act respecting conscientious objection to the use of taxes for military purposes,” proposed by then-NDP Member of Parliament Alex Atamanenko of British Columbia.
“This is war tax resistance, not tax avoidance,” Ernie explained. “We aren’t unwilling taxpayers. We don’t grumble about the taxes we owe. We believe in paying them for community well-being. We just draw the line at supporting the machinery that seeks to kill people. We won’t participate in that.”
As for the government, it ultimately gets the funds the Wiens’ owe by taking a portion of Ernie’s Canada Pension Plan payments each month.
“We got some polite phone calls from the CRA asking us to pay the full amount,” Ernie said. “They were quite sympathetic to what we were doing, but said they had a job to do.”
Doug Hewlitt-White, 76, is on the board of Conscience Canada. A retired civil servant who lives in Ontario, Hewlitt-White has been diverting taxes from military spending since 2015.
Unlike the Wiens, Hewlitt-White doesn’t divert his taxes away from the military for religious reasons.
“I do it because I believe it isn’t moral or ethical to kill people to further national goals, for Canada or any country,” he said, adding “I fundamentally believe that war is an outmoded and ancient way of thinking.”
Looking back to the Second World War, when the Canadian government operated an alternative service program for conscientious objectors who didn’t want to join the military, Hewlitt-White noted that today the government “doesn’t need our bodies. It needs our money.”
For that reason, Hewlitt-White keeps back the portion of his taxes that would be used for military purposes — even though he knows the government will get its money in the end.
“I see it as mostly symbolic, a signal to the government that not everyone agrees with supporting military spending,” he said, noting that so far this year 11 people have told Conscience Canada they have diverted taxes away from the military.
Jan Slakov is president of Conscience Canada. From her home in B.C., she said that she, too, hopes that one day the government will pass legislation “to honour our right to freedom of conscience.”
Even if that doesn’t happen, Slakov hopes to get the message out to more Canadians about the opportunity to make a statement about their conscientious objection through diverting taxes.
“I hope it can be something that leads more and more of us to learn about the power of nonviolence and to use that power,” she said. “When we renounce the power of violence, to the extent we free ourselves of that type of power, we embrace that other power, the power of love in action.”
For more information on war tax resistance, visit www.consciencecanada.ca
All of the world’s nations should be moving in the direction of peace assurances as security, yet we are still be fed a steady diet of fear that provokes many reactions. I wonder what happens now with the current push for ‘security’ in a defence model with its marriage to the proliferation of weapons of destruction for its reassurances, not to mention the money to be made. Humans have some serious choices to face in what needs to change to become truly secure and a lot of that comes from seeing self in others and being compassionate. The more walls or stronger threats only fan the fires of fear that digs us deeper into the trenches.