The Paradise Papers and you

There are at least a couple of ways to tell whether someone from Canada that complains about the injustice of the offshore tax avoidance schemes revealed in leaks like the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers would participate in the same schemes if only they could afford to.

These are middle-class versions of the same thing:

1. Regular cross-border shopping in the US: Get the benefits of living in Canada while reducing your cost of living by diverting your spending to a nearby country you probably would prefer not to live in to save a bit of money. Pretend that the lower cost of living doesn't have anything to do with the reason you'd rather not live there.
2. Paying in cash: Pay for your services in cash for the purpose of tax evasion (avoiding HST for yourself and income tax for the recipient). Lowering your own cost of living at the expense of society.
3. Renting out half of your house and not acknowledging the tax obligation: The rental income has to be reported as income and the capital gains when the house is sold are only tax-free for the portion you personally lived in.

While I'd consider #1 to be unethical, #2 and #3 are illegal. Tax avoidance is generally not illegal though to me it is in some cases unethical.

It'd be interesting to know how many people that do the above are maxing out their Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) as that is a very legal means of eliminating your tax obligation on a portion of your investment growth.

This isn't meant to say that I think the schemes revealed in the Paradise Papers are ethical. It's to say that they're all wrong, and that your righteous moral ground is significantly nearer to sea level if you're partaking in the schemes like those in the list above as you give every indication that you'd do the same thing, if only you had the resources.