The lottery gambit

The latest innovation to hit the Ontario election campaign could come from the unlikeliest of places—Slovakia.

And what is this innovation? It’s the Slovakian value added tax receipt lottery. Say again? The Slovakian lottery gambit.

Slovakia’s revenue from value added taxes (the equivalent of our HST) has been shrinking. It seems that the only explanation can be that sellers of goods and services aren’t leaving much of a paper trail—all the better to avoid paying tax. And setting up a bureaucracy to be a better enforcer is expensive and slow. So a lottery is the creative solution.

Here’s how it works. Slovakians who keep receipts as purchasers, can enter a monthly draw for prizes of cash, cars or a chance to be on a television game show. All they have to do is ask for a receipt when purchasing, and then register their receipts with the government, which can then use the paper trail to go back to sellers and demand whatever tax is due. So far, almost half a million people have taken part in the lottery, and tax revenue has increased by over half a billion dollars in less than one year. Other countries are starting to take note.

Now so far, no one has started a similar scheme in Canada in order to collect more tax from the underground economy. Nothing says that we can’t. After all, even if we merely equalled the Slovakian number, we’d be able to use the profits each year to buy a fighter jet or a few more cottage country bandshells.

But nothing else says perhaps there are other creative ways in which we can use the lottery gambit. Let’s take the current Ontario election campaign as an example.

NDP Leader Andrea Horvath is proposing that consumers be spared the HST on their hydro bills. Now cutting back every hydro bill by the amount of the HST is nice little gift worth, I imagine, about a couple of hundred bucks per year. But it’s hardly enough to make a person happy for the rest of his or her life. Why not instead introduce the ‘Great Hydro Refund Lottery’—and give people their refund not in cash but in lottery tickets? Lots more fun, with the chance to win much more valuable prizes.

For her government, printing up more lottery tickets would be as painless as printing more money— something, some might argue, an NDP government might be quite adept at. It wouldn’t cost any real cash. It would just water down some people’s chances of winning the lottery while upping other people’s chances. And even that could be fixed by enlarging the lottery prize pool.

What about Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne? She is proposing to invest $130 billion for infrastructure over the next 10 years. Sounds like a lot. So to get there a little faster, why not move beyond borrowing more and issuing special ‘green bonds’ as inducements; as well, spice it up and sell tickets for a special ‘Great Ontario Infrastructure Lottery.’ Throw in a billion or so every year for prize money and she’ll probably still come out ahead on net revenue from ticket sales.

She could even throw in non-cash prizes, like joining a focus group and getting in on the ground floor to determine what principled Liberal positions might look like.

That leaves us with Conservative Leader Tim Hudak. If, as he claims, he is serious about getting rid of 100,000 public service positions, he is going to need some pretty high quality information about where those positions can be cut. This means getting inside the public service. So he might want to establish a ‘ratting out’ process. This could be backed up by a lottery—the ‘You Can’t Fire Me Lottery.’

Public servants who stepped forward to finger other public servants whose jobs should be cut would have their names entered in a lottery pool. Win the lottery and you are exempt from termination—even if you yourself have been ratted out. As a consolation prize, you might lose your job but receive a bushel of regular lottery tickets on top of your serverance. Or, to move outside the box one step further, you might be given a voucher for a number of Tim Hortons ‘Roll Up The Rim’ contest entries—especially apt if you’ve been laid off and are likely to spend your days there anyway.

It seems to me that while our friends the Slovakians have latched on to a keeper idea, they’ve only scratched the tip of the well. Given the quality of the suggestions I’ve made for our provincial party leaders, it seems almost inevitable that some sort of lottery gambit will be played out in Ontario. Public sector morale would be transformed. And we would all be the winner/gagnant!

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca