Columnists
Stepping and Schlepping
Whew! By the time this hits the street we’ll have endured a snappy “snap election”. I’m not a praying kind, but I am grateful all of the snappiness is over. Come on! I bet all y’all are feeling the same way. Am I right? You know I am. And I am hoping we have a honeymoon phase for the next few weeks. Personally, I could use a break from the strategizing, the shouting, the accusations, the finger-pointing and the “Mark said, Pierre said” we’ve been treated to for way too many weeks. I’m over it. Right about now I’d simply love to stop and chat with someone about the best perennials to plant in a shady area. I’d love to have a coffee with friends and/or family and just shoot the breeze about our kids, their kids, summer holidays, gardening or the last great series we watched on GEM or the page-turner of a book I just read. You know, normal stuff. You know what I mean. I know you do. I think we’ve all endured a long, hard winter followed by a mudslinging, mean-spirited federal election and then, somewhere in that mix, had to file our income taxes and wonder if our CRA accounts were among those accounts which were hacked into sometime earlier this year. And, speaking of taxes, and yep that’s where I’m going, when is filing a Canadian Tax Return going to be something less that eight hundred pages of complicated equations, exceptions, credits and bafflegab?
There I said it. There really isn’t a whole lot that stresses me more than getting ready to press “send” on my tax filing. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m not sure if I remember my CRA account password. Maybe I don’t remember what was on line 1702B or C from three years ago. Maybe I can’t remember the NOC, even though I was a staff trainer for NOC back in the olden days. Maybe I’m not sure if I want the “tax genie” to review my file. This much I know, I just fill in all of the spaces to the best of my knowledge and have kept all of the supporting documents, at the ready, in a labelled ziplock baggie, just in case. My calendar from the previous tax year has all of my medical travel dates and distances marked. I should be fine and dandy, but I just know I’ll be getting a little manilla window envelope telling me someone has recalculated my submission and now the CRA wants a few dollars more than I figured I owed. I cannot think of a time when this has not been the case. I’ve used the services of an accountant and a bookkeeper and then switched to TSFI (tax software for idiots) and there’s always a little something the CRA finds that doesn’t quite agree with my calculations. Always. I would have voted for just about anyone who promised me they’d change personal income tax reporting from needing a post-graduate degree in Canadian Tax Filing to a flat-rate based system. And, I’d bake that candidate oatmeal cookies every week for the rest of their term of office to show my gratitude. But I’m sure someone on the CRA staff would decide that’s something a self-employed person would do—bake those cookies—and ask me about my certified kitchen. I’d probably have to show how much it cost to shop, schlep and ship to prove it was a gesture of kindness and appreciation.
Each Monday morning I promise myself I’ll get through the week if I just take it all one step at a time. I’ve been adding oodles of “steps” since the Snap Election was called. I’ve added steps since the T4A, the T4E, the T1000 and the T1867s showed up in my postal box. I added even more steps picking up the “TSFI” only to have a TIA because there wasn’t a disc in the box when I got home and was red-faced to find out “discs” are so last year. I stepped up my steps looking for those pesky charitable tax receipts and all of hospital parking machine chits. And the truth of the matter is, all of those items are usually in one place, but once the stress of filing hits my brain goes into overdrive. I think, by the time I press send, I will have more than surpassed the magic ten thousand steps my FitBit wants me to cover each day even though I haven’t really done any actual stepping. I’m almost ready to press “send”.
What the H E double hockey sticks—I sure hope there’s still a couple of jelly beans left in the jar.
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