Don't call them therapy dogs: a case study in the Liberal tax-engineering style

At long last, Canadians have elected a rational government
that doesn't stoop to using the tax system for crass political
gestures and social micro-engineering ... oh, wait

Veteran David Boese hugs his service dog Sam during Remembrance Day ceremonies at the War Memorial in Ottawa on Friday, November 11, 2016.

Colby Cosh

March 2, 2018

It is time for another lesson in the vocabulary of newspaper economics. You will recall that when we had a Conservative federal government, it was strongly attached to the idea of small tax credits for certain modest, local, conservative social purposes. There was a tax credit for children’s art and music lessons, and another one for amateur sport and fitness expenditures. There was a tax credit for public transit users, a deduction for tradesmen’s tools, and a tax break for volunteer firefighters and rescue workers.

The agreed-upon term for these was “boutique tax credits.” You must have seen that one a lot in op-eds from economists, who are nearly unanimous in despising the complexities that these credits add to the tax code, and with good reason. Many of these boutique credits were tossed out, in the name of putting tax policy on cleaner, more utilitarian lines, when the Conservatives went out and the Liberals came in. At long last, we elected a rational government that doesn’t stoop to using the tax system for crass political gestures and social micro-engineering…

But what’s this, now, on page 175 of the new 2018-19 budget? “Expanding the Medical Expense Tax Credit For Psychiatric Service Dogs.” Ah, yes, I remember something about this: there is a fashion among veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder for having therapy dogs accompany them in public places. Mind you, we are not supposed to call them “therapy dogs.” That is an insulting term, one that hints that these animals are not as serious, and might not be eligible for the same legal and social deference, as trained dogs for the blind, physically disabled, or cognitively compromised.

Maggie, a service dog for Canadian Forces veteran David Desjardins of Ottawa, looks into the camera during a press conference about financial support for veterans and their support animals at Parliament HIll in Ottawa Nov 4, 2011.

I have to say that the benefits claimed for PTSD dogs do sound an awful lot like essentially therapeutic ones, but you have been duly warned. The most recognizable promoter of this treatment modality is an RCAF veteran named Medric Cousineau, who operates a service called Paws Fur Thought that matches afflicted veterans with appropriate, trained dogs.

In 2015, after plenty of lobbying by Cousineau, Veterans Affairs announced that is was going to look into the evidence for benefit — therapeutic benefit, I suppose — from PTSD service dogs. Cousineau was, as sympathetic media storytellers were not slow to let us know, quite livid. Other types of service animals traditionally accepted in public settings — in some cases as a matter of statute law — had never been subject to the humiliation of scientific scrutiny. Cousineau, who claims that his own dog can “smell changes in his biochemistry” and “escalate her behaviour” to help him avoid stressful social situations, called the whole idea of checking up on such claims “a clear case of discrimination on the basis of disability.”

Despite this objection, Veterans Affairs has completed the first phase of its “efficacy” study, which found that veterans who have the dogs report benefits from having them, and I cannot say that comes as a surprise. On the basis of this finding, the federal government is expanding the existing medical-expense tax credit to cover the costs of the dogs.

Cvet’s Pets, run by Winnipeg Blue Bombers long snapper Chris Cvetkovic, has teamed up with MSAR Service Dogs by providing starter kits for every veteran who receives a “courageous companion.

These costs seem enormous, though they are probably not a patch on the costs of any other form of psychiatric care that isn’t an off-patent pill. The expanded credit will not be available only to veterans, although it is the perpetually haunting nature of our debt to veterans, in the person of Cousineau, that has been used to secure it. Probably only a small minority of PTSD sufferers are survivors of military combat (Cousineau’s case is attributed to a terrifying offshore search-and-rescue mission for which he received the Star of Courage).

On budget day, Seamus O’Regan, our Veterans Affairs Minister, made sure to track down Cousineau for a congratulatory phone call, and then made extra double sure that we all heard about the phone call. “We continue to learn more and more about PTSD,” O’Regan told the CBC. With cruel fidelity, reporter Kayla Hounsell also transcribed his next remark: “It is an evolving science and therefore the solutions to that science are evolving and I think service dogs are an important part of that solution.”

It’s important to note, as a few Liberal partisans reading this column are already eager for me to do, that this new measure can NOT, repeat, NOT, be characterized as a “boutique tax credit.” Perish the thought! It is merely a technical change in the criteria for an existing tax credit.

This explains why you not have seen green-eyeshaded tax experts complaining about the change on any of the objections that might be brought against it: that it is shamelessly political, that it combines the emotionally exploitative power of soldiers and dogs into a sort of chimera of sentimentality, or that the use of evidence in making this policy choice seems casual at best.

As a non-expert, I would just like to make an obvious point that the change does raise, whatever you think of it. Namely this: much of the complexity in our tax system, and much of the wasteful political contention that it involves, probably does not reside in the mere length of the technical regulations.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-dont-call-them-therapy-dogs-a-case-study-in-the-liberal-tax-engineering-style