Professor Kathleen Lahey has an issue with taxes. In fact, she sees the issue growing in countries like Canada.

“A major part of my work investigates how tax laws and government budgets work virtually invisibly to ‘keep women in their places’ in every region of the globe, despite the vast number of binding statutory, regulatory, constitutional and international legal prohibitions on gender discrimination,” she says.

Her interest in taxes began early. Lahey’s mother worked as the bookkeeper in the family business and, one day, Lahey asked her mother how much she was paid for this work. She was informed her mom did not draw a salary. By earning no income in the family business and leaving all income it earned to her father, he got a lower tax rate (under U.S. income-splitting policies) than if her mother had been paid a modest salary. This struck Lahey as unfair that her mom did not have any money of her own even though her job was crucially important to the business. 

Lahey continued to notice these challenges with tax systems in countries like Canada and the U.S. as her education continued. She developed an interest in how tax laws and cultural changes interact, and even covered tax issues as part of a math and language college course she taught before going to law school. 

“By the time I finished law school, I realized that I wanted a job where I could use tax and fiscal laws to make the world a better place for everyone,” she says.

Shortly after finding that career in law teaching, her first big chance to do that came when the 1982 Charter of Rights and the Constitution Act were coming into effect. 

“During the moratorium on section 15 equality rights, I got a chance to document all the forms of tax discrimination in the Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) project aimed at getting discrimination in all areas of law changed as soon as possible after section 15 came into effect,” she says.

That work opened a huge research agenda for Lahey. “It involved detailed historical and economic data, cross-country comparisons, enumeration of all the relevant cases and participating in the debate over the meaning of substantive versus mere formal equality in a context that had until then treated tax laws as beyond the reach of gender equality laws virtually everywhere,” she notes. 

The next big challenge came in the early 2000s, when Canada had been ranked number one in the world for gender equality for five solid years. 

“By that time, the 1995 United Nations’ Beijing Platform for Action had been enthusiastically embraced by Canada, and its call for substantive equality – equality of outcomes – in all spheres of life, including in tax and related laws,” Lahey recounts. “This landmark UN document was dubbed ‘the most progressive blueprint ever for advancing women’s rights’ and was expected to usher in sweeping improvements for women around the world, including in Canada, where many forms of inequalities still persisted.” 

Unfortunately, the impact of the Beijing Platform ran up against another global trend.

“As women achieved the highest level of equality, Canada and many other nations began to respond to calls for tax cuts by the wealth-holding sector of the economy,” explains Lahey. “This began an era of falling revenues, and many governments like Canada’s proceeded to cut revenues quite radically, and then use that – and the fear of budget deficits – to justify cutting funding to public services including those which had been trying to benefit women economically.”

Canada dropped from number one in the world for women’s equality to last among the richest countries as the cuts created greater pressures for women. The consequences? 

“Growing numbers of special tax benefits and tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy left women out, while funding for government programs essential to after-tax economic security for all – like care resources, effective pay equity laws, effective prohibitions on group-based discrimination, and funding for Status of Women offices and research programs – was cut despite the fact that these types of laws and programs had helped increase equalities in Canada just a few years earlier,” Lahey says. “These factors combine even today to divert substantial amounts of money away from women and into the hands of male taxpayers or back into government coffers,” Lahey explains. 

For instance, while the government spent $2 billion on childcare subsidies in 2018, it spent $28 billion on tax benefits rewarding unpaid work for women, according to Lahey.

“While these unpaid services provided short-term help and tax cuts for spouses and cohabitants of women performing unpaid work, the tax benefits typically go to the supporting partner or other qualifying family member, not to the women who do the unpaid work,” Lahey notes. “Thus, this setup simultaneously constrains the time women can spend in paid work, and, in turn, means that with lower lifetime earnings, their pension and social security incomes will be smaller, and they may even lose some of those small benefits if divorce or separation ensues.” 

“Strong pay equity laws, full public funding for care resources and enforcement of nondiscrimination laws can temper the effects of these imbalances and lack of effective government policies,” Lahey adds. “Many countries, rich and poor alike, have better approaches than Canada when it comes to these complex issues.”

Lahey’s unique insights into tax and gender have helped her obtain significant research funding –over $1.3 million from SSHRC alone with one-third of that awarded in 2018-19 – as well as opportunities to present, advise and advocate all over the world for gender equality, equality for all in all types of taxes, and in tax-budget systems as a whole.

Beginning in the 1990s, Lahey began taking her expertise internationally, beginning with China, to examine the factors that make life more difficult for women in developing countries. Working with her Queen’s Law colleague, Professor Bita Amani, Lahey is currently studying Ghana, where gender income inequalities are growing faster than new gender equality programs.

“The plot line is similar to Canada, but the inequality is intensified in low- and medium-income countries,” she says. “These countries are attractive to overseas investors and have weaker labour regulations and less political power, which result in women getting taken advantage of in the workplace. At the same time, businesses and investors reap larger profits offshore as the direct result of these and many similar policies. Unfortunately, it is also more difficult to get accurate data in countries like Ghana, hence this project will work closely with local networks and experts.”

Helping Lahey to acquire and analyze relevant data, governance and legal contexts in this and other projects are six research associates, including students from Queen’s Law and other disciplines. These researchers help prepare submissions for international organizations, open-minded government officials and others.

Among those projects is a team working on a review looking back at 25 years of the Beijing Platform for Action. Emily O’Keefe, Emma Hamer and Nas Mumin, all Law’21, are closely examining what countries have submitted regarding their gender equality and tax/budget initiatives.

“Countries paint themselves in as glowing terms as possible to show they are improving their efforts,” Lahey says. “With a highly skilled research  team looking at the reports, we have been able to identify some of the inconsistencies and, in particular, a trend toward focusing on small short-term ‘project-like’ initiatives while ignoring the requirement of reporting on ‘whole of government’ advances in gender equality and tax laws.” 

Also, as part of her work relating to UN treaty bodies and programs, Lahey and other researchers are examining how countries engaging with extraterritorial tax havens results in the exploitation of female labour in a growing number of situations.

“Countries looking to erase their tax liability hurt people all the way up and down the chain except for the owners of the company,” Lahey says.

Lahey has been working on the topic of equality of after-tax/budget outcomes for all in the context of environmental issues at the same time. 

As she explains, “Both the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate – each of which has its own compliance mechanisms – and the Addis Ababa Action Agreement on financing for development, are all now linked directly to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and to its comprehensive implementation document, the Beijing Platform. As a result, there is now a global network of treaties that can be used to monitor progress in attaining multidimensional substantive equality guarantees for women, for all, between countries, and within countries, in relation to all Indigenous peoples and other diverse groups, and with all life on earth. These are new tax law norms for many traditional tax lawyers.”

Admitting that while it is difficult to find researchers and others interested in this kind of work, Lahey notes that numbers are growing, and the advocacy is increasing. In recent years, she has joined up with several national and international organizations such as Canadians for Tax Fairness, the Tax Justice Network and others that look at resolving global inequalities and improving sustainability. 

“I don’t take on a particular assignment unless it has potential to reach policy-makers who will listen and change things or it creates opportunities for advocacy and training that could have discernable impact,” she says.

And the real scope of the impact that is needed is huge, she concludes. “Especially with new knowledges becoming more accessible to non-Indigenous researchers and policy bodies through the increased attention to issues of colonization, decolonization, the inherent rights of Indigenous and diverse groups, and their centrality in helping imagine new ways of sharing land, resources, human contributions and goals, the focus is now on how what started with a simple question of why gender inequalities in tax law are so hard to change has merged into, yet powerfully shapes, the most fundamental questions we now face.” 

Agreeing that these are big research questions, she poses them in all seriousness: “How do we as people, whether as researchers, learners, or teachers, or in governments and in private life, ensure that all laws, policies and practices – including revenue and benefit laws – are built around social, economic and governance norms that can sustainably produce real equality and equal sharing in sync with the needs and capacities for change for all forms of life?”

Learn more about Professor Kathleen Lahey and her work on the Queen’s Law website.

By Phil Gaudreau