Noah Jarvis is the Ontario Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) wants Canadians to pay up, but it’s making it harder to file your taxes.The CRA needs to take a hard look in the mirror and clean up its own mess, instead of restricting the ways that Canadians can file their taxes every April.The CRA is planning to stop Canadians from filing their taxes on paper. By cancelling this service, the CRA is stopping Canadians from filing their taxes the way that works best for them.Just over 2.5 million Canadians decided to file their taxes by paper last year, according to the CRA. More people chose to file their taxes on paper in 2025 than they did in 2024.Despite this, the CRA is trying to phase out millions of Canadians’ preferred way of doing their taxes.Many Canadians like filing their taxes on paper. When the CRA mails out paper copies of its tax package, seniors who are used to reporting their taxes the old-fashioned way don’t have to learn a new system.But the CRA is going ahead anyway to push out paper tax filing..The tax agency is going a step further by hitting Canadian businesses with a $1,000 fine if they file their taxes on paper. More than 11,600 companies were hit with this fine in 2024, and 4,840 of those businesses were completely inactive.Hitting Canadians with fines isn’t about improving efficiency and cutting costs at the CRA. It’s about punishing Canadians for choosing how they file their taxes.The CRA claims that eliminating paper tax filing will help to cut costs and improve the organization’s efficiency.That’s laughable.If the CRA is looking to cut costs and improve its efficiency, it’s looking in all the wrong places.This is the same CRA that blasted out $15.5 billion in COVID-19 era benefit payments flagged by the auditor general as suspicious. The CRA even refused to fully investigate the potentially fraudulent payments because it “wouldn’t be worth the effort.”The CRA increased the size of its bureaucracy by nearly 50% from 2015 to 2024, with little to no improvement in its service.Our tax bureaucrats need to understand that they work for Canadians, not the other way around..They shouldn’t be in the business of telling Canadians how they should file their taxes, especially when they’re barely able to answer a phone and give Canadians accurate answers to their tax questions.That’s right, CRA bureaucrats only manage to provide Canadians with the correct answer to their tax questions 17% of the time, according to the auditor general. If a high school student only gets a 17% on their test, they wouldn’t just get a failing grade, they’d be flunking out.We’re holding school children to a higher standard than CRA bureaucrats. CRA bureaucrats are failing because they can hardly understand Canada’s massive and unwieldy tax code.CRA agents aren’t able to answer questions about the tax code because it has gotten so long and unwieldy. The tax code is longer than the full Harry Potter book series. It’s no wonder barely anyone at that CRA understands how it works.If the CRA wants to run a tighter ship, it first needs to encourage the government to fix the tax code instead of punishing Canadians for filing their taxes by paper.Tax bureaucrats who can’t answer most Canadians’ tax questions have their priorities all messed up. The priority should not be punishing taxpayers for filing their taxes on paper.Before the CRA tries telling Canadians how to do their taxes, it should get its house in order first.Noah Jarvis is the Ontario Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
