On the weekend, the Nanaimo Daily News published an editorial calling for more food taxes – as if the cost of living in B.C., and specifically on Vancouver Island, isn’t high enough. The idea that a state can fairly tax “junk food” and not dip into all sorts of problems determining what “junk” has already been debunked by Denmark’s experience.

Anyway, here’s a letter to the editor we wrote the Daily News. Hopefully they publish it.

Dear Editor:

The Daily News’s support for a junk food tax is junky public policy.

First, what—and who—defines junk food?

Would you tax orange juice? It contains nearly as much sugar as Coca-Cola. Would you tax sugar packets at Tim Horton’s to punish those of us who love double-doubles? What about steak or beer or milk or butter or pizza or olive oil—all fatty foods?

As the health promotion chairman of the B.C. Medical Association’s noted, “It would be difficult to draw up a list of things that were truly bad versus things that are truly good and be able to implement a tax on that basis.”

Nutritional choices are best made by individuals and parents, not government fiat.

Worse, a food tax won’t make us any healthier. A George Mason University study found that a 20% tax on a 75-cent soft drink (upping the price to 90 cents) would see the Body Mass Index (BMI) of an obese person decline from 40 to 39.98, a virtually non-existent decline. This was backed up by similar Cornell University findings.

The food tax introduced in Denmark in 2011 resulted in disastrous economic outcomes, including job losses and cross-border food shopping in Germany, while delivering no correspondingly positive measurable health outcomes. The tax was unanimously repealed a year later.

A junk food tax is just another tax grab from already cash-strapped Canadians.