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My sister and I recently took my 82-year-old French mom to Northern France for a two-week vacation. We booked several short-term rental accommodations, all of which were excellent with one exception. That unit turned out to be a three-storey property with a narrow, steep spiral staircase that was genuinely dangerous, particularly for her.

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I was irritated and went back to the listing. Not one review, photograph or description line mentioned it. The property had been deliberately misrepresented and we had no recourse once we were standing at the bottom of that staircase with our luggage.

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Governments do this too, but with considerably higher stakes than a missed staircase.

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Politicians who cannot defend a tax policy on its merits create a marketing name. The label is designed not to inform, but to disarm: to make the financially illiterate feel reassured and the financially literate hesitant to object. It is one of the more cynical features of modern fiscal governance, and it is accelerating.

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For nearly a decade, the Justin Trudeau government insisted that Canada’s carbon tax was not a tax, but rather a price on pollution. The distinction was entirely rhetorical.

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A government charge that is compulsory, reduces disposable income, and raises consumer prices qualifies as a tax. Calling it a price on pollution was a marketing decision, not an economic one, and one designed to neutralize opposition by borrowing the language of environmental responsibility. It worked well enough on the politically sympathetic. It fooled nobody who actually read the legislation.

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More recently, the federal government rebranded the GST credit — a long-standing, well-designed offset to a regressive consumption tax introduced by the Brian Mulroney government in 1991 — as the Canada groceries and essentials benefit.

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This was not the first time Ottawa had reached for the GST credit’s plumbing to manufacture good news. Since 2020, it has done so four times: a special payment that doubled the credit during COVID-19, a six-month doubling in 2022 under the Making Life More Affordable banner, a grocery rebate in 2023 that was simply a second cheque equal to double the January credit, and now the 2026 top-up tied to renaming the credit itself.

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Each was mechanically the same GST credit adjustment, but with changed marketing. Of course, the government can’t help but brag about it. Yep, redistributing after-tax payments of extracted funds as a gift is a neat trick.

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The tax branding arms race is not limited to Canada. In January, the incoming Dutch government announced what it called a freedom tax — a surcharge on personal income and corporate taxes designed to generate approximately five billion euros annually to fund a dramatic expansion of defence spending toward North Atlantic Treaty Organization targets. The name is almost admirably brazen. A tax increase has been repackaged as a patriotic contribution to liberty.