Plucked

Two and a half centuries ago, the French finance minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot quipped that taxation is “the art of plucking the hen without making it cry out.” While variations on wording and attribution have circulated ever since (often it’s claimed that an earlier finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was talking about geese), the lesson has remained consistent: the challenge in government is to find the sweet spot in taxation that will neither scare off investment nor leave a lot of money on the table.

Eric Cline, a former Saskatchewan politician and mining executive, argues in his study of Canada’s potash industry that for more than three decades, following the sale of his province’s publicly owned potash mining company, it’s the people of Saskatchewan who have been well and truly plucked.

Debates over the public ownership of Canadian industry have long been characterized, on one side, by fears that private control of major entities allows...