Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

SUSAN SACHS, Special to The Globe and Mail, March 2nd

PARIS — Few travellers think they are helping the less fortunate when they buy a plane ticket. But soon everyone flying from airports in France, Britain and 11 other countries will be making a charitable contribution, like it or not, to the global fight against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

In France, the donation will take the form of a “solidarity tax,” as President Jacques Chirac has called it, on all international and domestic flights. The tax will range from €1 (about $1.35) to €40, depending on the class of ticket and the destination, and will take effect on July 1. The other countries have a year to figure out how they will impose the charge.

Mr. Chirac has campaigned energetically to persuade other countries to impose a similar tax on airline tickets and he made it the centrepiece of his address to an international conference on alternative methods of development aid that opened Tuesday in Paris.

Brazil, Britain, Chile, Congo, Cyprus, France, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mauritius, Nicaragua, and Norway have agreed to raise or have started raising a sum from air tickets to help the poor, they said in a closing statement yesterday.

Twenty-five countries opted not to impose the tax but promised to contribute to a central pot that the core group of 13 will create.

The traditional methods of helping poor countries, through debt relief and yearly pledges of assistance, have proved inadequate, Mr. Chirac said. To solve the chronic problems of disease and poverty in developing nations, he added, rich countries must come up with innovative money-raising ideas.

Taxing airline passengers is one way to “mobilize some of the fruits of globalization” and help create a steady and predictable stream of money for research, low-cost drugs and public-health programs in Africa, he said.

There has been little public reaction to the French tax plan. The government has yet to release details on how it would work or regulations for the airlines.

“It seems like a worthwhile cause . . ,” said Emily Darré, a Paris university student, after being told about the tax. She said she intended to fly to Los Angeles in August and would not change her plans because of the levy.

The airlines and the tourism industry have opposed the French aviation tax.

“Aviation is already taxed a lot compared to other means of transport,” said Yves Ezanno, general-secretary of the French Board of Airline Representatives, an industry group. “We have a lot of objections. For one, you have travellers paying for something that has nothing to do with their trip.”

Mr. Chirac first floated his idea for an aviation tax three years ago. The European Union, as a whole, has discussed an aviation tax, but many countries heavily dependent on tourism, such as Greece and Spain, have balked.

Other global taxes for development aid — on fossil-fuel consumption, the Internet, currency transactions and more — have also been proposed at various United Nations forums. But many countries, including the United States and Canada, have balked at creating superfunds that would be managed by international agencies. Canadian representatives attended the Paris aid conference as observers.

Mr. Chirac, using his platform as host of the development-aid conference, defended the aviation tax as a bold humanitarian experiment that would have little economic impact on travellers but could generate as much as €200-million a year from France alone.

Airlines, he said, are already set up to collect taxes and fees from passengers and distribute the money to various governments for airport taxes and security costs.

“We end up being used as collectors of taxes,” said François Choquette, the general manager of Air Canada in France.

A round-trip ticket between Canada and France already includes various taxes amounting to €148 a ticket, he said, and an additional tax for development aid could affect the airline’s business this summer.

source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060302.FRANCE02/TPStory/TPInternational/