This is as it should be - income taxes contain some of the most important data that we expose to the government, data that we submit with a certain expectation of respect for the confidentiality of it.
Then there's the HarperCon$, and their particularly vile way of doing things. During salary negotiations with federal judges, the Government used the income tax filings of sitting judges to reinforce its position.
Income taxes contain a great deal of information, including clues to past income, and possibly surprising amounts of information about a person's investments as well as employment income. The Federal Government grossly abused its position as employer by using tax filings data to make its position:
To buttress its position that salaries for federal judges are generally higher than the income they earned as lawyers in private and public practice, the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of giving the Canada Revenue Agency a list of the names of 627 judges the federal cabinet appointed to the bench between 1995 and 2007.
The agency was able to match 567 of those judges to their tax records as lawyers, and provided the Justice Department with an aggregated version of the information, with no names attached. A consultant used the data to calculate what the department claimed was an indication of the average increases in salaries and benefits lawyers received after they became judges.
Think about that for a moment - you are negotiating with your employer over matters of salary, and he turns around and slaps a stack of statistics on the desk which are derived from your last ten years' income tax filings - some of which contain the results of investments which were surprisingly successful for you. Whether it weakens your negotiating position is irrelevant - your employer has just shown you that he is willing to violate your personal privacy in order to "win" in the negotiations.
PMSH - violating people's privacy for his own political ends. How trustworthy of him.
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