Everything changes....

While at the plaza with our biggest supermarket yesterday, I stopped in at the Postal Outlet, to pick up this year's forms and instructions for completing and filing our income taxes.

Our friendly helpful government has informed us that this year, instead of them sending us individual tax packages tailored to suit our income bracket and place in the pecking order, we're all going to have to use the same complex and confusing T1 General forms more familiar to corporate lawyers and tax experts, and we are all being vigorously encouraged to do our tax filing on line this year, whether we're properly computer literate or not. 

The government is of course making this all seem like they are doing us a huge favor, but the convenience of this is largely on their side rather than ours, because for most of us not previously filing our returns on line, we now must learn a new routine, and must use special software for the process, apparently. When they get the bugs all out of it, this may be a better way, but for now, this is going to be a pain. For starters, reading the instructions for all these mostly unneeded parts of the General Form gives me a headache. I'm a simple guy - all my income is from pensions; one from a past employer, and two others from the government - so why do I need to wade through the same level of detail as the corporate giants who have expensive experts to help them wiggle out of the 'fine print'? It just doesn't seem very reasonable to me.