Finance committee  Thank you for having me here today. My name is Mike Moffat. I'm a business owner, a chief economist with the Mowat Centre, and an assistant professor at the Ivey Business School in London, Ontario. Those are a lot of hats, but I'm here representing my own views. I'm here today

Finance committee  It's more a problem for Canadian households. I would like to start by applauding the government for taking the initiative to cut red tape. As a business owner, I highly appreciate that, economic analysis aside. It's more a problem for households. Again, you're forcing households

Finance committee  Not particularly, no. If efficiency is defined as changing behaviour, there's not a lot of evidence that they do that.

Finance committee  Again, I did not write any of the papers on that issue, but there was an issue of the Canadian Tax Journal which looked at exactly that question. They surveyed households, and households were happy to get it. If you want to give households a cheque, we're all happy to get that, b

Finance committee  Oh, absolutely. You could just lower income tax rates, particularly at the low end. You could increase the universal child care benefits. You could increase HST rebates. You could do it all in one thing, rather than a little bit here and a little bit there, and trust families to

Finance committee  I think the first example was the whole iPod tax debate. We have these items, and the question became whether a television or an MP3 player is a piece of consumer electronics or is considered a computer part, which comes under a special tariff treatment. Depending upon what the a

Finance committee  I would fully agree with that. I think there's room to merge some of these plans, such as the HST rebate and the universal child care benefit, into a single cheque that's better targeted towards Canadians. I absolutely agree that this money could be packaged in a more sensible w

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Thank you for that question. I have some grave concerns about how that system was set up. It wasn't really creating a family tax system as we see in other countries. Instead, it's taking the individual taxes that we have and sort of jury-rigging a family tax credit on top of tha

Finance committee  Normally, when you design a targeted tax credit for businesses, the eligibility requirements tend to be backward looking. They say that if you paid so much in tax or your earnings were a certain amount the year before, then you're eligible for this, and then what you do next year

Finance committee  I think it's a stronger benefit. Now, again, based on what I said earlier, my inkling is always to have fewer tax credits, period. But if you're going to have a tax credit, I think the Liberal plan has two advantages over the Conservative one. One, it's backward-looking, so it do

Finance committee  I think that's a fair comment. I think what's needed is, as my colleague suggested, to have a large analysis of the system as a whole and go through all of these things and see what has become out of date. I think it's analogous to the tariff code, where there are tariffs in th

Finance committee  I wish you had asked me first, because I'm going to pass it along as well. I've not looked at that particular item and could not comment on it intelligently.

Finance committee  Who owns it?

Finance committee  As a business owner, I'm a little biased on that, but I think it should be run like an insurance fund, that it should be owned by all Canadians.