Finance committee  I feel very strongly that I'm not paid to make political judgments and wouldn't be able to make them anyway. I'm paid to come up with what I think are the best forms of taxation, or policies more generally, from a normative and efficiency point of view. If one starts compromisin

Finance committee  Do you mean another asset?

Finance committee  I'm not sure I understand the question. What do you mean by contributions in kind? Are you talking about the new vehicle--

Finance committee  I must admit I haven't thought through the details of this.

Finance committee  Yes, I think I said in my remarks that we shouldn't have reduced the GST. We should maintain the GST where it is, partly because it's a good tax on economic grounds, but also partly because it's going to make it more difficult to get harmonization with the provinces if the federa

Finance committee  You know, I can give you an economist's answer on the one hand, and on the other, there are pros and cons to doing this. The pro of doing it is that it doesn't induce people to lock their savings into a given asset; it allows them to freely change assets without penalty. The con

Finance committee  I certainly wasn't one who recommended that the government should deal with the manufacturing problem by throwing money at it and using the tax system or the subsidy system to do so. The problems we face with manufacturing are problems that are brought about by fundamental thin

Finance committee  I was saying the contrary--that it shouldn't be a writeoff.

Finance committee  I think the deductibility of royalties comes about by viewing royalties as a payment to the province for the right to use the resource.

Finance committee  It was introduced as a substitute for the resource allowance, which was sort of an across-the-board allowance that all resource industries got. My point of view is that there's no economic reason for there to be a deduction of royalties in the oil and gas industry against the fed

Finance committee  It's clearly in Ontario's interest to move to the VAT to eliminate the inefficiencies associated with the fact that the current retail sales tax in Ontario taxes business inputs substantially. The question is how to do that. There are two options you could pursue. One is to hav

Finance committee  The income trust set-up was essentially a vehicle for avoiding paying the corporate tax, to put it in the simplest possible terms.

Finance committee  You can say that if you adopt the classical view of the corporate tax as being simply a withholding tax against shareholders, and you have a 100% full method of integrating personal and corporate tax, then it wouldn't make any difference who paid the tax: the corporation or the i

Finance committee  Not in principle, no. Well, when I said you should use the carbon tax for double dividend purposes, rather than to subsidize environmental projects, that could be interpreted as saying that you should use the double dividend revenue to reduce other taxes. That's consistent, but

Finance committee  Yes, for the same reason as Mr. Duff mentioned.