Exactly.
An alternative to that would be to introduce an investment tax credit, equivalent, say, to a proportion of a manufacturer's fixed investment. This could be made wholly or partly refundable, which would be particularly good for manufacturers who don't have profits currently.
These proposals are extremely cost-effective. The capital cost allowance changes cost only a few hundred million dollars per year, yet they reduced Canada's marginal effective tax rate on investment by far more than the corporate tax cuts that cost billions of dollars per year. Fixed investment in manufacturing in 2007 was about $20 billion, so a 10% investment tax credit would cost somewhere in excess of $2 billion, depending on how much additional investment it stimulated.
That is a significant amount of money, but it pales in comparison to the $15 billion a year that is being given away to profitable industries through these no-strings-attached corporate tax cuts that both the dominant political parties in this country, the Liberals and the Conservatives, have been pushing for in recent months and years.