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 things that you can't touch with the tax system. If you want to think of it this way, we're facing the equivalent of a resource curse. Our activity is moving west and chasing resources; the exchange rate is rising because all of the revenues from resources are not being saved the way they are in Norway, for example; and one of the consequences is that the whole economy is tilting toward the west, which is fine for the west, but that's the source of the problem. I don't see how responding to it by subsidizing manufacturing....
It's not just manufacturing, by the way. Manufacturing is not the only industry that's facing problems in this part of the country.
The idea of using the tax system to try to address an issue that is fundamentally a macroeconomic imbalance issue would be precisely sending good money after bad, if you want to think of it in those terms. I wouldn't contemplate using the tax system to try to address the problems that manufacturing industries are facing because of the pull of resources to the west and the increase in the value of the Canadian dollar.