I'll take that one. Thank you for the question.
You're right in saying that one way to affect outcomes they might want to see is through the tax system. Taxes can affect people's decisions and are one way to get things done, but taxes aren't the only way to get things done. You can also spend money out of the budget directly on the expenditure side of the budget, rather than doing it through the credit side, the tax side.
My argument is perhaps a bit subtle.
Certain types of things might be better done on the tax side--for example, those affecting equity concerns that are raised by the GST through the GST tax credit, as Professor Mintz mentioned. Other things might be better done on the expenditure side. Take the example of the fitness tax credit. To go further on that, an issue with the tax credit approach is that an awful lot of families don't have taxable returns at all. They don't see any benefit at all from a fitness tax credit, so if you're trying to focus, say, on lower-income families, they're not going to see any benefit from that at all. On the other side, some kind of expenditure program that helped local community centres or something like that would be something you could perhaps use to improve the outcomes for all families.
It comes down perhaps to a case-by-case basis, but in general the broader the measure is, the less likely it is that you're going to have to worry about these kinds of small distortions and changes we've alluded to.