First of all, when the stakeholders were told, “You're not going to get a corporate rate reduction”, they were all quite happy to have at least something, so I'm not sure that tells you very much.
Again, I don't think that is the criterion for a good tax system. The criterion for a good tax system is one where we want to make sure that we don't get in the way of successful investments, don't push more companies into tax loss positions and don't do all sorts of other things.
We've had accelerated depreciation for manufacturing and processing equipment since 1972. It was disbanded, finally, by 1987. It was brought back by the Conservatives in 2006 or 2007, if I recall, as temporary accelerated depreciation, and it stayed on for the next 10 or 11 years, if I recall the exact dates.
Then you ask this question: What has that done for our manufacturing industry in Canada? Well, manufacturing today has far fewer jobs as a share of total jobs in Canada compared with what it was in 1972, 1987 or 2000. In other words, it has been a failed policy, but we keep doing it and it's rather too bad that we keep doing it.
In fact, if you look around—we do this analysis across 92 countries around the world—Canada, Lesotho and maybe a couple of other countries have a significant bias in our effective tax rates towards manufacturing industries, and towards mining as well, by the way. However, if you look at our taxation of services, which is actually 70% of the job force in Canada, we whack them with a lot of taxes. In fact, our competitiveness problems are even bigger in the service sector than they are in the others.
What we have done is create a very biased system. Sure, companies are going to say, “Give me something; give me accelerated depreciation”, but I don't think that is really the criterion for how we want to run a good tax system.