Yes, you are right.
One of the benefits of the Quebec tax credit is that it is refundable, and I think you see the benefit of that system by the amount of R and D that is done in Quebec.
Maybe as an economist I can say this. When I deal with economists at the Department of Finance there's this idea that sooner or later, in the long run, everything evens out anyway, so it doesn't make any difference if you pay the money now or pay the money at some point in the future. Well, in the long run we're all dead, as Keynes said, and that long run may not be so long for many businesses today. So the ability to get the money as quickly as possible is what maximizes return on investment immediately, and that's what drives the investment, both in R and D and in overall investment, in a business today.
That, I think, is the same argument I would make for the two-year CCA: the faster you can write off your equipment, the higher the rate of return will be. The Department of Finance will say we shouldn't be treating manufacturing differently from anybody else, and I agree with that, but you have assets that create wealth. They should be given preference, number one. Number two, we should structure a tax system so that you have the least impact on changing investment decisions. But if we assumed a world where we didn't tax companies, they would make, on average, in manufacturing, a return on investment in about two and a half years on capital investment. So now if we're going to put in a depreciation system, it seems to me that instead of the current system, where you try to look at how long you can spin off a useful life of an asset--in some cases 40 years--wouldn't it be better if you put in a depreciation system that actually mirrored the rate of return that companies would be making if there were no taxes? To me, that's a much more compelling way to structure a tax system.
It's the same thing on the R and D side. You want to make sure that the treatment of these investments gives an immediate return. That's what spurs the investment, then, in R and D, as well as in business investment, in general.