Finance committee  It's a good question. It's been a few years since I've seen an estimate on the amount of loss due to tax havens, and we don't include that in our alternative budget. But I would agree with you that we have been too much preoccupied with changes in the tax system that benefit the wealthy.

Finance committee  It's a fair comment, and we would certainly be prepared to do further research on this, but we are a small non-profit organization with limited resources and we do the best we can with a small budget and a lot of volunteer time. But thank you for putting that on the radar. I will look into it.

Finance committee  Fully phased in, it will be about $7 billion, because the tax would start on July 1. So it's only three-quarters of a fiscal year.

Finance committee  It's a very small amount applied to a very narrow base, so it's technically not a carbon tax—although we could perhaps quibble on that.

Finance committee  What's interesting is that if you look at the modelling around different types of taxes and carbon pricing and how they lead into greenhouse gas emissions, you'll see a very good example is the recent report from the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. Almost all of the gain over time is due to turnover of capital stocks--at certain points in time businesses need to buy new equipment, consumers need to buy new cars, and things like retrofits happen.

Finance committee  Going back a couple of years, I remember a study, I believe from Statistics Canada, that found that for every dollar of infrastructure spending, businesses benefited by 17¢ per year, which I would argue is quite a good rate of return for infrastructure spending. I would just caution to distinguish between renewing the existing infrastructure and rebuilding infrastructure.

Finance committee  Actually, in our alternative budget we don't roll that back, and I would agree with you that these types of targeted measures can be actually more effective. In years past, we have called for, instead of across-the-board corporate income tax cuts, something more along the lines of investment tax credits so that we reward actual investment that boosts our productivity over the long term.

Finance committee  I believe we are at a stage where we need to make major investments in retooling the Canadian economy. Coming from British Columbia, where the carbon tax and other measures to fight global warming have just been introduced, I would suggest that those are some of the really important areas where we need to do that.

Finance committee  Our largest single source of financing is from individual memberships. We also receive funding from organizational members, including trade unions, credit unions, and progressive businesses. A third source would be from foundations, and a fourth would be government.

Finance committee  The whole reason for the creation of a parliamentary budget office stems from concerns the CCPA raised in its alternative federal budgets, going back almost 10 years. We consistently argued, back when Paul Martin was finance minister, that he was understating revenues and using very conservative economic assumptions, and we made our own projections around what the surpluses would be.

Finance committee  The estimates I have for the value of corporate tax cuts are the ones in the economic and fiscal update. And I believe those are not broken out to specify the oil and gas sector.

Finance committee  Thank you. First of all, I would dissent from my co-presenter about the relative merits around productivity of cuts in various taxes. Most of these are based on theoretical propositions around how different taxes affect the economy. The way the modelling works is that because income tax, which is progressive, moves away more from a so-called natural equilibrium, they are by definition more distortionary.

Finance committee  Well, there are two. There's the technical paper, which was really just trying to look at different assumptions around economic growth and at what they meant for the economic and fiscal update as a base case: without any policy action on the part of the federal government, what would this do to the underlying fiscal balance?

Finance committee  Yes, that's the revised status quo framework. If you forget about any of the recommendations we make in the alternative federal budget, the available fiscal room shrinks to $1 billion if we insert the latest economic projections coming from the Bank of Canada into the economic and fiscal update.

Finance committee  We do not. We do this as an independent process.