Finance committee  Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation to speak to the committee. I'm pleased that the committee has a really broad mandate, because while details are important, it's also useful to maintain a focus on the long-term target, which is a tax system that raises revenu

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. It's a good one, because that's exactly where some of the problems with dual income tax arise. First, on the self-employment problem, the issue there is to try to separate what's a return to capital and what's a return to the labour of the self-emplo

Finance committee  I could start, if that's okay with Jack.

Finance committee  I'm going to pick up on the last thing that Monsieur Laforest said, which is about child benefits and the marginal tax rates that are faced by families in middle income ranges as they earn a bit more income. This is something that Professor Mintz mentioned in his presentation as

Finance committee  Sure. Let me address that briefly. There are a couple of issues I have with what I refer to as the boutique tax credits. One is that you're eroding the tax base. The government is giving you credits and costing revenue in that way, which means that the tax base is getting smalle

Finance committee  I think there is something to what you say. Let me try to defend it this way. The question is how broad a target you're trying to hit. When you try to have a credit for something that is very narrow, you create the incentive to shift things around and you have the difficulty of d

Finance committee  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

Finance committee  Let me address that with a brief point. One thing that's really interesting is that there has been a rise in income inequality in Canada over the past 25 years, but a lot of that is driven not by changes in capital income but by changes in earned income. People at the very top

Finance committee  There are two or three points. For the country as a whole, if you want to have more business investment--better investment, better job creation--one way to do it is to make sure Canada is an attractive location for investment dollars. One way to do that is to make sure we have a

Finance committee  So the argument is that for people who have dollars to invest in lots of different countries around the world, one of the key things they're going to look at is the after-tax rate of return on those investments. The more amenable the Canadian choice is to them, the more likely th

Finance committee  Sure, I'll defer to Jack.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I haven't seen a study of Sweden in particular, but I was just reviewing a study of Finland, which also has a dual income tax system, and it found that there was a gain for those who were heavy recipients of capital income within Finland and also som

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I will pick up the last point that you made first. I think you're right that there might be some differences in a place like Canada, where there's a lot more bilateral investment with a larger partner, than in Sweden, where it's more of a multilatera

Finance committee  Yes, I can see it, although it depends maybe upon what city you're in. In Vancouver, the problem is getting on a bus; the problem isn't empty buses going around, I can tell you for sure. In general, the argument I was trying to make is that on the spending side it is possible to

Finance committee  No, I'm fine.