Finance committee  Yes, I can. Thank you.

Finance committee  Thank you. Good afternoon. I assume you can hear me?

Finance committee  Thank you. My name is Dr. Lindsay Tedds. I am an associate professor of economics in the school of public administration at the University of Victoria. My primary area of expertise is Canadian tax policy, with a particular focus on design and implementation. With that, I woul

Finance committee  Correct.

Finance committee  It really boils down to the rationale for the tax credit. The benefit of the GST tax credit is predominantly to overcome the regressivity of a tax measure that we have implemented. So consumption taxes are known to be highly regressive; that is, they affect low-income households

Finance committee  As an economist, efficiency is a dangerous word. What exactly do you mean by efficient?

Finance committee  One of the most important things to consider is whether or not what you're doing is going to produce any incremental benefit. Let's take the child tax fitness credit. The goal of that was to increase the number of kids in athletic sports. What we do know from the evidence is that

Finance committee  Income splitting predominantly benefits high-income households. Very few benefits accrue to low- and middle-income households. So it depends on what you're trying to achieve with the policy, but the academic research on income splitting has been clear that there are better ways o

Finance committee  The GST/HST tax credit was an oddity in the way that people qualified for the tax credit. There is no other tax credit out there that required people to say, yes, assess me. Everything else is based off of information that CRA has.

Finance committee  I think it's important to separate out the basic flow-through share system versus the additional METC, which is what we call the super flow-through share system. The federal government studies that have been done—and there have now been two—as well as three academic studies, hav

Finance committee  This is tricky, because it might get me into a little bit of hot water. No, I don't have a lot of favourable things to say about the flow-through share system. I'm not saying that the mining and exploration industry doesn't need some vehicle in which to help encourage people t

Finance committee  When you look at the data at hand, there was absolutely no decrease. In fact, there were increases over those years the METC was not in play. That's because mining prices were increasing predominantly. That's what drives investing behaviour—the prices.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  When it comes to tax planning purposes, we know there is a tax planning element. In face, 90% of the investments happened at year end, which is an indication it was being done for tax planning purposes. This isn't something that people do over the year.

Finance committee  Good afternoon. I am Dr. Lindsay Tedds. I'm an associate professor here in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. My primary area of expertise is in Canadian tax policy, particularly with respect to design and implementation. I've written a number of