Finance committee  Thanks very much for inviting me. I submitted a brief that you will have access to. I will take my five minutes just to highlight the main things that come out of that brief. What I would argue is that the tax transfer system has become less redistributive, while inequality has

Finance committee  This is a very big question. As one of the other witnesses said, it probably goes back to the early 1990s. Many things have happened in the world to cause inequality in OECD countries, including more competitiveness for manufacturing industries. We've seen a decline in manufactu

Finance committee  Well, tax credits are there for different reasons. Some tax credits are there to impart progressivity to the system, such as personal tax credits, disability tax credits, seniors tax credits, and so on. Other tax credits are there to try to encourage people to behave in certain t

Finance committee  I think that's key. That's the key argument behind equalization-type programs, providing basic services at comparable levels across Canada. To me, equal opportunity is putting people on the same playing ground to begin with, which means giving everybody an opportunity to develo

Finance committee  Clearly, at the bottom end of the skill distribution, that's the case. People who are not eligible for EI or who have exhausted their benefits and go on provincial welfare are noticeably worse off than other people in society. Those people are the ones who are the provincial resp

Finance committee  I'll just make one comment about training. One ought to distinguish in the training debate between training of new workers coming into the labour force and retraining of workers who have lost their jobs through layoffs or technological shock or whatever, a lot of which happened i

Finance committee  Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Non-refundable tax credits are in the tax system primarily to make the income tax system more progressive. We now have the technical capability of making them refundable, since the introduction of the HST credit, the child tax credit,

Finance committee  There's always a trade-off between redistributive equity and consequences, inefficiency consequences, but I think in this case they would be minimal. The dividend tax credit applies only to dividends earned in unsheltered assets. Most people in the lower, middle, and even getting

Finance committee  The impact of the temporary foreign workers?

Finance committee  These are very difficult questions. I think it's too early to say what the effect of the EI reforms is going to be. It depends on how the seasonal industries respond to the reforms and how the training part of it changes. That's similarly with respect to the temporary worker

Finance committee  Indeed. They're not available to people who are in a non-taxpaying position.

Finance committee  Yes. That was in my brief.

Finance committee  Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. What I'd like to do is make a number of comments on three general areas having to do with tax policy. The first area is the growing inequality of income and wealth and what measures should complement the announc

Finance committee  Thank you. The first suggestion would be to offset the benefits that the middle tax rate cut affords the higher income groups by increasing the tax rates in the third and fourth brackets. Next, to help those at the bottom of income distribution and to facilitate a transition to

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. I hope I got exactly what you were saying. I was very much opposed to increasing the limit on TFSAs from $5,500 to $10,000, largely on the basis that it would benefit mainly people in the very high income groups. When we're facing a situatio