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

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 wi

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  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  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

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 cau

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

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 v

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 import

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 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 in

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 w

Finance committee  We assume that the effective interest rate on government debt in the 2007-08 year stays constant over the next few years; we project interest payments based on that level. That's built into the status quo framework. A lowering of interest rates would increase the available fiscal

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 an