More Harper Acquiescence To The Corporate Agenda

As much as it is said that the Harper regime is planning to buy votes for the 2015 election by giving income-splitting to families, the reality is that Canadians are increasingly being called upon to aid and abet its agenda of 'starving the beast' while at the same time subsidizing corporate profits.

As reported in The Globe and Mail, our Finance Department has quietly shelved plans to crack down on so-called “treaty shopping” by multinationals. The surprise move suspends a long campaign by Ottawa to stop what it says is rampant “abuse” of international tax treaties by companies seeking to duck Canadian taxes.

Treaty-shopping was most recently in the news when Burger King engineered a merger with Tim Hortons so it could pay a much lower corporate tax rate that Canada offers. Despite the fact that the late Finance Minister Jim Flaherty wanted to curb the practice, 'Uncle' Joe Oliver is embracing it:

Facing intense lobbying from resources companies and their tax advisers, Mr. Oliver apparently bought the argument that curbing treaty shopping would put a chill on foreign investment in places such as the Alberta oil sands, leaving Canada at a competitive disadvantage.

In other words, the argument goes, the rapacious appetite for massive corporate profits, along with the refusal to accept any responsibility to the country that makes those profits possible, is the business imperative that must be yielded to:

In a prebudget submission to the House of Commons Finance committee, Deloitte & Touche LLP had this to say:

“To attract foreign capital, Canadian projects generally must support higher potential yields than comparative investments located in the home country of a capital source,” Deloitte tax policy leader Albert Baker said in the submission. “This is a particular issue for the energy and resource sector.”

The flip side is that not squeezing corporations means individual Canadians must bear a disproportionate share of the country’s tax load. Unlike companies, ... hard-working Canadians can’t use complex offshore tax structures.

The message therefore seems to be that all other Canadian taxpayers – you and I – should subsidize the inflated profits of offshore oil sands investors.

So much for the rhetoric and propaganda the Harper regime fosters about its concern for 'working families.'