Please Click Here to find recent news, events and information from CUPE Ontario.
Billions in corporate tax cuts shouldn’t trump building a better Ontario, Fred Hahn tells Queen’s Park Finance Committee
TORONTO, Ont. Ontario’s fragile economic recovery could be in jeopardy unless the McGuinty Government frees itself from Stephen Harper’s corporate tax cut mania and instead puts forward a Provincial budget that balances wise investments in physical and social infrastructure with a fair corporate tax rate, the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario warned today during pre-budget hearings at Queen’s Park.
Corporate tax cuts shouldn’t trump building a better Ontario, Fred Hahn told the Legislature’s Standing Committee on Finance and Economics. The Committee is holding a series of pre-budget consultations across the Province.
Hahn called on the government to acknowledge the fact that Ontario does not have a spending problem, it has a revenue problem, caused by ongoing cuts to corporate taxes that consistently fail to deliver the benefits supporters claim they bring.
Between 2000 and 2009, combined Federal and Provincial corporate taxes have fallen from 44.6 per cent to 33 per cent. During that time, business investment as a percentage of gross domestic product fell from 8 per cent to 5.7 per cent. According to studies by economist Hugh Mackenzie, tax cuts have reduced Ontario’s fiscal capacity by about $18 billion per year, almost the exact size of the Provincial deficit.
Ontario’s economic health depends on its workers and their families earning incomes that allow them to invest in homes and appliances, in cars and in post-secondary education, he said.
To make that happen, Hahn called on the government to build a better Ontario by making badly needed investments in key social and physical infrastructure all Ontarians depend on, while restoring corporate taxes to fairer levels by cancelling further planned cuts and rolling back last year’s corporate tax cut.
Click to view the full CUPE Ontario Pre-Budget submission.
-30-
For more information, please contact:
Fred Hahn, President, CUPE Ontario, 416-540-3979
Kevin Wilson, CUPE Communications, 416-821-6641
