Ottawa Citizen

LoCal LibErals sErvE up thEir DECaDE-olD tax plan

- DAVID REEVELY dreevely@postmedia.com twitter.com/davidreeve­ly

The Ontario Liberals will boost Ottawa’s already booming economy by, er, doing a bunch of things they’ve already done, a batch of Liberal candidates announced Tuesday.

Ottawa Centre incumbent Yasir Naqvi and fellow candidates John Fraser (Ottawa South), Stephanie Maghnam (Kanata-Carleton) and Nathalie Des Rosiers (OttawaVani­er) stood up with a microphone outside Invest Ottawa’s Bayview Yards headquarte­rs and talked about this stuff in very serious voices, with very serious looks on their faces, presenting it all as things they will do if their government retains power June 7.

“Only our plan will ensure that we will create more jobs, not cut,” Naqvi said.

The plan includes: cutting the income tax on small businesses from 4.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent, eliminatin­g the capital tax, an annual levy on corporatio­ns’ held wealth, and reducing businesses’ property taxes by $200 million.

Only the cut to small businesses’ first $500,000 in profits is remotely new. The Liberals announced that they’d do it last November, as a sort of compensati­on for the hit some small businesses were about to take from the government’s hike to the minimum wage. The tax cut went into effect in January and was finalized in the Liberals’ last budget.

They eliminated the capital tax partly in 2007 and fully in 2010. They changed the property taxes businesses pay for education (an antiquated system that for antiquated reasons means businesses in different school-board territorie­s pay different amounts) also in 2007.

Some of this stuff is more than a decade old.

It’s all legitimate­ly part of the Liberals’ record, which includes cutting business taxes almost constantly since they were first elected in 2003, but offering it up as a Liberal plan in 2018 is bizarre. It’s not dishonest in the sense that they will keep these things in place if they’re re-elected, but even that does violence to the ordinary human understand­ing of time.

“We already started putting these measures in place, that is already helping our businesses,” Naqvi conceded.

He threw in the minimumwag­e hike as a business-booster, putting money in the hands of relatively poor people who are most likely to spend it. “It’s a combinatio­n of all these policies that is having an impact.”

We can feel for the Liberals a bit here. Whatever new they have was in the budget released in March, and now Liberal candidates get to repeat it.

Despite the constant rhetorical attacks from the Progressiv­e Conservati­ves that Ontario’s an economic disaster, the key indicators from Statistics Canada are good. The numbers just don’t support the claim that Ontario’s a ruin.

The unemployme­nt rate in Ontario is 5.6 per cent, better than the national average and within a few tenths of a percentage point of the lowest it’s been in a generation. Ottawa’s is the best it’s been in 30 years. Wages are up. Part-time jobs have been replaced with full-time ones. You can walk down Bank Street and see half a dozen help-wanted signs in three blocks.

Long-term unemployme­nt, the most damaging, soul-crushing, career-ruining kind, is down to 15 per cent of all unemployme­nt, from nearly 25 per cent five years ago.

Manufactur­ing jobs have declined by 300,000 since 2003, which is bad, but manufactur­ing jobs have disappeare­d across North America. Overall, Ontario has 900,000 more jobs than it did in 2003.

Much of the growth has been in urban Ontario.

Rural Ontario’s been kicked in the shorts by the gradual but unrelentin­g shift from local manufactur­ing to global supply chains, up-and-down commodity prices, and the rise of service and knowledge work that tends to be done in cities. This is a problem, and if anybody has an idea for how to restore small factories to small towns, every government in North America would like to hear from you.

The Liberal economic plan is focused on, as leader Kathleen Wynne would say, building Ontario up — improving education, building infrastruc­ture, taking up things like drug coverage as public responsibi­lities (at least partially) so that precarious employment and entreprene­urship don’t seem as scary.

Naqvi and the others, who aren’t stupid people and know that their “plan” of reforms they did over a decade ago is guff, reverted to that kind of talk almost instantly when pressed.

“This election is very much about the economy,” Naqvi said. “What kind of economy we’re building as we’re moving forward, and one of the biggest concerns we have is we have two parties, one on the right and one on the left, that are running based on their ideology.”

The Tories never saw a pinstripe suit they didn’t want to snuggle, the New Democrats hate capitalism, et cetera.

That’s fine as a political sales pitch, it’s just not much in the way of goodies for businesses. The Liberals would be better off being open about that and emphasizin­g how well they’ve done rather than warming over tax tweaks from the Dalton McGuinty era as if they’re new.

 ?? ERROL MCGIHON ?? From left, Ottawa-area Liberal candidates Yasir Naqvi, Stephanie Maghnam and John Fraser highlight the Liberals’ job-creation record in the capital at a news conference Tuesday. The policies are all legitimate­ly part of their government’s...
ERROL MCGIHON From left, Ottawa-area Liberal candidates Yasir Naqvi, Stephanie Maghnam and John Fraser highlight the Liberals’ job-creation record in the capital at a news conference Tuesday. The policies are all legitimate­ly part of their government’s...
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