Corporations not pulling their weight

Re House of Harper quickly crumbling, Feb. 22 Suddenly a lot of officials from banks and corporations are in favour of the Liberals running infrastructure-investment-driven deficits as high as $50 billion.

In other words, they want government to do the heavy lifting in stimulating the economy along with assuming, on behalf of the Canadian taxpayer, all of the financial as well as political risk.

This is the same group that for years has said governments really don’t create jobs, but rather are responsible for creating the right “environment and supports for investment,” by which they usually mean taxes.

Over the past decade, Canada’s corporations were given some of the deepest tax discounts in the world, and yet they have utterly failed to do anything other than mostly pocket the rewards.

Those same corporations also failed to reinvest their tax windfalls in new Canadian jobs (ex-Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney’s “dead money”). Recent StatsCan data also suggest many corporations in fact invested their windfalls outside the country.

Canada’s books for 2013-14 show personal taxes accounted for 48 per cent of total federal revenues compared with 13.5 per cent for corporate taxes. So yes, Canada should indeed invest heavily in infrastructure investment, but why can’t those corporations assume a larger financial input and responsibility in the country’s job and economic future? Edward Carson, Toronto Not on columnist Tim Harper’s undo list and crying out for action is raising the GST two percentage points back to where it was in 2006. It would be a great shame if the Harper government’s most enduring legacy is this socially damaging policy change.

Raising the GST back to 7 per cent would not only allow lower federal deficits; it would also make funding available for infrastructure, poverty reduction, a national pharmacare program and other investments that are desperately needed. David Goodings, Burlington