‘The system is the problem,’ tax critic says
NDP, Conservatives call for end to corporate loopholes costing public billions a year
There are few issues the NDP and the Conservatives agree on, but both parties are calling on Ottawa to overhaul the tax code that allows Canada’s biggest corporations to pay some of the lowest taxes in the developed world.
“The system is designed for multinationals and big companies to avoid tax,” said NDP tax critic Pierre-Luc Dusseault in an interview. “The system is the problem.”
In a joint investigation with Corporate Knights magazine, the Star last month revealed the government has never collected a lower proportion of its taxes from corporations than it does now.
In 2016, Ottawa collected $3.50 in income tax from individuals for every $1 it collected from businesses.
“Corporate tax is getting lower and lower, while individuals have to pay more every year to cover for the companies,” said Dusseault. “Even though the percentage of tax that should be paid is around 26 per cent, we know that companies, especially the multinationals, they don’t pay this.”
“It’s not so much because the rate has been lowered, but because of the loopholes,” he said.
Conservatives are also calling on the Liberal government to live up to its promise of making the tax code fair for everyone.
“Excessive complexity is the enemy of fairness,” Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre told the Star. “Those who have the financial means to set up complex arrangements are always better off under regimes that are highly complex.”
“The smaller, leaner entrepreneurial businesses can’t afford to have large legal and tax accounting departments that allow them to game the system. So they are automatically at an unfair and unjustified disadvantage,” Poilievre said.
The Star/Corporate Knights investigation revealed that Canada’s 102 largest corporations collectively avoided $62.9 billion in income taxes over the past six years. On average, that’s $10.5 billion less per year than if they paid the official corporate rate. It’s also an average of $100 million missing from the public purse per company, per year.
Those staggering numbers have prompted more than 27,000 Canadians to sign a petition calling on the government to raise corporate taxes and close tax loopholes.
The petition also asks the government to consider imposing a special levy on banks, which are the coun- try’s biggest tax avoiders.
While the Big Five banks are collecting record profits, their income tax rates have dropped to the point where companies in the banking sector paid one-third the rate of other large Canadian companies in 2015.
At 16 per cent, the tax rate paid by the biggest Canadian banks is the lowest in the G7.
“There are too many ways for them to make their numbers look like they don’t have that much profit,” Dusseault said, highlighting the banks’ many subsidiaries in tax havens.
“It’s unfortunate that Canada is not so good at getting banks to pay tax. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the (bank) lobby.”
Though Finance Minister Bill Morneau was not available for an interview, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a keynote speech at the economic summit in Davos, Switzerland this week highlighting the problems caused by runaway profits and weak corporate taxation.
“Too many corporations have put the pursuit of profit before the wellbeing of their workers. The gap between the rich and the poor is staggering. All the while, companies avoid taxes and boast record profits with one hand, while slashing benefits with the other,” Trudeau told world leaders and CEOs on Monday.
“That approach can’t and won’t cut it anymore,” Trudeau said. “Companies must take seriously their obligations to the workers who serve them, and the towns and cities that support them.”
“We are in real danger of leaving to our kids a world that is less fair than the one we inherited from our parents,” Trudeau said.
The Liberal government was elected on a promise of tax fairness and has committed $1billion to the Canada Revenue Agency to help crack down on the types of tax avoidance and evasion exposed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers leaks.
To date, there have been no indications the Liberals want to take on big business, where far more tax revenue is at stake.
The NDP is calling for a top-tobottom review of the tax code, which was originally written in the 1970s and has since ballooned to more than 2,000 pages. In the meantime, NDP MP Murray Rankin has proposed a quick fix through a private members bill that would crack down on offshore tax avoidance by requiring companies to prove cross-border transactions have “economic substance” and aren’t simply done to reduce tax.