From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Ian Madsen

Business groups are justifiably opposed to the federal government’s June 25 increase of the inclusion rate for capital gains tax. But there is another corporate income tax increase looming. It will come in the form of a 2018 corporate tax reduction that is set to expire starting this year. Ottawa ironically intended it to make Canada more competitive amid the 2018 tax reform and cut in the United States.

According to a study by Trevor Tombe at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, Canada’s corporate income tax rate on new investments will jump from 13.7 percent to 17 percent by 2027. Even worse, for Canada’s high-value-added manufacturing sector, taxation will triple. Higher corporate income taxes, in a nation experiencing difficulties in encouraging domestic or foreign investment in new plant equipment, will struggle to reverse meagre productivity growth—a problem noted by the Bank of Canada.

Heavier taxation will hinder future improvement in incomes and the standard of living, making it a serious issue. Increasing income tax on businesses and investment will not increase prosperity and personal income. The legislation to make the 2018 provisions permanent is, alarmingly, not urgent to politicians.

At least one policy could make Canada more attractive to business, investors, and hard-pressed ordinary citizens. It would be to slash corporate income taxes substantially.  Another is to make paying taxes easier, as Magna Corporation founder Frank Stronach suggested. It may surprise some Canadians, but Ottawa’s take from corporate income taxes is a relatively small. However, it is a fast-rising proportion of federal overall revenue: 21 percent in fiscal 2022–23, according to the government, up from 13 percent in fiscal 2000–21, notes the OECD.

Letting companies pay taxes and reducing the tax burden on ordinary people might seem OK to some. However, what happens is that every corporate expense, including taxes, reduces cash flow that reaches individuals. The money remaining in the hands of businesses could either be reinvested or paid out as dividends to owners. Let’s remember that owners are founding families, pension fund beneficiaries (employees, citizens), and ordinary individuals.

As there are fewer available funds, there will be a reduced capacity for capital investment. Investment is required to replace existing equipment, or add new equipment, devices, software, and vehicles for businesses. It only keeps companies competitive and makes employees more productive. This, in turn, makes the whole economy more profitable, thereby increasing taxes paid to governments.

As for the questionable reason for the tax increase, aiming to generate more revenue, recent experience in the United States is informative. The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act reduced corporate income tax from 39 percent of pre-tax income to 21 percent. It resulted in U.S. federal corporate income tax revenue rising 25 percent from 2017 to  2021. Capital investment  rose dramatically too, by 20 percent, a key goal of many Canadian policymakers.

Until recently, the Republic of Ireland had a corporate income tax rate of 12.5 percent, a key selling point in its successful efforts to attract foreign investment over the past several decades. Ireland, with few natural resources, is one of the richest and fastest-growing of the OECD nations, despite a bad real estate crash 15 years ago. Near the lowest in the OECD in tax burden, it nevertheless has a high quality of life and services.

If anything, Canada should cut corporate income taxes to below the levels of its main trading partners and rivals. To do so, it will have to extricate itself from the ill-conceived international treaty that compels signatory nations and territories to have a floor rate of at least 15 percent of pre-tax income.   Ottawa seems enamoured of multinational agreements and organizations, so it may be highly reluctant to abrogate membership in this growth-dampening arrangement. The statutory federal corporate income tax rate in Canada is 15 percent, but all provincial governments impose their own levies on top of that, ranging from 8 percent in Alberta to 16 percent in Prince Edward Island.

By cutting taxes, we can pave the way for a brighter economic future, marked by increased productivity and the prosperity we all yearn for. This move will also ensure our international competitiveness, a goal we are currently struggling to achieve with our current 25 percent rate (OECD).  Canada has a hard time attracting investors. Raising taxes will neither attract more of them nor encourage more investment from existing Canada-domiciled entrepreneurs and companies.

Ian Madsen is senior policy analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Elizabeth Nickson

When we are issued carbon allowances, owners of said lands will be able to claim tax deductions and will be able to sell carbon allowances to businesses, families and townships. In the simplest of terms, that’s where the money will be made. WE peons will be renting air from the richest people on earth.

Everything will be monetized and measured and traded, even you.

Up next on Wall Street’s exploitation list.

If not stopped, on November 17th, the U.S. government will pass a rule that allows for America’s protected lands, including parks and wildlife refuges, to be listed on the N.Y. Stock Exchange. Natural Asset Companies (NACs) will be owned, managed, and traded by companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and even China.

Since the early 2000’s, outfits like Goldman Sachs have been trying to trade air, or specifically carbon without much success. Their 2005 carbon exchange staggered along until it was quietly discontinued, and their Climate Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) is now facing delisting. “ESG” was the next attempt to monetize the un-monetizable, with the “E” part of that acronym standing for Environment, ill-defined as that was. Now ESG is failing. Market leaders say it is facing “a perfect storm of negative sentiment” and its U.S. investments fell by $163 billion in the first quarter of 2023 alone.

Its stepchild, Net-Zero, is so loathed, it looks like it might blow up the entire carbon scam. Says Australian senator Matt Canavan, “Net-Zero has absolutely carked it. It is a soundbite and totally insane. Almost everything we grow, we make, we do in our society relies on the use of fossil fuels.” Vanguard has pulled out of Net-Zero funds. The British government too is backing out of Net-Zero, saying “we won’t save the planet by bankrupting the British people.” New Zealand’s new government revised the country’s Net-Zero plans in its first week in office. In the hard hit Netherlands, the Farmer-Citizen movement is now the dominant party in the Dutch senate and every provincial assembly. Sweden has abandoned its 100 percent Net-Zero plans and Norway has announced another $18 billion in oil and gas investments.

Not going to happen.

Even in the submissive E.U. voters are turning from the “green” parties toward anti-E.U. parties. Renewables funds are seeing massive outflows because of rising interest rates and declining subsidies. Of course, the massive subsidies taxpayers have already given both “renewables” investors and “renewables” companies will never be clawed back. All we will get is a shrug as they move onto the next kill. Which is so obvious it is a wonder no one predicted it.

The entire universe envies the lush interior of the U.S. Increasingly empty, it is filled with a cornucopia of minerals, fiber, food, waters, extraordinarily fertile soil as well as well-ordered, educated, mostly docile people. Worth in the quadrillions, if one could monetize and trade it, financialize it, the way the market has financialized the future labor of Americans, well, it would be like golden coins raining from the sky.

On October 4th, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a proposed rule to create Natural Asset Companies (NACs). A twenty-one day comment period was allowed, which is half the minimum number of days generally required. NACs will allow BlackRock, Bill Gates, and possibly even China to hold the ecosystem rights to the land, water, air, and natural processes of the properties enrolled in NACs. Each NAC will hold “management authority” over the land. When we are issued carbon allowances, owners of said lands will be able to claim tax deductions and will be able to sell carbon allowances to businesses, families and townships. In the simplest of terms, that’s where the money will be made. WE peons will be renting air from the richest people on earth.

The following are eligible for NACs: National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, Wilderness Areas, Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, Conservation Areas on Private and Federal Lands, Endangered Species Critical Habitat, and the Conservation Reserve Program. Lest you think that any conserved land is conserved in your name, the largest Conservation organization in the U.S., is called The Nature Conservancy, or TNC, which, while being a 501(c)3, also holds six billion dollars of land on its books. Those lands have been taken using your money via donations and government grants, and transferred to the Nature Conservancy, which can do with those lands what it wills.

If this rule passes, America’s conserved lands and parks will move onto the balance sheets of the richest people in the world. Management of those lands will be decided by them and their operations, to say the least, will be opaque.

μολὼν λαβέ, buddy.

Farm country is fighting back. American Stewards of Liberty, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Kansas Natural Resource Coalition, Financial Fairness Alliance and Blue Ribbon Coalition have filed comments, Republican senators Pete Ricketts, James Risch and Mike Crapo have sent pointed queries to the SEC. This week, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) offered an amendment that would defund the SEC proposed rule to approve listing “NACs.”

Most of us ill-understand “financialization.” It is a complex set of maneuvers best explained by the behavior that crashed the economy in 2008 which bundled up questionable mortgages and brokered off the risk to dozens of different funds in order to share that risk. NACs are asset grabs. From ’09-’20, funds asset-stripped America’s manufacturing via debt obligations, buying the company, selling off the equipment, firing the most expensive employees, and gutting, if they could, pension funds. Then they upped the price and sold on the assets. Which were bundled and brokered off. These are called collateralized debt obligations and they thunder doom underneath the debt-fueled economy.

Natural Asset Companies are an attempt to grab hard assets to make up for an inevitable collapse. But taking more land out of production makes it certain that collapse moves ever closer. Land needs to be used, cared for, and maintained by the people who live on and use the land. Otherwise, it runs to desert and invasive species. The mad push to “green” and net-zero has triggered financialization, or a brokering of the future, because only energy spurs real growth — and energy has been increasingly restricted over the past twenty years. NACs are another destroyer of America’s heartland.

Elizabeth Nickson is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Her studies and commentaries at the Frontier Centre can be accessed here.   Follow her on Substack here.  Her best-selling book Eco-Fascists can be purchased here.