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Business

The Problem of Corporate Tax Rate Hikes

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Why it’s nearly impossible to avoid causing more harm than good

Are Canadian corporations paying their share? Well, what is their share? And before we go there, just how much are Canadian corporations paying?

According to Statistics Canada, in the second quarter of 2024 the federal government received $221 billion from all income tax revenues (excluding CPP and QPP). Provincial governments took in another $104 billion, and local (municipal) governments got $21 billion. Using those numbers, we can (loosely) estimate that all levels of government raise somewhere around $1.38 trillion annually.

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If you’re curious (and I know you are), that means taxes cost each man, woman, and child in Canada $33,782 each year. Trust me: I feel your pain.

Based on Statistics Canada data from 2022 (the latest comparable data available), we can also say that roughly ten percent of those total revenues come from corporate taxes at both the federal and provincial levels.

Keep that 10:90 corporate-to-personal tax revenue ratio in mind. Because what if raising the corporate tax rate by, say, five percent ends up driving businesses to lay off even one percent of workers? Sure, you’ll take in an extra $7 billion in corporate taxes, but you might well lose the $12 billion in personal income taxes those laid-off workers would have paid.

How Much Should Corporations Pay?

Ok. So how should we calculate a business’s fair share? Arguably, a single dollar’s worth of business activity is actually taxed over and over again:

  • When a corporation earns revenue, it’s taxed on its profits.
  • Any remaining profit may be distributed to shareholders in the form of dividends. Shareholders, of course, will pay income tax on those dividends.
  • Corporations pass on part of the tax burden to consumers through higher prices. When consumers pay those higher prices, a part of every dollar they spend is indirectly taxed through the corporation’s price adjustments.
  • Employee wages paid from after-tax corporate profits are taxed yet again.
  • Shareholders may eventually realize capital gains when they sell their shares. These gains are, naturally, also taxed.

I guess the ideal system would identify a corporate tax rate that takes all those layers into account to ensure that no single individual’s labor and contribution should carry an unreasonable burden. I’ll leave figuring out how to build such a system to smart people.

Does “Soaking Rich Corporations” Actually Work?

Do higher corporate taxes actually improve the lives of Canadians? Spoiler alert: it’s complicated.

Government policy choices generally come with consequences. From time to time, those will include actual solutions for serious problems. But they usually leave their mark in places of which lawmakers were initially barely aware existed.

Here’s where we get to explore some of those unintended consequences by comparing economic performance between provinces with varying corporate tax rates. Do higher rates discourage business investment leading to lower employment, economic activity, and incoming tax revenues? In other words, do tax rate increases always make financial sense?

To answer those questions, I compared each province’s large business tax rate with four economic measures:

Using four measures rather than just one or two gives us many more data points which reduces the likelihood that we’re looking at random statistical relationships. Here are the current provincial corporate tax rates for large businesses:

If we find a significant negative correlation between, say, higher tax rates and outcomes for all four of those measures, then we’d have evidence that higher rates are likely to have a negative impact on the economy (and on the human beings who live within that economy). If, on the other hand, there’s a positive correlation, then it’s possible higher taxes are not harmful.

When I ran the numbers, I found that the GDP per capita has a strong negative correlation with higher tax rates (meaning, the higher the tax rate, the lower the GDP). GFCF per capita and the private sector employment rate both had moderately negative correlations with higher taxes, and my own composite economic index had a weak negative correlation. Those results, taken together, strongly suggest that higher corporate tax rates are indeed harmful for a province’s overall economic health.

Here’s a scatter plot that illustrates the relationship between tax rates and the combined outcome scores:

Alberta, with the lowest tax rate also has the best outcomes. PEI, along with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, share the high-tax-poor-outcome corner.

I guess the bottom line coming out of all this is that the “rich corporations aren’t paying their share” claim isn’t at all simple. To be taken seriously, you’d need to account for:

  • The true second-order costs that higher corporate taxes can impose on consumers, investors, and workers.
  • The strong possibility that higher corporate taxes might cause more harm to economies than they’re worth.
  • The strong possibility that extra revenues might just end up being dumped into the general pool of toxic government waste.

Or, in other words, smart policy choices require good data.

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Automotive

Major automakers push congress to block California’s 2035 EV mandate

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Quick Hit:

Major automakers are urging Congress to intervene and halt California’s aggressive plan to eliminate gasoline-only vehicles by 2035. With the Biden-era EPA waiver empowering California and 11 other states to enforce the rule, automakers warn of immediate impacts on vehicle availability and consumer choice. The U.S. House is preparing for a critical vote to determine if California’s sweeping environmental mandates will stand.

Key Details:

  • Automakers argue California’s rules will raise prices and limit consumer choices, especially amid high tariffs on auto imports.

  • The House is set to vote this week on repealing the EPA waiver that greenlit California’s mandate.

  • California’s regulations would require 35% of 2026 model year vehicles to be zero-emission, a figure manufacturers say is unrealistic.

Diving Deeper:

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, representing industry giants such as General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Hyundai, issued a letter Monday warning Congress about the looming consequences of California’s radical environmental regulations. The automakers stressed that unless Congress acts swiftly, vehicle shipments across the country could be disrupted within months, forcing car companies to artificially limit sales of traditional vehicles to meet electric vehicle quotas.

California’s Air Resources Board rules have already spread to 11 other states—including New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon—together representing roughly 40% of the entire U.S. auto market. Despite repeated concerns from manufacturers, California officials have doubled down, insisting that their measures are essential for meeting lofty greenhouse gas reduction targets and combating smog. However, even some states like Maryland have recognized the impracticality of California’s timeline, opting to delay compliance.

A major legal hurdle complicates the path forward. The Government Accountability Office ruled in March that the EPA waiver issued under former President Joe Biden cannot be revoked under the Congressional Review Act, which requires only a simple Senate majority. This creates uncertainty over whether Congress can truly roll back California’s authority without more complex legislative action.

The House is also gearing up to tackle other elements of California’s environmental regime, including blocking the state from imposing stricter pollution standards on commercial trucks and halting its low-nitrogen oxide emissions regulations for heavy-duty vehicles. These moves reflect growing concerns that California’s progressive regulatory overreach is threatening national commerce and consumer choice.

Under California’s current rules, the state demands that 35% of light-duty vehicles for the 2026 model year be zero-emission, scaling up rapidly to 68% by 2030. Industry experts widely agree that these targets are disconnected from reality, given the current slow pace of electric vehicle adoption among the broader American public, particularly in rural and lower-income areas.

California first unveiled its plan in 2020, aiming to make at least 80% of new cars electric and the remainder plug-in hybrids by 2035. Now, under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the U.S. Transportation Department is working to undo the aggressive fuel economy regulations imposed during former President Joe Biden’s term, offering a much-needed course correction for an auto industry burdened by regulatory overreach.

As Congress debates, the larger question remains: Will America allow one state’s left-wing environmental ideology to dictate terms for the entire country’s auto industry?

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Business

Net Zero by 2050: There is no realistic path to affordable and reliable electricity

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  By Dave Morton of the Canadian Energy Reliability Council.

Maintaining energy diversity is crucial to a truly sustainable future

Canada is on an ambitious path to “decarbonize” its economy by 2050 to deliver on its political commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although policy varies across provinces and federally, a default policy of electrification has emerged, and the electricity industry, which in Canada is largely owned by our provincial governments, appears to be on board.

In a November 2023 submission to the federal government, Electricity Canada, an association of major electric generators and suppliers in Canada, stated: “Every credible path to Net Zero by 2050 relies on electrification of other sectors.” In a single generation, then, will clean electricity become the dominant source of energy in Canada? If so, this puts all our energy eggs in one basket. Lost in the debate seem to be considerations of energy diversity and its role in energy system reliability.

What does an electrification strategy mean for Canada? Currently, for every 100 units of energy we consume in Canada, over 40 come to us as liquid fuels like gasoline and diesel, almost 40 as gaseous fuels like natural gas and propane, and a little less than 20 in the form of electrons produced by those fuels as well as by water, uranium, wind, solar and biomass. In British Columbia, for example, the gas system delivered approximately double the energy of the electricity system.

How much electricity will we need? According to a recent Fraser Institute report, a decarbonized electricity grid by 2050 requires a doubling of electricity. This means adding the equivalent of 134 new large hydro projects like BC’s Site C, 18 nuclear facilities like Ontario’s Bruce Power Plant, or installing almost 75,000 large wind turbines on over one million hectares of land, an area nearly 14.5 times the size of the municipality of Calgary.

Is it feasible to achieve a fully decarbonized electricity grid in the next 25 years that will supply much of our energy requirements? There is a real risk of skilled labour and supply chain shortages that may be impossible to overcome, especially as many other countries are also racing towards net-zero by 2050. Even now, shortages of transformers and copper wire are impacting capital projects. The Fraser Institute report looks at the construction challenges and concludes that doing so “is likely impossible within the 2050 timeframe”.

How we get there matters a lot to our energy reliability along the way. As we put more eggs in the basket, our reliability risk increases. Pursuing electrification while not continuing to invest in our existing fossil fuel-based infrastructure risks leaving our homes and industries short of basic energy needs if we miss our electrification targets.

The IEA 2023 Roadmap to Net Zero estimates that technologies not yet available on the market will be needed to deliver 35 percent of emissions reductions needed for net zero in 2050.  It comes then as no surprise that many of the technologies needed to grow a green electric grid are not fully mature. While wind and solar, increasingly the new generation source of choice in many jurisdictions, serve as a relatively inexpensive source of electricity and play a key role in meeting expanded demand for electricity, they introduce significant challenges to grid stability and reliability that remain largely unresolved. As most people know, they only produce electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines, thereby requiring a firm back-up source of electricity generation.

Given the unpopularity of fossil fuel generation, the difficulty of building hydro and the reluctance to adopt nuclear in much of Canada, there is little in the way of firm electricity available to provide that backup. Large “utility scale” batteries may help mitigate intermittent electricity production in the short term, but these facilities too are immature. Furthermore, wind, solar and batteries, because of the way they connect to the grid don’t contribute to grid reliability in the same way the previous generation of electric generation does.

Other zero-emitting electricity generation technologies are in various stages of development – for example, Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) fitted to GHG emitting generation facilities can allow gas or even coal to generate firm electricity and along with Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) can provide a firm and flexible source of electricity.

What if everything can’t be electrified? In June 2024, a report commissioned by the federal government concluded that the share of overall energy supplied by electricity will need to roughly triple by 2050, increasing from the current 17 percent to between 40 and 70 percent. In this analysis, then, even a tripling of existing electricity generation, will at best only meet 70 percent of our energy needs by 2050.

Therefore, to ensure the continued supply of reliable energy, non-electrification pathways to net zero are also required. CCUS and SMR technologies currently being developed for producing electricity could potentially be used to provide thermal energy for industrial processes and even building heat; biofuels to replace gasoline, diesel and natural gas; and hydrogen to augment natural gas, along with GHG offsets and various emission trading schemes are similarly

While many of these technologies can and currently do contribute to GHG emission reductions, uncertainties remain relating to their scalability, cost and public acceptance. These uncertainties in all sectors of our energy system leaves us with the question: Is there any credible pathway to reliable net-zero energy by 2050?

Electricity Canada states: “Ensuring reliability, affordability, and sustainability is a balancing act … the energy transition is in large part policy-driven; thus, current policy preferences are uniquely impactful on the way utilities can manage the energy trilemma. The energy trilemma is often referred to colloquially as a three-legged stool, with GHG reductions only one of those legs. But the other two, reliability and affordability, are key to the success of the transition.

Policymakers should urgently consider whether any pathway exists to deliver reliable net-zero energy by 2050. If not, letting the pace of the transition be dictated by only one of those legs guarantees, at best, a wobbly stool. Matching the pace of GHG reductions with achievable measures to maintain energy diversity and reliability at prices that are affordable will be critical to setting us on a truly sustainable pathway to net zero, even if it isn’t achieved by 2050.

Dave Morton, former Chair and CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC), is with the Canadian Energy Reliability Council. 

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