| Re:
Toronto's tax advantage, Opinion, Feb. 9
This piece by
Janet Ecker, former Ontario finance minister
and now president of the Toronto Financial
Services Alliance, is an incredible plea for
more tax breaks for the very sector whose
greed and recklessness dumped us into the
current long and deep recession from which we
are still struggling to recover.
Despite
Ecker's contention that further tax breaks for
her industry will create a veritable
trickle-down of wealth and wonderful jobs for
all of us, on the evidence members of the
financial services sector appear mainly to
serve themselves. They use their vast
government-given credit-granting powers to
create both government and individual debt and
then wildly invest the proceeds — other
people's money — to increase their own
private wealth, knowing that the government
will bail them out if their risky business
tanks. And when the risks pay off, the profits
are used not to create jobs but to fatten
corporate cash reserves or fill the wallets of
their CEOs. The current corporate strategy is
not to hire but to downsize and outsource as
much as possible to improve the bottom line.
And lest we
fall for the fairy tale that Canada's banks
largely avoided the financial crunch, the
Harper government has spent at least $125
billion in the past two years buying up
government-insured toxic mortgages from those
very banks, according to the Canadian Centre
for Policy Alternatives, a progressive,
citizen-funded research body. As the CCPA has
also noted, the richest 1 per cent of
Canadians account for 13.8 per cent of
Canadian incomes and they raked in 32 per cent
of all income growth between 1997 and 2007. As
well, Canada's marginal tax rate has been cut
almost in half since 1948.
Unfortunately,
this growing inequity is a global problem
because the world's wealthiest corporations
and individuals have been shifting their
assets to offshore tax havens to the extent
that the annual loss in global tax revenues is
estimated at $500 billion by the CCPA.
Governments could do a lot of public good with
that kind of added income to adequately
finance health and social services, education,
transit and our crumbling infrastructure.
The last
thing the predatory financial services sector
deserves or needs is another tax break.
Terry
O'Connor, Toronto
|
