The other side

Lest anybody get the impression that the Vicq commission report is uncontroversial, a friend who writes for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives points out some problems:

First,...different tax reforms would achieve superior results at less cost than the Committee’s recommendations. Second,...the public funds raised by business taxes are needed for economic-development initiatives and other important social priorities...

Because Equalization could be important to Saskatchewan’s business taxes, the provincial government should not commit to specific reforms in its March 2006 budget. Instead, the Government of Saskatchewan should wait for the spring 2006 report of the Expert Panel on Equalization and the Government of Canada’s response to it. More fundamentally, the provincial government must question whether corporate-tax cuts, as opposed to tax credits or public programs, are the most cost-effective way to increase investment in Saskatchewan.

The entire article is worth a read, as it seems pretty clear that the Vicq committee didn't consider some important possibilities. That's particularly problematic with regard to the equalization issues when these were explicitly part of the committee's mandate.

It's easy enough to see where part of the problem lies based on the submissions heard by the Committee. On a very quick review, only CUPE seems to have addressed the possibility that social investment may be more important than tax cuts generally, and most of the submissions seem to have been to the effect of "lower taxes now!" without any significant discussion of the nuanced policy alternatives put forward by the CCPA. While more submissions from the CCPA and other organizations on the front end would obviously have helped matters, the committee itself should have been alive to some of the issues pointed out now.

So what to do now? More to come.