The Race is on! Canadians go to the polls October 14.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela

If you combine credit card balances, bank loans and mortgages, what is the average indebtedness of individual Canadians? An honest question, as I don’t know the answer, but my instinct tells me it’s going to be more than $22,155. when you start talking about mortgages. Why should the Government not be allowed to borrow as much as an individual Canadian?

Nothing wrong with debt per se. And something like mortgage debt makes sense, when buying a large item like a house. In general, you should actually make payments on your house though, so it will eventually be paid off, instead of continually adding to your debt.

I do like the fact that we are reducing debt in Canada rather than piling it on as in the USA. I’m not totally convinced that reducing it to 0 would be the best thing we could do, but…

[Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela]

@RickJay

1. I think it should be pretty obvious that the government is not actually turning $7.7 billion into $40 billion. You can’t just turn one dollar into five, and if you could, private investors would be lined up from Fredericton to Kamloops to do it. The precise connection between the two numbers is not made on that page, and I am confident there’s a lot of BS in connecting the two. That cite doesn’t even really explain how it came up with the “$40 billion” number; it just says “an economic impact of $40 billion.” Impact in what? How was it measured?

2. I don’t, on the face of it, see what’s different about the government giving X dollars to someone to make a movie, and give X dollars to someone to keep their car factory open. But when the government gives big bucks to a big business everyone (except in the industry the money was given to) screams about corporate welfare, so why is the money any better spent when it’s given to an organization that makes plays instead of widgets?

I like the arts too, but there is a perfectly reasonable argument to be made that the federal government’s role should not be paying people to make art.

3. As is always the case when it comes to something like this, nobody’s talking about the opportunity cost. Expending $7.7 billion on the arts is terrific for the people who get the cheques, but what else could have been done with $7.7 billion? It could have been invested in health care. It could have been given to other types of businesses. It could have been used to repair infrastructure. It could have been used to pay down the national debt. It could have been given back to the Canadian taxpayer in the form of a tax cut. I could sure use the money. And all those methods of dispersing the money would have generated an “economic impact” as well. If you let me keep the money I paid into that pot - which is at least a few hundred bucks - I would have invested it or spent it on local businesses, which also generates economic activity, doesn’t it?

As with a lot of stuff like this the money spent on the arts is being viewed in isolation, as if the rest of Canada doesn’t exist. The evil, evil Tories aren’t just making money vanish or stealing food from the mouths of actors; they’re reallocating dollars from one form of expenditure to another. Unless they actually pile up bales of cash on Parliament Hill and set fire to it, the money’s not vanishing, it’s going elsewhere, either spent on something else or not taxed in the first place. Dollars lost from arts funding unquestionably sucks for the people who would have received it… but it’s great for the people who get the moeny instead. On the whole, the Canadian people aren’t down any money. The question of whether arts funding should be cut cannot be viewed solely with regards to “should we fund arts,” but has to be viewed with questions like “what else could we put this money towards, and would it provide the country with more or less benefit?” and “what is the proper role of government spending?” and “what unintended consequences could result from spending government money on this?”

I don’t see any of these questions being asked in the discussion over arts funding. Regrettably, the discussion I’ve seen in the papers and on the internet is amazingly narrow-minded from BOTH sides of the argument.

I will have to respond in full later, probably after the weekend. Somewhere on the Canada Council site, they explain the basis of the formula - as yet, I haven’t found it, and even though I’m self-employed, I am supposed to be doing other things at this very moment. You may also be interested that the Conference Board of Canada has just released their report Valuing Culture: Measuring and Understanding Canada’s Creative Economy., which covers the same points. I haven’t had the chance to read all 78 pages yet, but in the document highlights, they quote - The Conference Board estimates that the economic footprint of Canada’s culture sector was $84.6 billion in 2007, or 7.4 per cent of Canada’s total real GDP, including direct, indirect, and induced contributions. Culture sector employment exceeded 1.1 million jobs in 2007 That’s even better than the Canada Council’s ‘close to 40 billion’.

Essentially, the argument for government support is that the arts are an income multiplier in ways in which other sectors of the economy are not. Compare Stratford, ON to any other town of a similar size in that area of the world. People come to Stratford from all over to see shows, but they stay in hotels, they eat in restaurants, they shop for antiques, they may have bought specific outfits to go to the theatre, they may have had their hair done, etc., etc. That is the quick version of why investment in the arts is of greater benefit to the government than tax cuts or supporting private sector manufacturing. The longer argument seems to take about 78 pages.

All of this is ‘talking to the taxman about poetry’ for me personally - supporting the arts is just the right thing to do. It’s not a matter of either the arts or (education, health care, highways, pick anything you feel the government should be responsible for) any more than it’s a matter of choosing to feed or clothe or house your kids. The arts are one more facet of society that deserve government support, in my book.

[Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela]

@Kid_A

Just wondering…does anyone actually live in a riding that isn’t a lock for one of the parties?

Who are the parties with the best chance of winning there? What do you think of the incumbent? Will it flip?

Trinity Spadina - it will be an interesting few weeks, and it’s between the Liberals and the NDP. Current incumbent is Olivia Chow, NDP - previously, the riding was represented for many years by Tony Ianno, Liberal. #4 in the list of GTA ridings to watch in this article from The Toronto Star

[RickJay]

@Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela

The Conference Board estimates that the economic footprint of Canada’s culture sector was $84.6 billion in 2007, or 7.4 per cent of Canada’s total real GDP, including direct, indirect, and induced contributions. Culture sector employment exceeded 1.1 million jobs in 2007 That’s even better than the Canada Council’s ‘close to 40 billion’.

Those are totally different numbers, you realize. The Canada Council claims $40 billion as resulting from the government’s $7.7 billion spending. The $84.6 billion total you just now cited is just an estimate of the total size of Canada’s cultural economic output, which obviously does not all rely on government funding to exist.

All of this is ‘talking to the taxman about poetry’ for me personally - supporting the arts is just the right thing to do. It’s not a matter of either the arts or (education, health care, highways, pick anything you feel the government should be responsible for) any more than it’s a matter of choosing to feed or clothe or house your kids. The arts are one more facet of society that deserve government support, in my book.

The latter part of your argument is, at least, a very honest one. But I’m sorry, you can’t handwave away the fact that there is a choice there. All decisions to spend on something are also decisions not to spend on other things.

I guess that’s why I self-identify as an economic “conservative” - I want a reasonably strong argument to be made as to why the government should take my hard earned money and give it to someone else, and I have to admit that “just because” isn’t the most convincing argument that could be made. I’m not opposed to paying taxes, but in the absence of sensible decision making you can spend yourself into the poorhouse. But that’s getting away from this election.

[SweetLime]

@Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela

Trinity Spadina - it will be an interesting few weeks, and it’s between the Liberals and the NDP. Current incumbent is Olivia Chow, NDP - previously, the riding was represented for many years by Tony Ianno, Liberal. #4 in the list of GTA ridings to watch in this article from The Toronto Star

Same here.
The new Liberal candidate is actually Tony Ianno’s wife. So it’s the battle of the wives this year (I hope that didn’t sound sexist - there’s no question that Jack Layton and Tony Ianno are better known than Olivia Chow and Christine Innes)
I can’t imagine the Conservatives taking the riding though.

[Gorsnak]

@Leaffan

The GST wasn’t revenue neutral to my wallet. Look at the increased gasoline taxes alone in the last few years.

How would you know? You never saw how much the MST added to the price you paid for manufactured items. The Tories swore up and down that the GST was revenue neutral. The MST was 13.5%, by the way, though collected on on a narrower group of items than the GST. And I can’t imagine anything more irrelevant to the question of how the budget was balanced in the 90’s than the value of gasoline taxes in 2007.

@Leaffan

Anyway, I do agree Paul Martin did a fine job balancing the books. I still think he was handed a pretty good deal by Mulroney.

Yeah, a $50 billion/year deficit. Real sweet deal, that. Here’s the thing you need to understand about the deficit spending during the Mulroney years - the deficit was trending larger in their final years, not smaller. Observe the last graph on this page, the one labeled “Federal program expenditures and revenues - per cent of GDP”. That big spike in spending in the middle of the graph is the tail end of Trudeau’s last term, and it’s certainly true that Trudeau is the chief culprit in creating the deficit in the first place. You can see that the Tories brought program spending down a ways relative to GDP, and then let it creep back up in their last term. Note also that program spending doesn’t include debt maintenance, which was a huge chunk of the federal budget at that time. Throughout that entire period, the federal deficit stayed in the $40-50 billion/year range. Then you see the precipitous drop in program spending beginning in '93? That was Martin. The revenue as a per cent of GDP (which you can view as the total federal taxation rate, including income, corporate, and sales taxes) does not increase with the advent of the GST in 91 or whenever it was. Revenue stays pretty constant. What got us out of debt was the Liberals cutting spending (actually holding spending constant, and allowing the economy to grow past it, but that’s a cut when you take inflation and such into account). I really don’t see how any objective analysis of the budget balancing of the 90’s can give any significant credit to the Mulroney and Wilson team.

The best case you can make is that they would have done better in the final years, but for that nasty little recession in the early nineties, and that the Liberals got to ride the dotcom boom. Perhaps. But the very sharp change in the federal government’s fiscal situation coincides with the '93 election, not the shift in the economy.

[Spoons]

@Gorsnak

How would you know? You never saw how much the MST added to the price you paid for manufactured items. The Tories swore up and down that the GST was revenue neutral.

I agree that the GST was revenue neutral, but the problem was that (a) Canadians were reminded of it every time they bought anything, even their morning coffee and newspaper, due to it being added on at point-of-sale like PST; and (b) that it went on all kinds of things that had never before had any kind of sales tax: professional services (lawyers, accountants, etc.), club memberships, haircuts, taxi rides, magazine subscriptions, parking lot prices, and so on. If it had been folded into marked and quoted prices like the MST, it might not have raised (and continue to raise) the ire it does with ordinary consumers. Now, some of these have folded it in, but things didn’t start out that way, to my recollection. Still, it’s hard to tell someone that the tax is revenue neutral when one day they paid $0.50 for a newspaper and $1.00 for a takeout coffee, and the next they had to pay $0.54 and $1.07 respectively. I think this may be what Leaffan is getting at.

[Grey]

True. But if a government is going to tax you - it’s nice to see it.

[Gorsnak]

@Spoons

I agree that the GST was revenue neutral, but the problem was that (a) Canadians were reminded of it every time they bought anything, even their morning coffee and newspaper, due to it being added on at point-of-sale like PST; and (b) that it went on all kinds of things that had never before had any kind of sales tax: professional services (lawyers, accountants, etc.), club memberships, haircuts, taxi rides, magazine subscriptions, parking lot prices, and so on. If it had been folded into marked and quoted prices like the MST, it might not have raised (and continue to raise) the ire it does with ordinary consumers. Now, some of these have folded it in, but things didn’t start out that way, to my recollection. Still, it’s hard to tell someone that the tax is revenue neutral when one day they paid $0.50 for a newspaper and $1.00 for a takeout coffee, and the next they had to pay $0.54 and $1.07 respectively. I think this may be what Leaffan is getting at.

Point is, the government didn’t see extra money from the GST over the MST, and so when Leaffan asserted that it was the extra money Mulroney’s GST that let the Liberals balance the budget, he’s just wrong.

[Leaffan]

@Gorsnak

Point is, the government didn’t see extra money from the GST over the MST, and so when Leaffan asserted that it was the extra money Mulroney’s GST that let the Liberals balance the budget, he’s just wrong.

I don’t believe for one minute that the GST was revenue neutral. And I don’t buy it that any green shift will be either.

[Gorsnak]

@Leaffan

I don’t believe for one minute that the GST was revenue neutral. And I don’t buy it that any green shift will be either.

You can believe whatever you like, but in this case you’re just dead wrong. Allow me to introduce you to the facts, in this case drawn from Fiscal Reference Tables, Sept 2007, published by the Department of Finance. We’re interested in 'Table 6: Excise taxes and duties” which gives us a nice breakdown of the annual take from both the MST and GST. Since I honestly have no idea if the MST rate had been tinkered with, I’m not going to look very far back. I’ll compare the last 3 full years of the MST with the first two full years of the GST, a nice random in between year, and the last full year at 7% for the GST.

MST
87-88: $12.927b
88-89: $15.645b
89-90: $17.672b

GST
91-92: $15.311b
92-93: $15.420b
99-00 $23.121b
05-06: $33.020b

So, right from the start we see that the first years of the GST net lower revenues for the federal government than the last years of the MST. Hmm. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps the GST wasn’t revenue neutral; it may have been a tax cut! But let’s check it against GDP before we draw any rash conclusions. For GDP I’m drawing from this table from StatsCan. This table is by calender year instead of fiscal year, so things don’t quite line up but it should be close enough for government work.

GDP
87: $558.949b
88: $613.949b
89: $657.728b
91: $685.367b
92: $700.480b
99: $982.441b
05: $1,371.425b

MST as % of GDP
87-88: 2.31%
88-89: 2.55%
89-90: 2.69%

GST as % of GDP
91-92: 2.23%
92-93: 2.20%
99-00: 2.35%
05-06: 2.41%

So there you have it. The GST was a tax cut. Who’d have thunk it.

[Waenara]

@Gorsnak

So there you have it. The GST was a tax cut. Who’d have thunk it.

Thanks for that great info Gorsnak! Speaking as a Canadian who was only eleven years old when the GST was introduced, I’d never even heard of the MST before. Whenever I’ve heard about the GST I’ve always assumed it was a new tax created just to increase government revenue. You learn something new every day.

[Blind_Man_In_a_Cave]

@Leaffan

I don’t believe for one minute that the GST was revenue neutral. And I don’t buy it that any green shift will be either.

I was just a teen working at my parents small town hardware store but I clearly remember phasing in the GST. All of the wholesale costs my parents had to pay immediately went down, and they subsequently lowered the price of most goods in the store. They were also ‘paid out’ for the value loss of the inventory they already had. So price did indeed lower with the loss of the MST. It was revenue nuetral. Now how the money was redistributed may not be completely fair. My parents ma and pa operation did not lower the price on everything - and not everything the full amount. But they made more money, as I’m sure a lot of business did. But the overall tax the government took in was less following the loss of the MST and the introduction of the GST. Everyone benefited, maybe just not always equally.

[Declan]

@Muffin

I was just tele-spammed by one of the parties. I don’t remember how to fast forward through a message on my answering service, so I had to sit there waiting for it to finish. While I was sitting there, I thought I should call up that party and tell them that I wouldn’t vote for him because of the tele-spamming, only when he gave his name at the end of the tele-spam, it was the party that I am voting for. :smack:

I had this happen to me the last election, the solution for anyone else is to press 3 3 and then delete.

Declan

[Leaffan]

@Gorsnak

You can believe whatever you like, but in this case you’re just dead wrong. Allow me to introduce you to the facts, in this case drawn from Fiscal Reference Tables, Sept 2007, published by the Department of Finance. We’re interested in 'Table 6: Excise taxes and duties” which gives us a nice breakdown of the annual take from both the MST and GST. Since I honestly have no idea if the MST rate had been tinkered with, I’m not going to look very far back. I’ll compare the last 3 full years of the MST with the first two full years of the GST, a nice random in between year, and the last full year at 7% for the GST.

MST
87-88: $12.927b
88-89: $15.645b
89-90: $17.672b

GST
91-92: $15.311b
92-93: $15.420b
99-00 $23.121b
05-06: $33.020b

So, right from the start we see that the first years of the GST net lower revenues for the federal government than the last years of the MST. Hmm. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps the GST wasn’t revenue neutral; it may have been a tax cut! But let’s check it against GDP before we draw any rash conclusions. For GDP I’m drawing from this table from StatsCan. This table is by calender year instead of fiscal year, so things don’t quite line up but it should be close enough for government work.

GDP
87: $558.949b
88: $613.949b
89: $657.728b
91: $685.367b
92: $700.480b
99: $982.441b
05: $1,371.425b

MST as % of GDP
87-88: 2.31%
88-89: 2.55%
89-90: 2.69%

GST as % of GDP
91-92: 2.23%
92-93: 2.20%
99-00: 2.35%
05-06: 2.41%

So there you have it. The GST was a tax cut. Who’d have thunk it.

Thanks for that. I will now admit that my assumption (based only upon personal expenses) was absolutely incorrect. Good info!

Cheers.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela

[Complete hijack] - Sorry, lad, I tried sending you a PM yesterday that obviously went nowhere…

Le Ministre de l’au-delà comes from a song…

Thanks. Got it.

[RickJay]

Not much chatter in this thread.

Maybe it’s because the candidates aren’t saying anything worth commenting on. As near as I can tell the messages are as follows:

CONSERVATIVE: “Stephen Harper: Leadership you can trust, because, technically, he’s the only one of the party leaders who has ever been Prime Minister.”

LIBERAL: “Green Shift, Green Shift, Green Shift (repeat 5,000 times)”

NDP: “Corporations baaaaaad! Baaaaaaaaaaaad! BAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!”

GREEN: “We wanna be part of the debate!”

BLOC: “Vive le Quebec libre! Mais, pour etre honnete, nous sommes vraiment seulment interesse dane la plan de retraite.”

[Gorsnak]

I was rather disappointed to see all the blather about gas prices yesterday. Sadly, the average Canadian’s understanding of why prices are spiking seems to be somewhat misguided. I think Jack about lost my potential vote pandering on that issue, leaving me with no idea who I’m going to vote for.

[Cat_Whisperer]

I’ve gone and checked out the platforms (didn’t bother with the NDP since they aren’t contenders and I’m not socialist enough to vote for them anyway). My impression: this is Harper’s election to lose. He is coming into it with strong leadership, a strong platform, and strong history, and for some reason, his campaign is making me cringe (and I support the Conservative party). I’m trying to figure out what the hell is the matter with the Conservative party, that they think this campaign is a good idea. Why you gotta be so mean? Why can’t you have a little dignity?

The Liberal platform is a joke. The Conservative platform gives us facts and figures; the Liberal platform says vague, nebulous things about we like the environment, and we will make everything good if you just vote for us. As I’ve mentioned already, the Green platform is silly.

[Kid_A_1]

@Gorsnak

I was rather disappointed to see all the blather about gas prices yesterday. Sadly, the average Canadian’s understanding of why prices are spiking seems to be somewhat misguided. I think Jack about lost my potential vote pandering on that issue, leaving me with no idea who I’m going to vote for.

You’re not the only one. I was hoping to see something in the paper this morning that wasn’t pandering to the public and actually addressed the issue with some facts. I didn’t see what May’s response was but a protest vote thrown in their direction is looking more and more likely.

And RickJay’s summary of the first week is bang-on.