Moonbox

Okay, be honest now: When you the GST was dropped 2%, were you running around telling everyone that GST was reduced by 15%?

Think of how much more cross-border shopping we would see, and how impossible it would be to keep track of purchasing online etc.

It's the definition of a useless feel-good policy. It's something that out-of-touch idealists can really get behind.

I mean no offense, but that's just a way of reframing the data to look worse. While 29/33 does indeed equal 1.13, that's not really the number that matters. The only number that matters is what the increase to your marginal rate will be...and that's still just 4%. Well that's your first mistake. I can't imagine why anyone would want to live in Toronto if they're retired. Yes they add up, and no it's not in isolation, but it's exceedingly unlikely that this 4% will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and forces Canada's wealthy to flee the country. Perhaps, but this line of thinking suggests that increasing income tax will be offset by more tax avoidance. That's completely false.

A $30 labor cost handicap makes it rather difficult to do so. No doubt it would have helped, but it would have done very little to solve the main problem the Big Three faced: a significant cpu gap for similar vehicles compared to foreign competitors. Yeah...but then that suggests that foreign auto makers haven't been guilty of the exact same mistakes. How many of these beauties did you ever see? How's has the Scion brand been faring for that matter?

Corporate taxes are a different issue altogether and not particularly relevant for a personal income tax discussion.

It would reduce emissions by driving industry out of the province and to China...as seen in Europe.

This is the standard argument against such measures, and it's echoed everywhere around the world. Realistically, however, it rings a little hollow. For the vast vast majority of people, a 4% increase to their tax burden is not going to cause them to uproot. Things like friends, children, grandchildren etc will all get in the way of such sentiments. Many of these folks also rely on their local/domestic business to continue making this sort of money. Add to it that you have to find somewhere you could relocate to permanently and happily and it's not as simple a decision as it sounds.

Yeah that's brilliant. That's like...refusing a court settlement and going to court, then losing handily in court, and then hoping you could still take the settlement.

double-post.

Sure, but we're talking about decisions made back in the 80's and early 90's, back when Honda's were still called rice-burners and you could count on your Cavalier rusting our within a few years. The Big Three and the unions got away with all of their BS because they didn't have any competition. Fast forward to the mid to late 90's and it's a completely different story. At that point GM/Ford/Chrysler were scrambling to adapt and the unions simply refused to see reality.

Dinosaur practices, yes. Unfortunately, when it was realized that the Big Three were no longer competitive with the likes of Toyota/Honda and that changes needed to be made, it wasn't management that prevented it. The UAW was the millstone around the company's neck. Nobody said that. Foreign automakers do not have unionized work forces in North America. In fact, many of them have essentially zero industrial footprint here. As for back home, they're heavily subsidized by their governments. Toyota, for instance, gets significant public subsidies to help pay for union benefits/pensions in Japan. What's even better is that it's one of the most xenophobic countries in the developed world and people buy nothing but Japanese cars there. It's kind of nice having a iron-clad home base. except that's rather difficult when your relationship with your workers constitutes dealing with idiots like Buzz Hargrove.

That's kind of my point thanks. All of these cream-puff ideas demonstrate a flabbergasting lack of world/economic perspective.

I thought this was an interesting article. I've been saying a lot of the things it says for years now, particularly the folly of imposing carbon taxes and green energy programs in the absence of trade tariffs on countries without similar measures in place. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/wynnes-green-scheme-could-deal-massive-blow-to-ontario-and-canada/article24233437/ "many factories and industrial plants, already struggling with high power costs, found it more profitable to shut down and sell their carbon credit allocation in the carbon trading market. As a result, the bulk of Europe’s emissions reductions have been achieved by the departure of energy-intensive industries to overseas locations...And since European industry was already among the world’s most energy efficient, the emissions embedded in most of those imported goods are higher than when the same goods were produced domestically." "Adding irony to this job-exporting fiasco, some European countries, including Germany, have implemented subsidies in an effort to keep the remnants of their industrial sector from shutting down. German electricity consumers paid some €20-billion ($27.2-billion) in green power subsidies last year, while at the same time their government spent billions of euros to help industrial plants survive the combination of high electricity and cap-and-trade costs that made them uncompetitive in the first place." I know lots of people disagree, but these measures don't appear to do much more than export our industry and pollution off-shore. If we're going to implement these measures ourselves, we need to be forcing the places we do business overseas to do the same.

The one thought I have is how can the City of Ottawa stop Uber, or ride-sharing websites like it, from operating? Ultimately, I see this finally being what puts an end to the utterly ridiculous system of the Taxi Driver "Guilds" we see all over North America. There will eventually be two options: 1) Make sites like Uber illegal, thus forcing people who want to use such services to do it on the low (probably not safe) or 2) Legitimize them and give up on trying to make huge cash for the cities (and cab companies) through Taxi systems that make it impossible for the people who need them to afford them.

That's a little bit oversimplified/black & white...but you have a point. That was funny well said.

Thanks for the lesson. I know what collective bargaining is. You're responding to a tongue-in-cheek comment I made mocking the process. That's my fault. It was more subtle and less clever than I'd hoped. Let's move on. Unfortunately, the bargaining process is not so cut-and-dry. In the case of the auto industry, the negotiating positions weren't even-strength. Really!? Guys like Rick Wagoner (GM's former CEO) were earning $1/year in salary leading up to/during the crisis...and then they lost their jobs altogether! Regardless, this is another argument altogether. In the framework of this discussion, it's completely irrelevant.

because they couldn't afford not to operate at that point. They were heavily indebted and they had enormous built-in structural costs. Even if they shut down and all of the workers went on strike, GM/Chrysler/Ford would still have been bleeding money. They HAD to continue operating to not make the situation worse than it already was, thus they had little bargaining power with the UAW.

If it means not having to pay for more bloated teacher salaries/benefits? It appears the answer to that question everywhere in Canada is YES. Would we prefer to stop overpaying our teachers and thus be able to afford more of them? Absolutely. Unfortunately, it's pretty damn obvious that the teachers are more interested in their compensation and vacation than the actual students.

Clearly you missed the point. There's plenty wrong with it. When Party 1 makes unreasonable demands, refuses concessions and forces agreements that that Party 2 is in no position to stand up to, it's rather bizarre logic suggesting that Party 2 is equally responsible for the consequences. What's even worse, however, is that in this case Party 1 wasn't even really held responsible for the outcome at all. The shareholders lost all their money and, even worse, the taxpayers footed the bill - all so that North America's most unreasonable and militant unions wouldn't have to reap what they'd sown.

I guess it depends on your angle doesn't it? Teachers and the public service sector probably aren't going to be happy out it at all. A lot of taxpayers will be, especially the ones in BC.

For anyone who has been following the topic, Justice Griffin's previous two rulings regarding the BC Teacher's Federation have been effectively neutered by the appeal court with a 4-1 majority. The BCTF's insistence that it was unconstitutional for the government to determine class sizes and composition outside of collective bargaining has, according to the court of appeal, been quashed. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bcs-teachers-federation-would-do-well-to-raise-the-white-flag/article24200726/ As the article reads, the most critical point of this ruling is that class sizes and composition are not just matters of teachers' working conditions, but also of education policy: "The province is charged with the democratic responsibility to develop education policy in the public interest and is held politically accountable for the policy choices it makes." The implication suggests that collective bargaining cannot dictate education policy. What qualifies as education policy is unclear to me, but one extremely interesting point on the debate was the court's decision that collective bargaining with the Teacher's Federation cannot "...unduly interfere with the legislature’s constitutional role in allocating public resources." All in all, it appears to be a huge blow to collective bargaining in the Public Sector. An appeal to the Supreme Court is in the works but apparently its chances are minute.

So why is it called collective bargaining then? Umm... I think you need to re-examine that logic.

everyone...like the auto industry where Toyota enjoyed a $37/hr labour cost advantage over GM prior to the recession? Yeah that worked out perfectly from everyone...especially the US and Canadian taxpayers who had to bail out CAW/UAW pensions...

Certainly there are some things the government doesn't need to be involved in, but infrastructure ownership is not one of them. The efficiency advantages of privatization will be offset by the inevitable push for shareholder returns so as tax payers we'll end up paying more, not less. The problem with Ontario hydro costs are mostly to do with our governments' baffling incompetence. It could easily be fixed with a touch of integrity and realism (Tim Hudak could would have done it if he wasn't such political dolt), but Kathleen Wynne is taking the easy way out. Rather than take the axe to a bloated Crown corporation themselves, they're going to pass the buck and let the private sector do it for them. A privatized corporation, however, has zero interest in providing competitive power rates to Ontario.