Hi Tim.
I'm curious about your platform. As I see it, if prisoners are going to be doing jobs that are normally done by municipal workers, while the PCs intend to shrink the public service, then the PC platform will raise the unemployment rate as many jobs will be lost.
The idea that employers will lay people off because of "higher taxes" is simply wrong. Are you trying to say that, for example, the Ford Motor Company will stop selling cars in Canada if we return the corporate tax rate to 1990s levels; they'll just pack up and go home? Nonsense. Corporations will remain operating in Canada so long as their product or service is profitable. However, the corporate tax rate only positively affects their profitability. Corporations pass their higher taxes along to the consumer in terms of higher prices. Higher prices do lessen demand for the product slightly, but corporations have mitigated the loss through higher revenue. Companies do not lay people off because of a tax hike, because such would affect their productivity negatively. They would not then be able to "bounce back" with improved market conditions, nor would they be able to react to the actions of their market competition.
Furthermore, numerous studies have already looked at the link between tax rates and employment and have determined that there is no statistical correlation. Taxes go up, employment stays about the same; taxes go down, employment stays about the same.
The idea that tax cuts lead to job growth has also been demonstrated as false, using market principles. If I build bikes at my factory, I will hire employees when I need more bikes to be built for customers. More bikes will be built when demand for bikes is higher. As a corporate tax cut does nothing to stimulate demand for the product, my company will not sell more bikes. Instead, the tax cut will allow me to be more profitable. As a consequence, my business will not invest these profits into new hires, as I am not selling more bikes than I used to be selling. In fact, there are costs associated with overproduction, as well (warehousing, etc). Unless demand for bikes increases, my business will not hire a new employee. And with so many people newly unemployed by the loss of public sector jobs, there will be fewer people able to purcahse my bike, which translates into lower demand for my bikes.
Allowing small businesses to be more profitable stimulates the broader econnomy by provoking more money to be spent local to the business (ie: in Ontario); in other words, small business people tend to spend their profits on goods and services in their communities. However, such does not occur when tax breaks are given to larger and multinational enterprises. Their profitability gains realized through tax cuts manifest as shareholder dividends, the vast majority of which are international in nature. Such money is not likely to be spent in Canada, let alone Ontario.
In reality, once the corporate tax rate is competitive with other jurisdictions, further corporate tax cuts simply add to corporate profitability at the expense of revenues needed for social services and governmental programs. This process has been demonstrated time and time again over the course of the last fifty years. Canada currently has the same corporate tax rate as many "third-world" resource exporting countries, and Ontario is also exceptionally competitive with competing jurisdictions. In fact, it's the lowest tax rate of any developed industrial nation. Surely, as corporate tax cuts do little to stimulate the consumer economy, they do not need to go any lower.
So my question is the following: since corporate tax cuts will not magically produce jobs, what do you intend to do to keep Canadians -- especially the tens of thousands of public sector employees you plan on reducing -- working and paying taxes?
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