Now I understand why my Canadian friends are so upset about the election of Donald Trump.
Canadian jobs are at risk of flocking south under Trump
By
Lorne Gunter ,
Edmonton Sun : Saturday, November 12, 2016
Donald Trump’s election to the presidency is really bad news for the federal Liberals. It is equally bad news for their provincial counterparts in Ontario and for the NDP wrecking-ball of a government in Alberta.
Trump is not bad news because his victory has caused progressives’ hair to spontaneously combust (although that’s been fun to watch) [CaptRenault: I agree
]. And his rattling of politically correct elites in the U.S. threatens to generate a spillover rattle in Canada.
But that’s not why he is trouble for them.
Trump is a danger to our federal and provincial governments because two of his policies with the greatest chance of being implemented quickly are corporate tax reduction and a no carbon tax.
In a world in which capital, plants and jobs move quickly and (comparatively) easily, if Canada and its most industrial provinces have uncompetitive corporate tax rates, plus heavy environmental regulations and carbon taxes/pricing, business and employment will drain quickly to the States.
Starting in less than two months, Alberta’s government will impose a new carbon tax on everything that moves. The $3 billion it is slated to raise annually will be a tremendous added burden on the province’s already depressed economy.
Even when it looked as if the Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, would win and continue President Barack Obama’s climate-alarmism policies, Alberta’s oil companies were having trouble attracting investment because of the impending carbon tax.
But that difficulty wooing investors will double or triple now that Trump has won. With an anti-green Republican in the White House and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, there is almost no chance the U.S. will adopt its own carbon pricing.
Already uncompetitive Alberta will become even more uncompetitive as U.S. taxes go down and Alberta’s go up.
Beginning in 2018, when Ottawa’s carbon tax kicks in (and increases and increases and increases every year until 2022), the job-killing effects will be spread nationwide.
The same is true of Ontario. Nearly a decade of “green” energy obsession has produced few environmental benefits, but it has given Ontario the highest electricity costs on the continent.
Power costs are the third or fourth highest input cost in most manufacturing operations. So the doubling of hydro rates since 2009 has helped drive away hundreds of thousands of jobs. And they have not gone to Mexico, but rather to Ohio, Michigan and Iowa, among other states.
The green policies of Ottawa and the provinces only made sense if Clinton had won and followed our lead. If Clinton had won, the competitiveness gap between Canada and the U.S. wouldn’t have been as large in the Americans’ favour as it is about to become.
But now the gap on carbon taxes and environmental regulations is going to be – as Trump says in his New Yorker accent – “Yoo-ge.”
That carbon-tax gap is bad enough, but Trump has also promised to lower corporate tax rates Stateside.
Believe it or not, Canada actually had an edge over the U.S. on corporate taxes when Stephen Harper was our PM and Obama was the prez. Indeed, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of corporate tax in the industrialized world.
If Trump even just rolls back those rates to Canadian levels, that will make the U.S. more attractive still.
Trump could also reinvigorate the coal industry in the States and stop the forced closure of coal-fired power plants, further lowering U.S. power costs.
Canada’s Liberals and New Democrats live in an isolated fantasyland. In their minds, if they simply will something – such as a prosperous, zero-carbon economy – it will be so.
They’re about to find out the hard way what hogwash that is.