With a steady lead in the polls and a healthy war chest of political donations, the Conservative Party is rolling out a trio of new advertisements that are being viewed as aiming to redefine and soften Pierre Poilievre’s image and messaging.
With a steady lead in the polls and a healthy war chest of political donations, the Conservative Party is rolling out a trio of new advertisements that are being viewed as aiming to redefine and soften Pierre Poilievre’s image and messaging.
It seems to me people like PP because of their stance on inflation, which for most is the single biggest issue facing Canada today. Cons are proposing budget cuts, and the NDP are proposing a grocery store tax as solutions. People will probably be more favorable towards whichever solution they think will be the most effective.
But they think that budget cuts will be effective because they’re conservatives, so in the end it’s a circular argument.
If removing gas tax is any indication in Ontario, and gas prices stayed the same because the price was still what the market could bear, cutting taxes on grocery stores just means that the stores make more profit. The NDP idea of taxing profit “seems” more effective, but if anyone familiar with Hollywood accounting will say that profits will disappear before taxes are properly paid. They need to tax income.
They need to tax income based on standard profitability rates.
Yes, that would work.
I’m not sure I follow. Are you suggesting all grocery stores should pay a fixed amount of taxes based on a preset number, independent of their earnings in a given month?
Tax scales as a function of margin.
Though, applying the supply management system to grocery stores would probably work too, good suggestion!
How would this apply to a small, neighborhood grocer VS a large chain like Loblaws? If both are paying the exact same dollar amount, we’d be severely overtaxing one, or undertaxing the other.
You have a small, neighbourhood grocer where you are?
Yes, it is the only grocery store for kilometers, and the only option for me to personally shop at.
Do you mean they need to tax revenue? From what I understand income and profit are the same thing.
Income: money in (gross). Profit: money after expenses (net).
While humans have to pay income tax (because the government is afraid we’d have no money left to tax because we’d spend it all), business pays tax on profit. This means that they can totally “expense” more in a year and pay less tax. The only thing preventing that are stockholders, who often like profit as it gives them dividends and makes the stock more desirable and drives the price of the stock up. This assumes that there is a large number of stockholders and not a filthy rich Food Barron holding all the stock (a la Weston).
So what you’re suggesting is that we repeal the income tax entirely and instead raise the sales tax on all items sold?
A grocery store pays a small amount of whatever they sell to the government, regardless of whether or not they make any profit in a given month (GST & PST). If at the end of the month, they’ve made more money than they’ve expended (grocery stores have massive expenditure as they have to buy all their products from producers/wholesalers) they pay an additional tax on-top of that, as I’ve understood.
Grocery stores are a service (and a risky one at that), and as such still need to make at least a small profit otherwise nobody would operate them. I imagine that by raising sales tax, it would be consumers who absorb the tax, and not management.
No, I’m suggesting that we tax income rather than profit on large corporations run by a dynasty of incredibly wealthy individuals as they seem to be doing a bit too well under the current system.
A sales tax is an income tax. Whenever a grocery store sells an item, they pay 10% to the government. Are you accounting for other ways grocery stores can make money outside of sales (I’m ignorant on what those could be), or do you mean that grocery store managers (individuals) should be paying higher personal income tax?
edit: I have learned that a sales tax is technically something the consumer pays, not the grocery store, but that seems more like semantics to me. It shouldn’t matter if you tax every individual item 10%, or the total sales number 10%, it will work out to be the same.
I’m not saying managers pay, I’m saying that the large chain groceries should pay before they get an opportunity to hide profits.