QUEEN’S PARK: Immediate, broad-based and substantial tax cuts create jobs, growth and prosperity, and are a crucial part of any integrated and comprehensive plan to balance the budget and rebuild Ontario’s economy, PC Leader Tim Hudak said today.

Significant tax relief is a key path brought forward by the PC Caucus in their latest white paper – Paths to Prosperity: An Agenda for Growth. “I want Ontario to once again be the engine of Canadian job creation and to have top-quality public services,” Hudak said. “These are interdependent, not separate, goals.

“We can’t have one without the other, Ontarians deserve both, and tax cuts can help achieve both goals because tax cuts create jobs, and more jobs mean more revenue,” Hudak added.

Hudak cited that the top marginal tax rate in Ontario is nearly 50 per cent – the second highest personal income tax rate in Canada. Over the last nine years the provincial government has blindsided Ontarians and job creators with tax increases, tax hikes, hidden taxes and cancelled promised tax relief.

Deputy PC Leader and Job Creation Task Force Chair, Christine Elliott said, “economists have demonstrated that overly high tax rates can actually reduce tax dollars collected because they are a strong disincentive for individuals to work and businesses to produce goods and services”.

An Agenda for Growth identifies three main tax rates that if reduced means jobs and growth in Ontario: taxes on business profits, peoples’ income and the sales tax on just about everything we buy. Hudak said “given the depth of Ontario’s debt crisis, and the urgency with which we need to balance our books, we need to be strategic about which rates we choose to reduce.”

The latest Paths to Prosperity discussion paper is soliciting the best advice from businesses, individuals, economists, think tanks and associations on which tax cut would have the most impact on job creation, including:

  • Business income tax;
  • Personal income tax;
  • Provincial portion of the harmonized sales tax.

To read An Agenda for Growth and to share your own ideas to create jobs and turn the economy around, visit: www.ontariopc.com/paths-to-prosperity.