Business
Federal taxes hurting B.C. wineries and craft brewers
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
By Carson Binda
Trudeau has a habit of saying his government is working to make life more affordable, but tax hikes do just the opposite.
Federal tax hikes are hitting a crucial industry in British Columbia at the worst possible time.
The alcohol industry across B.C. has had a tough couple months. Between forest fires, droughts and cold snaps, wine-growers and craft brewers will have a harder time turning a profit this year. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is about to make things even worse.
In April, Trudeau is hiking federal taxes on beer, wine and spirits by almost five per cent. Taxes already account for about half the price you pay for alcoholic beverages. That means every time you buy a bottle of wine or a six-pack of your favourite craft beer, you’re also buying one for the taxman.
To add insult to injury, the tax hike is automatic, meaning our elected MPs won’t vote on the increased taxes on wine and other alcoholic beverages.
Back in 2017, the Trudeau government introduced a tax escalator on alcoholic beverages. The escalator means the taxes on beer, wine, ciders and spirits goes up automatically every year, without a vote in Parliament.
Regardless of your views on alcohol, it’s wrong for the government to hike taxes without letting the democratic process weigh in.
Trudeau shouldn’t be jacking up taxes on a struggling industry, especially not without letting our elected representatives voice their concerns by actually voting on the hike.
Wine growing is an important industry in B.C., with more than 12,000 people across every region of B.C. employed. It creates more than $3.75 billion for the provincial economy. Almost 1.2 million tourists visit B.C. wineries every year. There are 341 separate wineries in our province alone, with hundreds more wineries across the country.
While taxes on B.C. VQA wines are less than the taxes on non-VQA wines, VQA wines only make up around 19 per cent of sales. Local non-VQA wines in B.C. are the most frequent type of wine sold in the province.
Craft beer is also a big driver of the local economy. There are more than 200 craft breweries in B.C. alone, which made almost $230 million in revenue in 2020. Around 4,500 people are employed by craft breweries in B.C. And more than 95 per cent of wineries, breweries, cideries and distillers in B.C. are small businesses.
A majority of the 1,100 craft breweries in Canada are in rural areas where they are important employers. It’s wrong for the small businesses in rural communities to be picking up the bill for big-spending politicians in Ottawa.
Small businesses selling alcoholic beverages are also going to be paying the tab for Trudeau’s tax binge. Think about all the pubs, bars and restaurants that make ends meet by selling beverages to thirsty British Columbians.
Instead of hitting the gems of our provincial economy with automatic tax hikes, we should be supporting those small mom-and-pop brewers and pubs to ensure they can keep employing thousands of British Columbians and pumping billions into our economy.
Credit where credit is due: Some federal politicians like MP Tracy Gray in Kelowna have been vocal in their opposition to the escalator tax. But that’s falling on deaf ears in the prime minister’s office.
Trudeau has a habit of saying his government is working to make life more affordable, but tax hikes do just the opposite.
If Trudeau really wanted to help the little guy get ahead, he wouldn’t be hiking taxes on small businesses and families.
Carson Binda is the B.C. Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Fr0m Heartland Daily News
By Rick Whitbeck
The Biden administration’s decision to raise tariffs on Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles, steel, computer chips, and other technological products is the epitome of a penny wise and a pound foolish.
To much of the nation, the news was a reelection flip-flop, or an attempt to prop up the electric vehicle industry Biden has prioritized since he took office, as part of his green agenda. The international supply chain for electric vehicles isn’t going to magically stop running through the Chinese Communist Party anytime soon.
If Biden really wanted to curb Chinese geopolitical power, he would make fundamental changes to his administration’s history of attacking domestic mining opportunities. Allowing development of copper, graphite, nickel, cobalt, and other critical and strategic minerals right here at home would go much further than imposing tariffs.
Biden has demonstrated affinity for promoting “net zero” policies and forcing transitions away from traditional energy supplies of oil, gas, and coal. In a nutshell, the attacks on domestic mining projects seem completely counterproductive.
According to the International Energy Agency, staggering quantities of subsurface elements will need to be mined by at least five times their current worldwide production by 2040 to meet the Biden administration’s green energy goals. Graphite, cobalt, and lithium all will be needed in quantities exceeding 25 times (or more) their current supplies. In the next quarter century, we will need twice as much copper than has been produced in the last 3,000 years. All of which is impossible when Biden won’t let us dig.
The U.S. has tremendous opportunities to have our own mineral resources. Yet, the Biden administration has thwarted their development at nearly every turn. For example, massive copper and nickel deposits could be developed in Minnesota at the Twin Metals and Duluth Complex projects, but Biden has ordered each of them off-limits for development. The Resolution Copper prospect in Arizona met a similar fate, with the Department of Interior placing on “indefinite hold” its approval.
The Western Hemisphere’s largest copper prospect is Alaska’s Pebble Mine. Kowtowing to environmental extremists—and ignoring a clean U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Final Environmental Impact Statement—the Environmental Protection Agency continues to stymie progress on a deposit worth more than $500 billion. All the while shutting down the possibility of 700 full-time jobs in an area of rural Alaska that has seasonal unemployment exceeding 20%.
Alaska has been the target of more than 60 administrative and executive orders targeting its resource-based economy since Biden assumed office. One of the most recent took place on Earth Day, when a congressionally-authorized road to the Ambler Mining District—an area rich in copper, zinc, and other strategic and critical minerals—was stopped by the Department of Interior.
Just like with the Resolution mine in Arizona, the Interior Department used “Indigenous opposition” as its deciding factor, even though many villages and tribes closest to the mining district publicly support the project and its future employment opportunities. In Alaska, the Biden administration literally blocks the road to the minerals Biden’s tariffs claim to protect.
Alaska’s governor, Michael Dunleavy, along with its entire congressional delegation, has been openly critical of the continued hypocrisy of the Biden administration when it comes to talking “net zero” and acting with vigor to oppose domestic mining projects. The same response has come from many within the Minnesota and Arizona congressional community. They’ve been unable to break through to the administration, as Team Biden chooses to listen to eco-activists and career bureaucrats with an anti-development agenda.
What would hurt China, empower America, and begin to chip away at the global imbalance would be mining and processing our crucial minerals and elements domestically. Let’s see if the Biden administration wises up to that fact, or if America tires of being subservient to the CCP and makes fundamental changes to federal leadership in November.
Rick Whitbeck is the Alaska State Director for Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs and fights back against economy-killing and family-destroying environmental extremism. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @PTFAlaska
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
To read more about domestic mining to escape reliance on China, click here.
To read more about clean energy and mining, click here.
From the Fraser Institute
The cost of regulation from all three levels of government to Canadian businesses totalled $38.8 billion in 2020, for a total of 731 million hours—the equivalent of nearly 375,000 fulltime jobs.
One does not have to look too deeply into recent headlines to see that Canada’s economic conditions are declining and consequently eroding the prosperity and living standards of Canadians. Between 2000 and 2023, Canada’s per-person GDP (a key indicator of living standards) has lagged far behind its peer countries. Business investment is also lagging, as are unemployment rates across the country particularly compared to the United States.
There are many reasons for Canada’s dismal economic conditions—including layer upon layer of regulation. Indeed, Canada’s regulatory load is substantial and growing. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of regulations in Canada grew from about 66,000 to 72,000. These regulations restrict business activity, impose costs on firms and reduce economic productivity.
According to a recent “red tape” study published by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), the cost of regulation from all three levels of government to Canadian businesses totalled $38.8 billion in 2020, for a total of 731 million hours—the equivalent of nearly 375,000 fulltime jobs. If we apply a $16.65 per-hour cost (the federal minimum wage in Canada for 2023), $12.2 billion annually is lost to regulatory compliance.
Of course, Canada’s smallest businesses bear a disproportionately high burden of the cost, paying up to five times more for regulatory compliance per-employee than larger businesses. The smallest businesses pay $7,023 per employee annually to comply with government regulation while larger businesses pay a much lower $1,237 per employee for regulatory compliance.
And the Trudeau government has embarked on a massive regulatory spree over the last decade, enacting dozens of major regulatory initiatives including Bill C-69 (which tightens Canada’s environmental assessment process for major infrastructure projects), Bill C-48 (which restricts oil tankers off Canada’s west coast) and electric vehicle mandates (which require all new cars be electric by 2035). Other examples of government red tape include appliance standards to reduce energy consumption from household appliances, home efficiency standards to reduce household energy consumption, banning single-use plastic products, “net zero” nitrous oxide emissions regulation, “net zero” building emissions regulations, and clean electricity standards to drive net emissions of greenhouse gases in electricity production to “net zero” by 2035.
Clearly, Canada’s festooning pile of regulatory red tape is badly in need of weeding. And it can be done. For example, during a deregulatory effort in British Columbia, which appointed a minister of deregulation in 2001, there was a 37 per cent reduction in regulatory requirements in the province by 2004.
Rather with plowing ahead with an ever-growing pallet of regulations to be heaped upon Canadian businesses and citizens, government should reach for the garden shears and start reducing the most recent regulatory expansions (before they have time to do too much harm), and then scour the massive strangling forest of older regulations.
Whacking through the red tape would go a long way to help Canada’s economy out of its dismal state and back into competitive ranges with its fellow developed countries and our neighbours in the U.S.
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