In praise of video game subsidies

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 4 Comments

Zach Dill/Flickr

Oh that Jesse Brown. He’s at it again. Regular readers probably remember our spirited back and forth recently about Apple’s relative level of importance to technology over the past decade. Now, with his latest post, Jesse has me frothing over another topic: video games.

In his post, Jesse takes issue with the big tax breaks and other financial incentives that video game companies have received in many countries to set up shop there, especially Canada. As Jesse puts it, it’s a highly profitable industry that’s also one of the most subsidized: Continue…

Kill the subsidy, but kill them all

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, June 3, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 247 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

With the impending heat death of the Liberal party—er, rather, with the approaching end of the $2-per-vote party subsidy—the commentariat is consumed with what this will mean for the various political parties, and what Stephen Harper’s motives might be for introducing it.

Well, that last bit’s obvious, isn’t it? He wants to destroy the Liberal party. Everybody knows that. But wait: maybe by obliging the opposition parties to rely more heavily on their own supporters for funds, rather than the taxpayer, he will only create a more motivated cadre of foes, while his own troops grow fat and complacent in office. Or maybe by starving the opposition of funds, he will force them to realize there is only room for one left-wing party, hastening the very unite-the-left movement that could one day be his undoing. But how could such a master strategist not see that? Maybe he wants a united left, the better to…

People. Isn’t it possible, just possible, that he’s doing this because…it’s the right thing to do?

Continue…

Horse-Something

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, March 29, 2010 at 5:36 PM - 66 Comments

Sigh.

The Government of Canada Invests in Horse-Canada Magazine

AURORA, ONTARIO – On behalf of the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, Lois Brown, Member of Parliament (Newmarket–Aurora) today announced funding for Horse-Canada magazine.

Horse-Canada magazine celebrates the joy of owning and caring for horses by contributing to the improvement of horse care and horse management in Canada. The magazine is published five times a year and is distributed across the country. The funds will contribute to the creation of Horse-Canada magazine’s content through Canadian writing, designing, editing, and photography services.

“Our Government is proud to help magazines that speak to Canadians’ interests and passions,” said Minister Moore. “Horse-Canada magazine is an excellent source of information for horse-lovers throughout Canada.”

“I am proud to recognize Canadian Horse Publications as a superb example of a Canadian publisher that produces many high-quality publications serving Canada’s large equestrian industry and enthusiast population,” said Ms. Brown.

“We’re very pleased to receive financial support from the Government of Canada in recognition of Horse Publications Group’s commitment to producing top-class magazines by and for Canadians,” said Jennifer Anstey, Publisher.

[h/t Eye on the Hill - Feds invest in Horse-Canada Magazine]

So the people who don’t read Horse-Canada, which would be almost everyone, will pay to produce five issues a year of Horse-Canada so that the people who do read Horse-Canada don’t have to. This achieves the important public policy goal of … diddlysquat. The people who don’t read Horse Canada get no benefit because others do. The people who do read Horse-Canada are perfectly capable of paying for it themselves. There is no public good argument for subsidy. (Oh, I know: We’re telling ourselves our own stories. About horses.)

Repeat this exercise hundreds of thousands of times and you have the Public Accounts of Canada. Now repeat several hundred thousand more times for the provinces. And again for the municipalities — three levels of government furiously passing money from one group of taxpayers to another and back again, at all points pretending that the money does not come from taxpayers, but from themselves (“The Government of Canada invests in…”)

This particular installment is brought to you by three things:

1) The willingness of publishers such as Jennifer Anstey to take other people’s money — and to say nice things about the government that gave it to her.

2) The willingness of MPs like Lois Brown to take part in this charade, rather than to do her job as a Member of Parliament — as a watchdog on government spending, not a distributor of it — which is precisely to blow the whistle on this kind of thing.

3) The utter shamelessness of ministers like James Moore, who make their living dishing out money that isn’t theirs to people who aren’t entitled to it, in return for thanks they don’t deserve.

Hard right? Hardly

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:28 PM - 115 Comments

Just so we’re clear: I don’t really care whether the Harper government conforms to one definition of conservatism or another. Neither do I carry any brief for conservatism, as such, though I might hold conservative views on specific issues. When I say that conservatism is dead in Canada, I am not mourning or despairing. I am merely stating a fact.

The reason that’s worth stating is that there is a party that continues to carry on as if it were conservative, though it conforms to no known definition of the word. And all right, yes, I’d prefer that people should be who they say they are and do what they say they will do, and that things should be called what they are and not what they are not.

So I suppose in that sense I should be delighted to find, via my friend Paul Wells, that I’ve got it all wrong: that the Conservatives are in fact robustly, unabashedly conservative, that indeed conservatism is “on the march across Canada.” Why, it’s the biggest swing to the right in “half a century.” It’s Harper’s hard right turn.

This is contrarian analysis at its finest. Under the Conservatives, spending, which conservatives once promised to cut, has been growing at a rate of 8 per cent a year. The budget, which conservatives once aimed to balance, is now in deficit to the tune of $54-billion, with literally no end in sight. Corporate subsidies, which conservatives once vowed to eliminate, continue to be doled out by the billions every year; much of the auto industry has been nationalized; the number of regional development agencies has increased by one. Conservative MPs now run around the country boasting of the pork they are bringing home to their ridings, complete with novelty-cheque signing ceremonies.

The top marginal rate of income tax remains where it was a generation ago, while the tax system has been further complicated with the addition of a slew of special credits for children’s sports, transit passes and other good causes. Employment Insurance has been larded up with supplementary payments that make a return to insurance principles more remote than ever. The Canada Pension Plan has been allowed to swell to Caisse de Depot-like dimensions. The great statist vehicles of the 20th century — Canada Post, Via Rail, the CBC — likewise continue to stalk the land, subsidies and privileges intact, while private oligopolies in air travel, finance and telecommunications remain largely protected from foreign competition. All were once the objects of conservative reform efforts. No longer.

The political reforms that were the bedrock of democratic conservatism in the age of the Reform party, aimed at giving more power to ordinary MPs and, via referendums, to the citizens at large, are now but a memory, replaced by a PMO whose all-controlling zeal exceeds even previous records. The philosophy that distinguished the conservative approach to constitutional matters — decentralizing power to the provinces, commitment to the equality of provinces and citizens — has been replaced by massive increases in transfers to the provinces generally and a raft of special concessions — powers, money, an ill-defined “national” status — to Quebec.

But that is to look at the matter through the narrow lens of fiscal, economic, democratic and constitutional conservatism. Rather than obsessing on such arcane matters — you know, the whole size and role of government thing — friend Wells encourages us to see the glass as socially full. Because even as it was giving ground on every one of all those other fronts, the government has been delivering for social conservatism. Why, “look at the victories” social conservatives have won, Wells suggests, “in just the past few months.” Yes, let’s.

Continue…

Unnecessary at any speed

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 84 Comments

It is a special kind of boondoggle that even a politician can resist. People who spend other people’s money for a living aren’t in the habit of asking too many questions at the best of times, still less when even the most colossal waste of funds can be justified as “stimulus.” But when a project promises not only the usual thousands of jobs and billions in spinoff benefits, but to save the earth in the bargain, you’d think they’d be falling over themselves to sign on. But some ideas, it seems, are just too insane.

Hence the latest act in the ongoing, 30-year farce known as high-speed rail. The setting this time is Alberta, but the action is always the same. A consulting firm reports, after many months and millions of dollars, that the latest scheme to link city A to city B by high-speed rail—in this case, Calgary and Edmonton—will cost billions of dollars, in fact billions more than was previously estimated. The politicians take a look at the numbers, blanch, and thank the consultants for their work. The project does not proceed. It never does. Continue…

Less than zero

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 2:23 PM - 59 Comments

Great news! After many years, sales of Bombardier’s much-vaunted — and much-more-subsidized — C-Series regional passenger jet are finally off the ground, with Lufthansa finally commiting to buy the first 30 of the planes.

So let’s see. Governments have put, what is it, $780-million into the project? That means as of now Bombardier is into the taxpayer for roughly $26-million per plane sold, or just over half the sticker price. But it’s all right: it’s a “repayable loan.” Bombardier only needs to sell several hundred of the things and we get all of our money back, ie we earn a zero per cent rate of return. Until that day, we’re in negative territory.

So it’s not quite true, even now, to say that Lufthansa has “bought” 30 jets from Bombardier. More like: the taxpayers of Canada have paid Lufthansa to take them. And Lufthansa has, after much deliberation, accepted.

Stretching the truth about stretch limos

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 10:42 AM - 9 Comments

Odd to see arts and culture making even a slight dent in the federal election campaign, even if only in Quebec. Gotta love this bit of sweater-vest populism from Harper, attacking all those fat-cat arts folk: “I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people, you know, at a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people…Ordinary people understand we have to live within a budget.” (Canadian Press, September 23, 2008)

The Liberals were quick to pounce on it with this reality check:

“Is that the same budget that his then Heritage Minister Bev Oda lived within when she sent back the mini van that had been rented for her and ordered limos for her and her staff at the Junos gala in 2006? She even used the $1,000-a-day limos two days before the Junos even began. What is worse is that she tried to stick the taxpayers with the entire bill, even for the limos she took to partisan Conservative Party events.  Ironically, the hotel she was staying at is connected by underground tunnel to the Metro Centre where the Junos took place.”