Bill No. 4 - Corporations Registration Act. - Third Reading

MS. CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise and say a few words about the Corporations Act. This bill is fine, on its face. As we said before, there's no problem in making it cheaper for businesses to incorporate in Nova Scotia, to streamline that process, but we are of the opinion that incorporation fees are not the biggest challenge facing Nova Scotia businesses at the moment.

Advocates for this bill who have been quoted widely have even said that this fee reduction won't result in more businesses of any size incorporating, but that it is mostly a symbolic bill and it sends a signal. The signal is that Nova Scotia will now have the lowest incorporation fees in the country and that's great. But we also have the lowest minimum wage in the country, we also have the fastest-rising tuition fees in the country, some of the highest student debt in the country, some of the worst child poverty in the country. Municipalities are struggling to fix roads and improve infrastructure. Housing and child care are increasingly unaffordable.

I just want to say to the members of this House that those facts also impact our economy and that they also send signals. Those signals are the ones that we certainly wish that the government was paying a little bit more attention to because, for successful businesses and successful entrepreneurs to set up shop here, we need people to feel secure about the future of Nova Scotia to take risks. We need happy consumers with money in their pockets. We hear about this all the time, we need healthy employees who can be reliable and focused at work and we need to be building on the incredible quality of life that we have here. We need to have communities that people want to come and live and invest in, where they feel happy and healthy and secure.

To that end, I would just like to say a few things. In response to my comments at second reading, the minister said that this reduction in fees is an expenditure that will help create more entrepreneurs, create more businesses, and create wealth in the province to generate revenue for the province to fund social programs. Leaving aside, again, the fact advocates for this fee have said that it will not do that, I want to counter the insinuation that our caucus doesn't care about these issues.

This mindset, this focus, on keeping taxes on corporations and the wealthy low, keeping our regulations relatively lax, keeping our cost of labour low - all of these result in less government revenue, which means declining public services. This is trickle-down economics, Madam Speaker, and it's a development strategy that has failed over and over and over again. When Ronald Reagan introduced it, he made similar comments to those that we have heard in this House - that corporate tax cuts would result in more revenue for public services because of business confidence - but it didn't happen.

The evidence from past decades of this is so clear that the IMF is even concluding that its past policy advice in this area was wrong. I could go on and on, Madam Speaker, but I'll say that the study from the IMF has advice for policymakers, which is that efforts by governments to reduce debt-to-GDP ratio by cutting spending to pay down debt are counterproductive because they undermine growth. Instead, countries should pursue growth-stimulating spending - this is from the IMF - and the debt-to-GDP ratio will decline naturally through the GDP growth achieved.

Growth stimulation is what Nova Scotians need, Madam Speaker. This can reduce costs for small businesses in much more meaningful ways than reducing incorporation fees, and we can improve the quality of life for Nova Scotians at the same time. Affordable child care, a living wage, affordable housing, affordable and accessible rural and urban public transit, high-quality schools, functioning health care - these are all things that we can and should be pursuing to make inclusive growth something more than a buzzword, and it's not hard to do. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives publishes an alternative budget every year that looks at inclusive growth.

For advice on where to cut red tape, I might recommend that the government take a look at the work of the Centre for Local Prosperity on creating economic resilience through import replacement. They have specific recommendations on provincial red tape to cut that would support community-driven businesses, thereby creating wealth that would stay and circulate in the community. That's a place-making initiative if I've ever heard one.

All of this is to say, I found the minister's comments and focus on this bill a little bit disappointing because there's so much more we can and should be doing for business in this province. Along with my colleagues, we will be supporting this bill because reducing incorporation costs is great. It's just not that big of a thing.

We're happy to do this, but we wish we were doing a whole lot more.