Frank Stronach

Unleash small business by exempting them from corporate taxes

May 2, 2023

Small businesses are often described as the backbone of our economy — and that’s because they are. They develop new products and technologies that drive economic growth and create new jobs. But if small businesses are so important, why aren’t we doing more to support their success and foster even greater growth? Small businesses bore the brunt of the economic fallout during the pandemic. The on-again, off-again lockdowns dried up revenue, drove away customers and made employee retention very difficult. I often wonder how many of the small businesses that went under during the pandemic could have become another Magna International? Legendary entrepreneur Richard Branson famously said that all big businesses start small. When I started Magna, I opened up

High interest rates and inflation has put Canadians on a financial precipice

August 23, 2023

Canadians are worried about runaway inflation, rising interest rates and their personal finances. Many are burdened with a lot of debt. And a growing number of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque and just scraping by. A study published last month by MNP, Canada’s largest consumer insolvency firm, showed that more than 50 per cent of Canadians say they are only $200 away from being unable to meet their financial obligations. What’s more, according to MNP, two-thirds of Canadians are concerned about their ability to pay their debts due to rising interest rates, and approximately three in five Canadians say they’ll be in financial difficulty if interest rates go much higher. That sort of stress and economic worry is putting

Fixing capitalism by mandating profit sharing

April 11, 2023

One of my favourite books published over the last few years is “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,” by Robert Reich, a public policy professor at UC Berkeley and secretary of labour in the Clinton administration. Reich’s main argument is that capitalism is damaged and that the rich are getting richer while the poor and middle class are getting poorer, creating the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in nearly a century. He’s right that capitalism is a system that enriches only a few. I also agree with Reich’s call for a revival of corporate profit sharing, which was much more widespread in the 20th century, when some of America’s biggest and most well-known companies had profit-sharing programs.

Government bureaucracy is the cholesterol clogging up the economy

July 11, 2023

Back in the early 1980s, when commercial computers first came onto the market, they were sold with a big promise: they could do the work of an entire floor of employees in a typical office building and could dramatically decrease the amount of paperwork and paper filing for businesses and organizations. But it never happened. If anything, the piles of paperwork, government forms and compliance reports that needed to be filled out increased enormously — and with it, so too did the size of our bureaucracy. As a result, today you see hundreds and hundreds more office buildings staffed with more people who devote a large chunk of each workday to regulation compliance requests. The facts bear this out: government

Small farmers need our support

June 27, 2023

Canada’s small family farmers do backbreaking work, day in and day out, from sunup to sundown, providing Canadians with the necessities of life. Yet despite how hard they work, and despite how vital their work is, they often don’t make very much in return. They plant, grow and harvest many of the fruits and vegetables we eat. And they often struggle to eke out a living based solely on the income they generate from their farm businesses. It’s not fair or right — and it’s a problem that’s been ignored by Canadian policymakers for far too long. I operate an organic restaurant and marketplace, and I’m constantly speaking and meeting family farmers from all over southern Ontario. Many of them

Bringing back manufacturing jobs the key to Canada’s economic future

May 30, 2023

Canada used to be a strong manufacturing nation. Some of our biggest and best known companies were manufacturing powerhouses like Massey-Harris and Northern Telecom. We made everything from tractors and trains to automobiles and airplanes. We also had our own homegrown manufacturers like Inglis and Electrohome that built made-in-Canada washing machines and TVs. One of the first jobs I had when I immigrated to Canada as a young toolmaker was working in a factory that produced parts for the ill-fated Avro Arrow, which at the time was the world’s fastest fighter jet. But Canada hardly ever makes world-leading, technologically advanced products anymore. One of the reasons for this is that we no longer have the pool of skilled technical trade