Frank Stronach

To support small businesses, exempt them from corporate income tax

September 6, 2023

In today’s highly competitive global economy, countries fight tooth and nail for corporate investments, promising everything from tax breaks to subsidies. Why? Because these investments bring jobs, and jobs have become one of the world’s most precious commodities. Article contentCanada’s unemployment rate rose to 5.5 per cent in July, according to Statistics Canada — the highest it’s been since February 2022. That’s more than one million people looking for work. When I was CEO of Magna, whenever we opened factories in small towns across Southern Ontario, it usually meant hundreds of new jobs and a big boost to the local economy. But most jobs in Canada don’t come from big corporations — they come from small businesses. According to statistics

Save the family farm

February 14, 2023

When you think about King Charles III, the last thing you probably think about is family farming. But Canada’s new monarch made an impassioned plea over a year ago for small family farmers in the United Kingdom and around the world to come together in a co-operative movement to better ensure their survival. A strong advocate of organic farming, Charles has also created what he calls a “Terra Carta,” a charter that lays out a roadmap for producing environmentally sustainable, healthy food, while ensuring the survival of small family farms. But in the U.K., as in Canada, many small family farms are barely scraping by, and those who grew up on such farms are increasingly fleeing the fields and barns

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

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

Intrusive government regulators must back off

April 11, 2023

Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan used to say that the scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Audiences loved that line because it really hit home. However well-intentioned our government officials are, they usually end up making everything a little more difficult, a little more costly and a little more complicated. About 10 minutes up the road from my office is a new eight-storey, 422,000-square-foot facility built by the local regional municipality. The new administrative office, which cost more than $200 million to build, will oversee a variety of public services and house 1,500 government employees. What worries me most is what many of these civil servants will be doing day

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.