ON THE ISSUES
A STRONG economy
We define economic diversification as the shift toward a more varied structure of domestic production and trade with a view to increasing productivity, creating jobs and providing the base for sustained poverty-reducing growth.
Jeff on The Economy
Our Plans To Build A Strong and Diversified Economy Include:
- Simplifying Tax Burden on Business
- introduction of a Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) could contribute to the advancement of this climate — by simplifying cumbersome and costly Provincial Sales Tax (PST) exemptions and refund programs, and removing the ‘layering of taxes’ incurred by businesses and passed onto consumers
- Angel Investment Tax Credit
- allowing ‘angel investors’ to write off losses (should they occur) and accelerate eligible small-scale, targeted investments made in Saskatchewan to support Saskatchewan ideas will speed up commercialization cycles, incentivizing new businesses, ‘connecting’ small pockets of local capital, and de-risking radical or disruptive
- Infrastructure Bonds
- Available to institutional, public, and private sector investors, to help finance infrastructure renewal, the concept of government backed infrastructure bonds would allow investors from within the province to receive a partial tax write-off and nominal rate of return, while supporting the future growth of Saskatchewan
- Social Impact Bonds
- To maximize finite public dollars in a time of massive investment demands, the Government of Saskatchewan must accelerate the use of SIBs across every social sector and ministry, putting in place responsive mechanisms to react to new opportunities
- Private philanthropists may also act in place of, or complement, the funding role of government in SIBs
- Province-wide Rapid Response Unit for Standardization
- Inter-ministerial and intra-provincial collaboration through a single-window access point (an RRU) is a notable step to standardizing responsiveness to potential investors
- New Royalty Tax Credit
- To reward the use of Saskatchewan and Indigenous-sourced content in resource development supply chains
- By implementing — ideally alongside reciprocal partners in other provinces — a royalty tax credit, primary extractors and processors would enjoy a reduction in provincial royalties proportional to the percentage of goods and services they have domestically sourced, with an added return for Saskatchewan-based Indigenous content
- Position Saskatchewan as a global centre big data
- Saskatchewan should strive to be a pioneer of the application of this technology to drive both business and social innovation