Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Corporate Welfare at Industry Canada since John Diefenbaker
Between April 1, 1961 and March 31, 2012, and adjusted for inflation to 2012 dollars, Industry Canada disbursed $34.3 billion through to other governments, foundations, and businesses. $22.1 billion of that money was disbursed to business, $8.8 billion given in grants, and $13.3 billion provided in loans.
Pratt & Whitney Canada Corp. received the most money over the decades: almost $3.3 billion via 75 disbursements. Bombardier and De Havilland were the second and third largest recipients, each receiving disbursements worth $1.1 billion over the years.
Most of Canada?s largest companies (ranked by the number of employees), do not take financial assistance from Industry Canada. The top three employers?Onex Corp. (246,000 employees), George Weston Ltd. (155,000 employees), and Loblaw Companies (135,000 employees)?received no Industry Canada handouts in the 51 years surveyed.
Peer-reviewed research does not support many claims advanced by federal politicians and other proponents of such subsidies: that corporate welfare is responsible for economic growth or job creation. In fact, the companies with the highest employee counts?most of which do not take subsidies?are real-world examples of companies that have not needed taxpayer assistance to create jobs.
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Mark Milke
Mark Milke was a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute between 2010 and 2015. Mr. Milke led the Institute’s workon Alberta-related issues as well as contributing to a broad host of national and regional studies. Mr. Milke is currently an independent analyst and consultant in Calgary.Mr. Milke has authored four books on Canadian politics and policy and dozens of studies on topics such as property rights, public sector pensions, corporate welfare, competition policy, aboriginal matters and taxes. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, Mr. Milke was the research director for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and former B.C. and Alberta director with the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation. His work has been published widely in Canada since 1997 and in addition to the Fraser Institute, his papers have also been published in the United States by the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and in Europe by the Brussels-based Centre for European Studies.Mr. Milke’s opinion columns appear regularly in the Calgary Herald and Globe and Mail, as well as in the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province, and Victoria Times Colonist. Mr. Milke has a Master’s degree from the University of Alberta where his M.A. thesis analyzed human rights in East Asia; he also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Calgary where his doctoral dissertation analyzed the rhetoric of Canadian-American relations. Mr. Milke is president of Civitas, and a past lecturer in Political Philosophy and International Relations at the University of Calgary.… Read more