http://news.nationalpost.com/news/c...-goes-to-small-favoured-group-of-companies-ag
Typical Party "L".
Entitle to Entitlement (Dingwall said that),
Adscam is back
Nepotism is back
Ontario doles out vast majority of its corporate welfare to a small, favoured group of companies: AG
Republish
Reprint
Ashley Csanady | December 2, 2015 | Last Updated: Dec 2 6:07 PM ET
More from Ashley Csanady |
@AshleyCsanady
Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press filesAuditor General Bonnie Lysyk
The vast majority of Ontario’s corporate welfare goes to a select group of companies who are quietly invited to apply, the auditor general has found.
Of the $1.45 billion in grants, economic development and “employment-support funding” the province has doled out since 2004, 80 per cent of it has gone to companies who were invited to apply and never publicly posted.
Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk calls it a “selective process” and notes the minister of economic development “could not provide the criteria it used to identify the businesses it invited to apply, or a list of whose applications were unsuccessful.”
Related
She said during a press conference the government may have approached companies because they wanted to target certain industries or areas. She said an open process might be more cumbersome to run, but “we still think that’s the right way to go.”
These programs have created 12,298 new jobs, according to ministry data, and helped retain 59,289, up until the end of March 2015. Over the course of all the subsidy contracts that number should rise over 100,000.
Lysyk notes drastically varying costs per job: $718 to $16,981 per post retained or created.
Once the terms of those deals expire — usually five years — there’s no follow-up tracking. The report notes that means the ministry “has no information on whether jobs created or retained are long-lasting.”
And the lack of transparency in the selection process for these government handouts could leave small- and medium-sized businesses out in the cold.
“While 40 per cent of the number of projects funded by the ministry related to existing small-and medium-sized businesses, the dollar value of that support amounted to less than four per cent of its total funding,” the report states. “No support went to new start-ups and projects were limited to certain areas of the province.”
There’s also a lack of co-ordination, with Lysyk noting another nine ministries payout an additional $1.8 billion in corporate welfare, again without proper tracking of its long-term efficacy or consideration for possible duplication.
And the government has routinely re-announced the same money under different names — touting as much as $1 billion in investments that had previously been identified.
“Over the last 10 years and as recently as January 2015, the government publicly announced almost $1 billion more of economic-development and employment-support funding projects by re-announcing the same available funding under different funding programs,” the report states. It notes the Jobs and Prosperity Fund announced last January, a $2.5 billion ten-year program, included $780 million in programs that had already been announced.
It also says the government has done a poor job at planning how and why those funds are dispersed, pointing to other provinces that have better co-ordinated and reported on those plans. Experts suggest such corporate payouts should focus on boosting exports, and B.C. is cited as one province that has actively tracked how its handouts affect its trade balance.
In its response, the ministry “is in the process of change” and the purpose of the Jobs and Prosperity Fund, a Strategic Investment Framework and the development of an industrial competitiveness strategy for the province will seek to address these issues.
The Progressive Conservatives, meanwhile, were unimpressed. “Crony capitalism never works,” PC economic development critic Monte McNaughton tweeted. In a press release, he said “government handouts are no way to rebuild Ontario’s economy” and the re-releasing of grants is yet more “press release politics” from the Liberals.
Minister of Economic Development Brad Duguid said Wednesday evening the program is open and transparent and there is information online for companies interested in applying. That said, he noted it’s a complex calculation to determine what businesses get support — productivity, exports, employment numbers and innovation are taken into account — and the government shares what it can without revealing commercially sensitive information.
“The fact is there’s a great deal of scrutiny that goes into these decisions,” he said.
