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“Corporate welfare is giving Bombardier a billion dollars, a few years later another billion, another billion. I don’t believe in that. But giving a tax incentive is encouraging companies here and giving a tax incentive to open up in certain regions. If they’re up north, I’d be more than happy — Procter and Gamble’s leaving Brockville. If Procter and Gamble came up to me and said, ‘What sort of taxes can we save?’, we’d come up with a great plan to keep Procter and Gamble up there. There’s going to be 300 families without a job up there. That’s huge. Absolutely huge.”

Tax incentives wouldn’t be just about keeping businesses in Ontario, he went on.

“Not only that, I want to attract new companies, too. You know what I like down in the U.S.? You see what’s happening down there? They said manufacturing jobs would never come back. They’re coming back by the droves now. They have the lowest unemployment. This is who we’re competing against. They’re giving tax incentives,” he said.

The Ford family business is Deco, a labels-and-packaging company, which has a large outpost just outside Chicago.

“Every couple of weeks, from a certain state, I’ll get a letter from the chamber of commerce, from the state itself, saying, ‘Here, come to Texas, we’ll help you — even with a building. We’ll even help you hire people, as long as you come here and employ people’,” Ford said.

“My point was, my friend, we have to be business-friendly here. We are not business-friendly. We have layers and layers of red tape and bureaucracy that we have to cut. We have to make sure that businesses thrive in Ontario, we don’t tax them to death. And a lot of it, yes, I agree, is municipal taxes, municipal — we have the highest hydro rates, the carbon tax that’s done. So just look at the hydro rates, the carbon tax alone. They’re job-killers, absolute job-killers. We’re getting rid of the carbon tax, we’re lowering hydro rates. Next question.”