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The Ontario Tories had promised a cut to the corporate tax rate in their campaign platform, but the government says their incentive will have the desired effect of lowering Ontario’s average marginal effective tax rate for corporations.

That rate, the budget says, will fall to 12.6 per cent in 2019 from 16 per cent last year, below the 18.7 per cent average in the U.S. this year following tax reform.

“We’ve done something … in our opinion and in the opinion of others, (that) is a lot better,” Fedeli told reporters when asked about the missing corporate-tax cut.

The finance minister added that when the government consulted with businesses, the expensing incentive was what they had wanted.

“It brings relief immediately,” Fedeli said. “And it drops us down farther than the states now, and so we protected the businesses by doing that.”

While a recession is not very likely in the next few quarters, this probability is gradually rising

The Ford government’s latest forecast shows a deficit of $11.7 billion for the 2018-19 fiscal year, to be followed by a string of shrinking shortfalls that will end with a surplus in 2023–24.

However, with the tax help, the province is not predicting it will crack the 2-per-cent mark for annual economic growth in any year between now and 2024.

While a more sluggish economy was not unexpected, the provincial government has revised the outlook from a fall update, which came before December’s serious slide in the stock markets and which had projected 1.8-per-cent growth this year and 1.7 per cent in 2020. The same update had predicted 2-per-cent growth for Ontario in 2018, an expectation that was actually surpassed.