TIM BELFORD

Tax-free Big Biz

John Maynard Keynes was a pretty bright chap.

His ideas on economics and the role of government in the whole sheebang held sway for a long time.

And although the private sector has spent the last twenty or thirty years railing about government interference, it apparently still holds a lesser-known bit of Keynes to heart.

The great man once said: "the avoidance of taxes is the only pursuit that still carries any reward."

And, according to a recent internal study carried out by Customs and Revenue Canada, the Canadian business world has clasped those precious words to its collective bosum.

A full two-thirds of all companies with annual revenues of fifteen million dollars a year or less pay no taxes.

None. Zilch. Bupkiss.

Even more disconcerting is the fact that six and a half per cent of businesses with revenues of more than two hundred and fifty million dollars a year evaded Revenue Canada's clutches as well.

Now, that's only forty-one companies but those forty-one have 2640 subsidiaries who all thumbed their fiscal noses at Paul Martin's attempts to balance the budget.

I don't want to complain, but since I'm shelling out forty per cent of my income to see that the roads get paved and the army gets a new tank, I don't think it's unreasonable that the likes of Quebecor and Bombardier should do the same.

What makes it worse is the explanation.

And I quote: "The complexity of financial products, institutions, and transactions provide ample opportunity for aggressive tax planning."

Aggressive tax planning!

That's bureaucratic mumbo jumbo for banks paying forty-four per cent less in 1998 than they did in 1997.

I guess it's pretty simple.

Large companies have more lawyers and accountants than Caesar had legions.

And since they're the only ones who can read the tax laws, it stands to reason that ones man's "pay up and shut up" is another man's loophole.

It appears that we've all been listening to Jean Chretien as he exhorted us to tighten our belts.

Unfortunately, it appears that for a whole lot of Canadian companies it was a money belt they were tightening.

And yet the solution is simple. You merely have to use any extra cash you have lying around to buy a bankrupt company.

Or maybe invest the left-over bread money in some flow-through mining shares.

Or, better yet, take the money you saved on this year's heating bill and hire an accountant of your own.

I mean, why should the multinationals have all the fun.