Lessons from the Rise of Tax Credits

By Alex Usher. Tax benefits for education go back to the late 1950s. There was pressure at the time to create a “national system of scholarships”, but this clearly was going to cause problems in Quebec. But Prime Minister Diefenbaker, on the advice of Ted Rogers and with the assistance of Brian Mulroney, found a way around this which was acceptable to Quebec: namely, by making tuition fees tax deductible. Lesson #1: the federal government in part views tax expenditures as a way to get around troublesome provinces. More...