CANADA: GENERAL METADATA

Data documentation

General notes

The fiscal year in Canada runs from 1 April to 31 March. Following OECD convention, data are allocated to the starting calendar year so that data covering the period April 2005 to March 2006 are allocated to 2005.

Canada being a federal country, the data also cover the following provinces and territories: Alberta (AB), British Columbia (BC), Manitoba (MB), New Brunswick (NB), Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), Nova Scotia (NS), Ontario (ON), Prince Edward Island (PE), Quebec (QC), Saskatchewan (SK), and Yukon Territory (YT). [1]

The inventory includes a number of provincial tax expenditures within resource royalty systems. These are included because they are explicitly defined as quantified departures from the general royalty rules. As noted in Chapter 2 of OECD (2015), however, it is important that such measures, including their objectives and impacts, be considered (in a parallel way with income-tax and consumption-tax measures) within the context of the broader royalty system of which they form a part.

Certain features of Canada’s tax system that indirectly support the production of fossil fuels - including coal and oil sands - apply to the mining sector as a whole. While the OECD definition of support to fossil fuels stresses specificity as a requisite [2], the present inventory considers those measures that apply to mining in general to be specific enough to warrant their inclusion in the database. In the absence of data on the actual sector distribution of the usage of these measures, as in other countries, the OECD has estimated based on relative output levels the share of the usage that relates to fossil-fuel extraction, as opposed to the share relating to the extraction of other minerals (e.g. uranium). This should not be interpreted, however, as reflecting the views of the responsible governments. [3]

Notes relating to Producer Support Estimates in the Province of Quebec

The province of Quebec does not currently produce fossil fuels on a significant scale, though some companies are actively exploring for oil in the Gaspe Peninsula and around the Anticosti Island. Exploration efforts are also concentrating on the province’s potential for shale gas, mostly in the south (e.g. Basses-Terres du Saint-Laurent).

The refundable tax credit for resources (Crédit d’impot remboursable relatif aux ressources) was introduced in March 2001 by the government of Quebec and provides eligible mining companies operating in the province with a refundable tax credit for up to 38.75% of qualifying exploration expenditure. [4] Qualifying exploration expenditure includes those expenses made with respect to oil and natural-gas, and which attract an additional 50% deduction for tax purposes.

While this measure benefits some companies engaged in the exploration for fossil fuels in Quebec, exploration expenditure in the province remains heavily oriented towards non-energy minerals. This measure is therefore not deemed specific enough to warrant inclusion in the present inventory, which would not preclude its inclusion at a later stage should fossil-fuel exploration further increase in scale.

Footnotes

[1] The inventory does not include at this stage Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

[2] Article 2 of the WTO’s Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM) also stresses the importance of "specificity" in determining whether a particular measure falls under the scope of the agreement.

[3] An estimated allocation based on gross-output shares is used here to provide readers with a sense of the magnitudes involved. Since these allocations are not from government sources and are based on general volume and value ratios, they might not always correlate well with actual distributions, if such information were available. These assumptions have been made by the OECD and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the responsible government.

[4] The amount of credit that can be claimed depends on whether taxpayers are also engaged in the extraction of minerals or hydrocarbons, and on the region in which they operate (e.g. the Great North). This measure is not compatible with flow-through shares.