Bill Kelly: A spoonful of sugar for small business

The word out of Ottawa is that the federal government will institute a program to offset the effects of their controversial business tax reform.

That’s great news for the many small businesses that would have taken a hit under the revisions and it’s good news for government MPs, who were getting lambasted by chambers of commerce and small business organizations because of the proposed tax changes.

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We don’t know the details of how the government plans to assuage the concerns of small business, but you have to wonder: what took them so long?

The government took a lot of heat on this issue and it didn’t have to be that way.

Whenever any government feels they have to enact controversial measures, the smart thing to do is to follow the Mary Poppins theory; a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

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It’s so simple, but it’s true.

When the B.C. government brought in their carbon tax a few years ago, they also introduced a series of tax breaks to negate the bad taste of tax increases and it worked.

The federal government should have learned from that example.

In fact, the Ontario government should employ the same idea with their minimum wage hike.

A spoonful of sugar; who knew that Mary Poppins had such insight into how politics should work.