Candidates in the Hastings-Lennox and Addington-Tyendinaga riding took part in a debate about agriculture at the Huntingdon Veterans Community Hall in Ivanhoe on Tuesday.
Taking part included the Liberals’ Tracey Sweeney Schenk, People’s Party of Canada’s Zaid Yusufani, the Greens’ Mike Holbrook, the Conservatives’ incumbent Shelby Kranp-Neuman and the NDP’s Ava Duffy.
The debate started with each candidate giving an opening statement regarding their experience with the agricultural sector.
It then went to a combination of the floor and pre-submitted questions where candidates had two minutes each to respond.
Among the topics related to agriculture were the use of hemp for sustainable farming, red tape limiting farmers, the industrial carbon tax, business risk management programs, expansion of rural internet, and infrastructure.
Also discussed was the capital gains tax and its impact on farmers.
Liberal Tracey Sweeney Schenk spoke first, mentioning her background her finance.
“The challenge is that your farms are corporation structures as well, and there must be a way to actually mitigate the business approach to the tax that is inherited when an adult child inherits a functioning farm as a business,” Sweeney Schenk says.
“Because if I own Canadian Tire, my kids would expect to pay taxes on that… a lot of the growth of the capital worth is not of your doing. It’s just market-driven values for the price. So we don’t have an answer to that at this juncture, but as land values go through the roof or no other reason, I agree that that does need to be addressed economically in order to make inheriting a farm viable instead of crippling.”
The PPC’s Zaid Yusufani says his party would get rid of the capital gains tax altogether, no matter the business.
“You might look at this as something weird, just give businesses no responsibilities. Well, we are also removing all corporate welfare, which is about 10 to 12 billion a year, which will basically delegate the responsibility of having good business model to the businesses again so that those who actually do something good and people benefit from them and buy their products will actually gain more and reinvest,” Yusufuni explained.
Mike Holbrook of the Greens says he doesn’t believe in passing on the capital gains tax to family-owned farms.
“Fifty years ago or so, we decided that we were going to take it off of principal residences as an incentive for families to save and to build wealth and to not get that tax and be able to pass it on. So just on a fundamental level, I don’t see any reason in the world why we don’t pass that concept on to farms,” Holbrook said.
Conservative incumbent Shelby Kramp-Neuman spoke about how families who own farms are impacted by capital gains.
“Any increase in capital gains inclusion would make farm succession planning less financially viable and present significant challenges for farmers reinvesting in their business,” Kramp-Neuman says.
“This isn’t something that would be necessarily on an annual basis, but would be more of an impact involved by the farmers when they’re looking at main assets…”
Finally, the NDP’s Ava Duffy says she is against any sort of capital gains increases on the average Canadian family.
“When it comes to things like, you know, selling their home, selling a small well, selling a small business to another family member, and passing down the business from parent to child, I believe that we should be no we should be increasing that tax burden on average Canadians,” Duffy says.
“I also do believe that we should have an increase in capital gains tax when we are talking multi-million and multi-billion-dollar corporations. But your average small farm that is, you know, not making millions and millions of dollars in profit, you should be able to pass that on to your children with relative ease.”
Each candidate then gave a closing statement.
You can listen to the full debate below:
