I've re-read this post several times: I don't get this post, Al - maybe I'm just missing the point -enlighten me, if you chose. For now I'm just assuming that this is the rant of an uninformed, big "L" Liberal brainwashed, mind.

The Canadian family farm has qualified for a tax free captial gains "rollover" within the family up to $500,000 for years - same with shares of a Canadian "small business corporation".
It seems the Tories think that lobster fishers should be treated similarly as farmers or small business "corporations".

What's your beef with this equal treatment? And how is it "your money", BTW. The Tories are allowing fairness to someone who might be otherwise required to pay a tax on a capital asset that he or she bought and maintained with their money and "sweat equity" on a ficticious "deemed disposition" if they should die or if they should dare "gift" or "sell" the asset to their son or daugther to carry on the business. How is their "ficticious" capital gain and the punitive tax imposed on this "gain", "YOUR" money? It's not YOUR pocket that is being picked here.

By the logic of your post, if someone receives tax fairness, he or she is somehow stealing from you? Jeez, talk about "thinking for yourself" and not towing the party line.

Well, see - you may have informed me better than the Globe. Just to be clear, I know that the first $500,000 capital gain is tax free. The farmer and the lobster boat operator would enjoy that equally. I understand this is in addition. So why do fishermen get the extra and others do not. I would gladly be disproven that the extra applies to all in the Tory plan.<p>Thanks for the greater conspiracy theory thing, by the way, but it does not apply. It is my money when I have to pay more than 20,000 of my income on equalization and find others getting tax breaks when they can also both get pogie and amass capital, unlike either the employee or the farmer - just one or the other for us.

Let's be clear: I'm no great fan of the Tories, but I'm less a fan of those purveyors of misinformation known as the Liberals. Your post just feeds the network of misinformation they survive, and cling to power, on.

The Tory plan is to equate fishers (ALL fishers, not just those in the lobster business) with farmers and CSBSs. I simply don't know how you could read and report the Globe article otherwise. Maybe, just maybe, you could check out http://www.conservative.ca/EN/news_releases/harper_plans_tax_break_for_family_fishing_businesses/

And let's not confuse income tax with capital gains tax. Farmers and fishers pay income tax on their earned income like you, but where does the farmer or fisher get the "extra" income to pay tax on the imposed "gain" in value of the business (farm or fishing) which, say, he inherited from his parents for nothing in the 1960s and which is now worth $500K on a "deemed disposition" when he wants to give it to his son or daughter? Again, how is eliminating that ficitious "gain" on the first $500K taking money out of your pocket?

The pogie thing is completely something else.

It ain't all something else as it is draw on the money of others but let's leave that aside. In all your dimwitted eagerness to be rude you must have missed that I said you may be right.<p>So let's see. The CPC site says:<blockquote class="smalltext">Conservative leader and Leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper said today a new Conservative government will provide help to family fishing businesses by providing a capital gains exemption for the first $500,000 of qualifying fishing property that is transferred within a family.</blockquote>You will note that is is an exemption from <i>income</i> as gains made on disposition are a form of income that is taxed. These is no meaning to "not confuse income tax with capital gains tax" as capital gains are income, revenue from property. But you are right in that is it a levelling. See this CRA (Canadian Revenue Agency) web page which reads in part:<blockquote class="smalltext">You may be able to claim the capital gains deduction on taxable capital gains you have in 2004 from:<ul><li>dispositions of qualified farm property;</li><li>dispositions of qualified small business corporation shares; and</li><li>a reserve brought into income in 2004, from either of the above.</blockquote>So adding fishermen to this is a form of levelling. As long as you do not include the inequality of how the capital was gathered by the fishermen...but more later.<p>But for now we can see that there is a special class of property transfer that does not trigger the capital gains deduction at all - transfers of farm property to children. It is not included in the capital gain deduction calculation as it is deemed not a taxable event at all. See this section from another CRA pamphet RC4060:<blockquote class="smalltext">You may be able to transfer Canadian farm property to your child. When you do this, you can postpone tax on any taxable capital gain and any recapture of capital cost allowance until the child sells the property. To do this, both these conditions have to be met:<ul><li>Your child is a resident of Canada just before the transfer.</li><li>The farm property is used mainly in a farming business in which you, your spouse or common-law partner, or any of your children were actively engaged on a regular and ongoing basis before the transfer.</li><ul></blockquote>That is something I do not think a small business person can do and, until the Tories get in, the fisherman cannot. There is a logic to it for farmers as they are year-round working amassers of huge real property value with relatively tiny income compared to other forms of capital. The small business person handles most of his expenses for capital costs through depreciation so that he or she pays, say, 20% of the cost of acquiring the capital as an expense against income. The guy who gets the family farm from his or her parents cannot spread out that cost as that sort of depreciation does not realistically reflect the land passing every 30 years to a new generation as the sort of neutral factor it is. Better just to remove the land from the equation. <p>But a fishing boat and gear is not like this. These are things that have to be replaced and have to be bought more than once in a generation. No one is out there lobstering or long lining on a boat that grampa built in 1926. Plus, the boat and the gear is not the thing of real value - it is the license. The license is an arbitrary exclusivity given to the fisher folk by the government in the last few decades. It in itself is problably worth at least half of the value of your average in-shore lobster fleet, which is the term for the boat and gear and license. Plus, unlike the farmer and the small business person, the fisher can claim Employment Insurance and, being a seasonal trade, does annually thus freeing up income to acquire capital - capital a farmer and a business purchase with their own revenue. See this CRA pamphlet on fishers and eligibility. Note that buyers are deemed "employers" for this industry alone. The effect of this over a life of a successful small in-shore fisher is massive.<p>So have the Tories actually proposed a levelling of fishers with the small business person who can't claim EI and does not have an exclusive monopolistic position by government license or the farmer who can't claim EI but yet is burdened by small income from impossibly valuable capital? What I am saying is that the fishers are getting far more than farmers and business people and for an obvious political purpose - they live in swing ridings. Note in all the above I have only referred to a Tory political document. The rest are Canadian Revenue Agency tax bulletins and guides. If I have interpreted them incorrectly, please advise. But knock of the political baffle-blab.