In a recent article in the Financial Post, Julie Bond, a SR&ED tax consultant, opined that the recommendation in the Jenkins Report to reduce the refundability of SR&ED tax credits and to move towards a grants-based system will stifle innovation for Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).
“Grants are not practical. With grants, you would have small and medium-sized companies stop a project, write a business plan, send it in to a bureaucratic organization, wait three months for a response, and if they’re approved, then go back to and finish the project,” Ms. Bond says. “By that time, they’ve lost the job.”
According to Corinne Pohlmann, Vice-President of National Affairs at CFIB, small businesses were not represented on the Jenkins panel. The CFIB recently sent a letter to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to make their views from a SME perspective known.
