It’s time to axe an executive tax break that encourages perverse behaviour while enriching the very rich.
If you’re a top executive at a major corporation, no need to read further; you’ll know all this.
But if you’re an ordinary person, you may not. You’ve probably heard of “executive stock options” — a perk that allows corporate executives a special deal on purchasing the company’s stocks.
And you may suspect that these stock options are connected to the rampant greed and corruption that have plagued the corporate world in recent years. If so, you’d be right.
Even leading business thinkers agree.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the renowned business scholar at McGill University Henry Mintzberg argued that executive stock options “represent the most prominent form of legal corruption that has been undermining our large corporations and bringing down the global economy.”
Canada compounds the problem by adding a special tax break that makes executive stock options even more lucrative — and costly to the Canadian treasury.
So when Opposition leader Tom Mulcair announced earlier this year that an NDP government would scrap the tax break entirely, nobody rushed to its defence. It turns out that this tax break — so beloved by the business set which lobbied heavily for it — is barely able to round up a friend outside the boardroom.
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