Sadly Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada were/are too stupid to understand basic business economics

Tax cuts to corporations don't work because corporations are not responsible to taxpayers or government......... they are responsible to shareholders.

Government is a business. To function it requires revenue, that revenue comes in the form of taxation. If a government uses a razor to cut taxes paper thin they reduce their revenues to a bare minimum.

But, worse than that, if a government disregards other industries and sources of revenue to concentrate on one industry and only that one industry then should their preferred industry falter so does the country overall.

It is simple economics that even an idiot can understand. If a corporation/manufacturer is a sole product producer and that product falters or demand stalls, as in the oil industry, then revenues are lower, profits are down and layoffs ensue which in turn lower tax revenues to the government.

Is this explanation too simple for conservatives to comprehend?

For a corporation to be self supporting it requires the "me too" products that are in daily demand and have low profitability and sustainability while having specialty products that provide above normal markups.

The sands are a labour and material intensive product that is price dependent OPEC knows this and has hit Canada where it hurts most..... the selling price.

If the CPC and Stephen Harper thought they were friends they are sadly mistaken.

Corporate Tax Cuts May Be ‘One Of The Great Policy Blunders Of The Past Generation': Study

They should have worked. Maybe they could have worked. But they didn’t.

Corporate tax cuts were supposed to spur economic growth and job creation, but a new study looking at more than 90 years of data argues those cuts have done nothing to help growth — in fact, it shows they may have slowed the economy down.

That’s because businesses didn’t do what they were expected to do with their tax windfall, according to the study from the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Instead of turning the freed-up cash into investments that would create new economic activity and new jobs, large corporations started stockpiling larger cash reserves — or “dead money” as former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney called it in 2012.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/29/corporate-tax-cuts-canada-economy_n_8676646.html