Green party's Elizabeth May proposes 'robot tax' to prepare for future of automation
Credit to Author: Cheryl Chan| Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:01:47 +0000
The Green party of Canada is proposing a “robot tax” that will protect workers and a shrinking tax base in a future where employees are displaced by automation.
The tax kicks in when a company replaces a worker with a machine and would require the company to pay a tax equivalent to the income tax that would have been paid by the laid-off employee.
Artificial intelligence can pave the way for a bright future, but it may also eliminate large swaths of the workforce so the government must plan ahead, said Green Leader Elizabeth May during a news conference in Burnaby on Sunday.
“We have to reduce the anxieties for the individual worker,” said May. “What does it mean for workers if they are vulnerable to being replaced, whether they’re a checkout clerk, a worker in a factory, the driver of a truck or even a doctor?
“What does it mean if we are going to turn to automation to replace a workforce? That’s worth talking about before it starts happening to us.”
The revenue behind the robot tax would go into general revenue to fund education and retraining programs for workers.
The tax would also be a new source of revenue that would pay for other big-ticket proposals in the Green party platform, including eliminating post-secondary tuition and implementing universal Pharmacare and a guaranteed livable income program.
“The last thing we need when coping with AI and how to adjust to it is a shrinking tax base because people are replaced with robots and robots aren’t paying taxes,” said May. “That’s how we are getting ahead of this issue.”
Small businesses would be exempt from the tax.
May announced the proposal flanked by other Green party candidates, including the candidate for Burnaby North-Seymour, Anita Kuttner, who is also the shadow cabinet critic for science and technology.
No other jurisdiction in the world has implemented such a tax, said Kuttner, although a number of think-tanks around the world are already grappling with a future where artificial intelligence and automation become more widely-used and disrupt large sections of the labour force.
“The idea is to make sure there’s not a sudden jolt to our tax revenue if a whole bunch of things are automated at once,” said Kuttner, a scientist with a Ph.D. in astrophysics and astronomy.
“Our proposal is the beginning of the conversation because there is no set precedence.”
Kuttner said the robot tax would be paid by companies annually per worker replaced by automation. She acknowledged more work needs to be done in terms of identifying jobs that have been replaced by a robot as opposed to other efficiencies, and then determining how many jobs a machine or robot managed to replace.
“This is something that is really complicated to implement so we will be studying how to do it properly,” she said.
May is expected to make an announcement in downtown Vancouver tomorrow on the sustained impact of Friday’s climate strike.