With New York City defector Amazon’s negative-1% income tax paid (rebate, in other words) on $5.6 billion profit1, at least one failed bidder for a new Amazon headquarters is eager to add some Canadian tax concessions to Amazon’s profit margins.
Unlike the U.S., Canada (with its similar aging population) has been more aggressively pursuing immigrants and asylum seekers. Perhaps the thinking is that a younger, hungrier workforce in Toronto will need 25,000 or so non-union, low-paying Amazon warehouse jobs instead of the US$100,000/year employees that Amazon claimed to require in New York.
While the Toronto Star headline linked below implies the city should be congratulating itself for missing out in the corporate headquarters tax giveaway contest, statements in the article from Toronto’s official bidding agency suggest a continuing official eagerness to slip between the sheets with Amazon: Toronto’s failed bid to land Amazon’s second HQ is looking smarter after New York loses campus: observers
As for New York City, with nationally hostile immigration policies and a shrinking pool of workers, U.S. job opportunities are on the increase while unemployment shrinks. In this climate, why New York seemed to offer so much to Amazon for so little in return is a mystery.
Undue influence from the real estate industry? Realtors are certainly are not happy campers after Amazon’s pullout. Read more at CNN: Real estate brokers were banking on the ‘Amazon Effect.’ Their bubble just burst
Toronto, like New York, already has serious and rapidly growing housing affordability problems. Toronto hardly needs its own ‘Amazon bubble.’ However, local realtors with their fees based on free market transactions, not ultimate outcomes, may well think otherwise.
