Many families with young children struggle to afford good-quality childcare. The current tax deduction for child-care expenses helps to alleviate the cost for some, but many families, particularly at the lower end of the income scale, end up with practically no tax break from the current system. We can do better.
In a recent C.D. Howe Institute study, we propose to upend the tax treatment of child-care expenses, and replace the tax deduction with a system of generous refundable tax credits. It would provide up to 75-per-cent child-care cost subsidy at the bottom of the income scale – à la Quebec – for a child in private, unsubsidized, care. This revised system would increase work participation, fairness, quality of care and…
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s House of Commons speech last week signalled a new direction in Canadian foreign policy. In doing so, the Canadian government has to be sharply focused on dealing with Washington, navigating Donald Trump’s protectionist view of the world and the impending NAFTA negotiations.
Those negotiations will be challenging, once the U.S. Congress clears the administration’s fast-track approval and the Trump team presents Canada and Mexico with its demands, likely in August.
Unlike the 1980s and 1990s when the United States had strategic interests in showing the world that it could reach accommodation with its North American partners, this time we have an “America First” president with no…
Until a few years ago, the main concern in the Canadian debate over health policy was how to control costs. When provinces managed to restrain health-care spending growth to an average rate below that of the economy as a whole (since 2010), that concern subsided somewhat; we had “bent the cost curve” and things seemed to be under control. But as a devastating pair of reports in The Globe and Mail makes clear, the cost-cutting in health care is threatening to make a mockery of the claim that access to health care in Canada does not depend on ability to pay.
As wait times even for things like urgently needed orthopedic and eye surgery become impossibly long, there are more and more desperate patients who are…
