Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has announced that the 2024 federal budget will be delivered on April 16. That is more than two weeks after the April 1 start of the budget year: fiscal 2024-25.
Late federal budgets have become a pattern. The 2023 budget was delivered March 28 – just three days ahead of April 1, and nowhere near early enough for Parliament or anyone else to even consider the fiscal plan before the year started. In both 2022 (April 7) and 2021 (April 19), the government also failed to get the budget out before the new fiscal year began. Go back a year earlier, and the situation was even worse. There was no budget.
It should be clear: Timely budgets with their tax and expenditure plans are good.…
Looking around the OECD, Canada is an average-tax nation overall but relies far more on income taxes and much less on consumption levies than most other industrialized nations. Leaning so hard on income taxes hurts our economic performance.
Every tax creates economic distortions but some overused taxes are more damaging than others. By raising more of our revenue from the less damaging taxes we could improve economic performance without reducing public services.
The latest C.D. Howe Institute Shadow Budget proposes a simple change in the federal tax mix: raise the GST rate by two percentage points — back to its original rate of seven per cent. At the same time, cut the federal corporate rate by two percentage points and…
Pas facile de se faire une tête dans ce dossier, où promoteurs et opposants présentent des arguments valables, mais aussi des positions critiquables. Prenons de la hauteur pour en juger.
L’argument central avancé dans ce journal par le ministre de l’Économie, de l’Innovation et de l’Énergie, Pierre Fitzgibbon, est de « développer au Québec une économie basée sur des secteurs d’avenir » et de « réduire notre écart de richesse avec le reste du Canada » pour financer la santé et l’éducation.
Des objectifs louables, certes, mais le gouvernement de la CAQ ne semble appliquer qu’une moitié de la stratégie préconisée pour lutter contre le réchauffement climatique, qui est de s’attaquer tant aux risques…
