Last week, the Bank of Canada announced it was lowering its purchases of federal government debt from at least $4 billion a week to $3 billion a week. The Bank presented this change as a response to positive economic news that, it noted, could also lead to an increase in its target for the overnight rate of interest in the second half of 2022, earlier than it had previously discussed. But with the Bank projecting economic growth of 6.5 per cent for 2021 and inflation above target at the end of the projection period, the question has to be asked: why is the Bank still buying any of the government’s debt?
When it started buying bonds as part of its quantitative easing (QE) program last year, the Bank was concerned about…
In the C.D. Howe Institute’s shadow federal budget, released 12 days before Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland delivered the real thing this week, I and my coauthors, Don Drummond and Alexandre Laurin, recommended raising the GST back to seven per cent in 2023. This idea got attention — mostly about how a two-point hike in the GST was too politically painful to be realistic. Over time, though, even in the big-borrowing, low-interest-rate future described in the budget, every dollar spent on programs requires close to 100 cents of revenue. Painful or not, the permanently bigger federal government that this budget anticipates will require Canadians to pay for it.
Since the pandemic struck, the federal government has…
Même si le fardeau des impôts payés par les entreprises est ultimement porté par des personnes – actionnaires, employés et consommateurs –, le sens commun exige que les compagnies fassent leur part et on s’insurge lorsque les plus grandes profitent des paradis fiscaux pour se défiler.
L’administration Biden a ravivé l’espoir d’un accord international sur un taux d’imposition minimal et sur la capacité des pays à taxer les ventes faites à distance par les FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) sur leur territoire national.
Selon l’Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques (OCDE), les stratégies fiscales qui exploitent les différentes règles des pays pour faire disparaître des profits ou les déplacer…
