Op-Eds
A major theme in the run-up to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s budget was the government’s commitment to prudence. Prudence was also a major theme in the run-up to last year’s budget. In both years, however, the run-up proved misleading. Last year’s budget hiked projections for spending and borrowing. This year’s also involves much higher future spending and borrowing than the run-up led us to expect, ruling out the 2027-28 return to surplus promised last year.
Because the fiscal plan buries the key numbers under hundreds of pages of political messaging and re-hashed material, it takes some digging to discover just how much the budget repeats the imprudence of its predecessors. What the digging reveals is that lower-than-…
Parents across the country may be thinking about taking on an extra shift or an extra job to pay off bills from the holiday season or keep up with the rising costs of day-to-day items. What these hard working parents pocket from extra work not only depends on the taxes they pay on that additional income, but also on how much their income-tested government benefits such as the Canada Child Benefit or the Canada Workers Benefit will be reduced or “clawed back.”
In a recent C.D. Howe Institute study, we calculate the total impact of taxes and benefit clawbacks on families with children, giving us what we call “effective” tax rates. We found that parents in low-income families in particular face high effective tax rates. For instance…
This week we learned the consumer price index was up 6.9 per cent year over year in October on the same day we got predictions about how much the federal government’s inflation-indexed tax will raise the price of beer. Inflation and tax rules often combine to increase Canadians’ tax burdens. Governments seem readier to adjust taxes for inflation when doing so makes the burden heavier than when it makes the burden lighter. That should change.
Adjusting some tax rules for inflation is easy. Most taxes on employment income and government benefit payments use thresholds that rise as prices do. The federal government indexes personal income tax thresholds, benefit payments and most tax credits to the CPI. But some provinces do not.…
Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office just did something important and long overdue. For the first time, the country’s official financial watchdog quantified the costs of climate change for Canada’s economy, showing that worsening climate impacts are a drag on economic growth. This is a crucial step in beginning to reduce the economic risks Canada can expect in a warming world.
There’s still a long way to go, however, and recent moves by Australia and the United Kingdom can point us in the right direction.
In Canada, our long-term economic projections are largely based on historical averages of productivity that do not account for the fact that the climate is now changing rapidly, bringing with it more…
Une véritable réconciliation avec les peuples autochtones doit aller au-delà des symboles pour se traduire en actions concrètes pour accélérer le rattrapage économique des Premières Nations, des Inuits et des Métis.
En cette Journée nationale de la vérité et de la réconciliation, examinons la contribution potentielle de la finance durable à ce rattrapage. En 2015, la Commission du même nom avait appelé le milieu des affaires à s’engager à reconnaître les droits des peuples autochtones, à leur faire place parmi leurs employés, dirigeants et actionnaires, à investir dans leurs communautés et à éduquer leur personnel sur ces enjeux.
PENSER AUX SEPT GÉNÉRATIONS À VENIR
Dans la culture autochtone, la terre n’appartient à…
