How the Harper government plays with your emotions to sell you ‘meaningless’ tax credits

Published July 23, 2014

Focus groups can teach you lots of interesting things: If you offer parents a $75 tax credit to put their kids through hockey, they’ll shrug and tell you it’s not a “meaningful amount.” If you show them a super cute kid flopping around the surface of a hockey rink for 30 seconds and and tell […]

Secret doc casts doubt over Finance Canada’s support for Conservative income splitting scheme

Published July 3, 2014

Has the Department of Finance told the Conservatives their family income splitting plan violates a key tax policy principle that seeks to minimize “interference with individual decisions such as those related to labour force participation, work effort, choices in childcare, and family formation?” In a heavily redacted briefing note marked “secret” to Finance Canada’s Deputy […]

Corporate Canada’s own numbers show they don’t pay their fair share of taxes

Published April 17, 2014

The Canadian Council of Chief Executives set out to show corporate Canada is burdened by high taxes, and yet has gone and proven the opposite. The recent report made the claim that the 63 corporations who participated in the voluntary survey paid an average Total Tax Rate of 33.4% towards a Total Tax Contribution of […]

What’s with all this praise for Jim Flaherty’s record?

Published March 19, 2014

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was written and published on March 19, 2014, immediately after Jim Flaherty’s resignation. If you listen to the way some pundits are describing the close of Jim Flaherty’s long tenure as Finance Minister – how he used his “steady hand” to “steer Canada through some very challenging times” – you can […]

Does this Tory minister actually think Canada’s cities are lying?

Published February 26, 2014

Did a senior Conservative cabinet minister just imply that Canada’s cities aren’t telling the truth about their financial situation? Employment Minister Jason Kenney took to Twitter Wednesday to give a shout-out to a report authored by a business lobby group that says municipal governments are “consistently misrepresenting how much tax money ends up in their […]

Corporate Canada done paying taxes for year, hoarding $541 billion in cash

Published January 29, 2014

Canadian corporations are done paying taxes for the year, according to a new study that links massive corporate tax giveaways to hoarding hundreds of billions in cash. Wednesday is Corporate Tax Freedom Day, meaning that corporations have now paid their entire share of taxes for the year to all levels of government, the Canadian Labour […]

Tag: tax policy