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Trump victory means Canada must get serious about tax reform

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Alex Whalen

Following Donald Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election, lower taxes for both U.S. businesses and individuals will be at the top of his administration’s agenda. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Trudeau has raised taxes on businesses and individuals, including with his recent capital gains tax hike.

Clearly, Canada and the United States are now moving in opposite directions on tax policy. To prevent Canada from falling even further behind the U.S., policymakers in Ottawa and across Canada should swiftly increase our tax competitiveness.

Before the U.S. election, Canada was already considered a high-tax country that made it hard to do business. Canada’s top combined (federal and provincial) personal income tax rate (as represented by Ontario) ranked fifth-highest out of 38 high-income industrialized (OECD) countries in 2022 (the latest year of available data). And last year, Canadians in every province, across most of the income spectrum, faced higher personal income tax rates than Americans in nearly every U.S. state.

Our higher income tax rates make it harder to attract and retain high-skilled workers including doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs. High tax rates also reduce the incentives to save, invest and start a business—all key drivers of prosperity.

No doubt, we need reform now. To close the tax gap and increase our competitiveness, the federal government should reduce personal income tax rates. One option is to reduce the top rate from 33.0 per cent back down to 29.0 per cent (the rate before the Trudeau government increased it) and eliminate the three middle-income tax rates of 20.5 per cent, 26.0 per cent and 29.0 per cent.

These changes would establish a new personal income tax landscape with just two federal rates. Nearly all Canadians would face a personal income tax rate of 15.0 per cent, while top earners would pay a marginal tax rate of 29.0 per cent.

On business taxes, Canada’s rates are also higher than the global average and uncompetitive  compared to the U.S., which makes it difficult to attract business investment and corporate headquarters that provide well-paid jobs and enhance living standards. According to Trump’s campaign promises, he plans to lower the federal business tax rate from 21 per cent to 20 per cent (and reduce the rate to 15 per cent for companies that make their products in the U.S.). Trump must work with congress to implement these changes, but barring any change in Canadian policy, business tax cuts in the U.S. will intensify Canada’s net outflow of business investment and corporate headquarters to the U.S.

The federal government should respond by lowering Canada’s business tax rate to match Trump’s plan. Moreover, Ottawa should (in coordination with the provinces) change tax policy to only tax business profits that are not reinvested in the company—that is, tax dividend payments, share buybacks and bonuses but don’t touch profits that are reinvested into the company (this type of business taxation has helped supercharge the economy in Estonia). These reforms would encourage greater business investment and ultimately raise living standards for Canadians. Finally, given Canada’s massive outflow of business investment, the government should (at a minimum) reverse the recent federal capital gains hike.

Of course, there’s much to quibble with in Trump’s policies. For example, his tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy (and likely Canada’s economy), and tax cuts without spending reductions and deficit-reduction will simply defer tax hikes into the future. But while policymakers in Ottawa can’t control U.S. policy, Trump’s tax plan will significantly exacerbate Canada’s competitiveness problem. We can’t afford to sit idle and do nothing. Ottawa should act swiftly in coordination with the provinces and pursue bold pro-growth tax reform for the benefit of Canadians.

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Canadians should expect even more spending in federal fall economic statement

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

The Trudeau government will soon release its fall economic statement. Though technically intended to be an update on the fiscal plan in this year’s budget, in recent years the fall economic statement has more closely resembled a “mini-budget” that unveils new (and often significant) spending commitments and initiatives.

Let’s look at the data.

The chart below includes projections of annual federal program spending from a series of federal budgets and updates, beginning with the 2022 budget and ending with the latest 2024 budget. Program spending equals total spending minus debt interest costs, and represents discretionary spending by the federal government.

Clearly, there’s a trend that with every consecutive budget and fiscal update the Trudeau government revises spending estimates upwards. Take the last two fiscal years, 2023/24 and 2024/25, for example. Budget 2022 projected annual program spending of $436.5 billion for the 2023/24 fiscal year. Yet the fall economic statement released just months later revised that spending estimate up to $449.8 billion, and later releases showed even higher spending.

The issue is even more stark when examining spending projections for the current fiscal year. Budget 2022 projected annual spending of $441.6 billion in 2024/25. Since then, every subsequent fiscal release has revised that estimate higher and higher, to the point that Budget 2024 estimates program spending of $483.6 billion for this year—representing a $42.0 billion increase from the projections only two years ago.

Meanwhile, as spending estimates are revised upwards, plans to reduce the federal deficit are consistently pushed off into later years.

For example, the 2022 fall economic statement projected a deficit of $25.4 billion for the 2024/25 fiscal year, and declining deficits in the years to come, before reaching an eventual surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027/28. However, subsequent budgets and fiscal updates again revised those estimates. The latest budget projects a deficit of $39.8 billion in 2024/25 that will decline to a $26.8 billion deficit by 2027/28. In other words, though budgets and fiscal updates have consistently projected declining deficits between 2024/25 and 2027/28, each subsequent document has produced larger deficits throughout the fiscal outlook and pushed the timeline for balanced budgets further into the future.

These data illustrate the Trudeau government’s lack of accountability to its own fiscal plans. Though the unpredictable nature of forecasting means the government is unlikely to exactly meet future projections, it’s still reasonable to expect it will roughly follow its own fiscal plans. However, time and time again Canadians have been sold a certain plan, only to have it change dramatically mere months later due to the government’s unwillingness to restrain spending. We shouldn’t expect the upcoming fall economic statement to be any different.

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Trudeau gov’t threatens to punish tech companies that fail to censor ‘disinformation’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

A report from the House of Commons Heritage Committee claimed that ‘some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money.’

A report from a Canadian federal committee said MPs should enact laws to penalize social media and tech companies that don’t take action to quell so-called “undesirable or questionable” content on the internet.

MPs from the ruling Liberal, New Democratic Party (NDP), and separatists Bloc Québécois party on the House of Commons Heritage Committee summarized their opinions in a report.

“The Government of Canada notes some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money,” reads the report titled Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.

“Disinformation creates ‘doubt and confusion’ and can be particularly harmful when it involves health information,” it continues.

The report notes how such “disinformation” can cause “financial harms as well as political polarization and distrust in key institutions,” adding, “The prevalence of disinformation can be difficult to determine.”

As noted in Blacklock’s Reporter, the report claims that many of Canada’s “major societal harms” have come from “unregulated social media platforms relying on algorithms to amplify content, among them disinformation and conspiracy theories.”

Of note is the committee failed to define what “disinformation” or “conspiracy theories” meant.

Most of the MPs on the committee made the recommendation that Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms, which ironically have at one point or another clamped down on free speech themselves, “put mechanisms in place to detect undesirable or questionable content that may be the product of disinformation or foreign interference and that these platforms be required to promptly identify such content and report it to users.”

“Failure to do so should result in penalties,” the report stated.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Canadian legal group The Democracy Fund (TDF) warned that the Liberal government’s Bill C-63 seeks to further clamp down on online speech and will “weaponize” the nation’s courts to favor the ruling federal party and do nothing but create an atmosphere of “fear.”

Bill C-63 was introduced by Liberal Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome.

Jordan Peterson, one of Canada’s most prominent psychologists, recently accused the bill of attempting to create a pathway to allow for “Orwellian Thought Crime” to become the norm in the nation.

Conservative MPs fight back: ‘A government bureaucracy should not regulate content’

Conservative MPs fought back the Heritage Committee’s majority findings and in a Dissenting Report said the committee did not understand what the role of the internet is in society, which is that it should be free from regulation.

“The main report failed to adequately explore the state of censorship in Canada and the role played by tech giants and the current federal government,” the Conservatives wrote in their dissenting report, adding, “Canadians are increasingly being censored by the government and tech giants as to what they can see, hear and say online.”

The Conservative MPs noted that when it comes to the internet, it is “boundless,” and that “Anyone who wants to have a presence on the internet can have one.”

“A government bureaucracy should not regulate which content should be prioritized and which should be demoted,” it noted, adding, “There is space for all.”

LifeSiteNews reported how the Conservative Party has warned that Trudeau’s Bill C-63 is so flawed that it will never be able to be enforced or become known before the next election.

The law calls for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with policing internet content.

The bill’s “hate speech” section is accompanied by broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics, including levying pre-emptive judgments against people if they are feared to be likely to commit an act of “hate” in the future.

Details of the new legislation also show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories.

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