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National

Canadians pay dearly in gas taxes – it’s only going to get worse

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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Author: Jay Goldberg

Two thousand dollars. That’s how much the typical two-car family spends on gas taxes every year.

Big numbers can sometimes be hard to process. But the feeling of dread Canadians get as the gas metre ticks up sure isn’t.

Go to the gas station and you’ll see moms filling up the minivan before soccer practice, praying the metre doesn’t tick past $100 so she can afford to take the kids to McDonald’s after an hour of drills.

Or dads fueling up after a week of long commutes to the office, who might choose to only fill the tank halfway in order to have enough money left over to pick up groceries on the way home for Friday night dinner.

All too often, folks will throw up their hands when they see the gas bill, not knowing who to blame. But the truth is a lot of the fault for high gas prices lies at the feet of our politicians.

The average price of gas in Ontario late last month was $1.66 per litre. Out of that total per litre cost, a whopping 56 cents was taxes.

That means that more than a third of the price of gas is taxes, money going out of the pockets of hardworking families and into the coffers of big government.

A family filling up a Dodge Caravan and Honda Accord once every two weeks ends up paying just shy of two grand in gas taxes over the course of a year.

That’s the equivalent of two months’ worth of groceries for a family of four.

Yes, gas taxes have been around for decades. But politicians today, particularly those in Ottawa, keep driving the tax burden higher and higher.

The Trudeau government’s carbon tax now costs 17.6 cents per litre. For that family filling up the Caravan and Accord once every two weeks, over the course of a year, the carbon tax bill alone will reach $604.

And it’s a cost that wasn’t charged at the pump just six short years ago.

If a 56 cent per litre tax bill sounds bad to you now, just wait until you see what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has in store for Canadians.

Trudeau plans to keep raising his carbon tax each and every year until 2030.

Today, the carbon tax costs 17.6 cents per litre of gas at the pumps. In six years, with Trudeau’s two carbon taxes fully implemented (the second one coming through fuel regulations), that number will be 54.4 cents per litre.

And that will bring the total per litre tax bill to $1.04.

By 2030, that same family filling up the Caravan and Accord every other week will be paying over $1,800 in carbon taxes. And the cost of overall gas taxes per year will hit $3,570.

This is a future Canadians can’t afford. And the federal carbon tax is making that future unaffordable.

The Trudeau government has tried to argue that somehow, by charging a carbon tax, paying bureaucrats to collect the carbon tax, charging sales tax on top of that carbon tax, and then using a magic formula to send some of that money back to taxpayers, Canadians will be better off.

Anyone who buys that should be looking for a beachfront property in Saskatoon.

And there are no refunds for Trudeau’s second carbon tax.

For those wondering, there are politicians out there willing to cut fuel taxes to make life more affordable at the pumps.

Provincial governments of all stripes, from the Liberals in Newfoundland and Labrador to the Progressive Conservatives here in Ontario to the NDP in Manitoba, have cut fuel taxes, saving families hundreds of dollars.

Trudeau’s scheduled carbon tax hikes over the next six years will crush family budgets like an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs. It’s time for the feds to learn from the provinces and lower costs at the pumps.

That means putting scrapping the carbon tax at the top of the agenda.

Business

It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

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From the  Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers

The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.

Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.

These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.

Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.

In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.

Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.

According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.

Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.

A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.

Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.

Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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2025 Federal Election

Carney’s budget is worse than Trudeau’s

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By Gage Haubrich

Liberal Leader Mark Carney is planning to borrow more money than former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

That’s an odd plan for a former banker because the federal government is already spending more on debt interest payments than it spends on health-care transfers to the provinces.

Let’s take a deeper look at Carney’s plan.

Carney says that his government would “spend less, invest more.”

At first glance, that might sound better than the previous decade of massive deficits and increasing debt, but does that sound like a real change?

Because if you open a thesaurus, you’ll find that “spend” and “invest” are synonyms, they mean the same thing.

And Carney’s platform shows it. Carney plans to increase government spending by $130 billion. He plans to increase the federal debt by $225 billion over the next four years. That’s about $100 billion more than Trudeau was planning borrow over the same period, according to the most recent Fall Economic Statement.

Carney is planning to waste $5.6 billion more on debt interest charges than Trudeau. Interest charges already cost taxpayers more than $1 billion per week.

The platform claims that Carney will run a budget surplus in 2028, but that’s nonsense. Because once you include the $48 billion of spending in Carney’s “capital” budget, the tiny surplus disappears, and taxpayers are stuck with more debt.

And that’s despite planning to take even more money from Canadians in years ahead. Carney’s platform shows that his carbon tariff, another carbon tax on Canadians, will cost taxpayers $500 million.

The bottom line is that government spending, no matter what pile it is put into, is just government spending. And when the government spends too much, that means it must borrow more money, and taxpayers have to pay the interest payments on that irresponsible borrowing.

Canadians don’t even believe that Carney can follow through on his watered-down plan. A majority of Canadians are skeptical that Carney will balance the operational budget in three years, according to Leger polling.

All Carney’s plan means for Canadians is more borrowing and higher debt. And taxpayers can’t afford anymore debt.

When the Liberals were first elected the debt was $616 billion. It’s projected to reach almost $1.3 trillion by the end of the year, that means the debt has more than doubled in the last decade.

Every single Canadian’s individual share of the federal debt averages about $30,000.

Interest charges on the debt are costing taxpayers $53.7 billion this year. That’s more than the government takes in GST from Canadians. That means every time you go to the grocery store, fill up your car with gas, or buy almost anything else, all that federal sales tax you pay isn’t being used for anything but paying for the government’s poor financial decisions.

Creative accounting is not the solution to get the government’s fiscal house in order. It’s spending cuts. And Carney even says this.

“The federal government has been spending too much,” said Carney. He then went on to acknowledge the huge spending growth of the government over the last decade and the ballooning of the federal bureaucracy. A serious plan to balance the budget and pay down debt includes cutting spending and slashing bureaucracy.

But the Conservatives aren’t off the hook here either. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that he will balance the budget “as soon as possible,” but hasn’t told taxpayers when that is.

More debt today means higher taxes tomorrow. That’s because every dollar borrowed by the federal government must be paid back plus interest. Any party that says it wants to make life more affordable also needs a plan to start paying back the debt.

Taxpayers need a government that will commit to balancing the budget for real and start paying back debt, not one that is continuing to pile on debt and waste billions on interest charges.

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