From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

Federal tax policy was not kind to Canadians in 2024, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. It wasn’t kind to Canadians in 2023, 2022 or any year since 2016 when the Trudeau government established a new income tax bracket of 33 per cent, pushing the combined federal and provincial top tax rate over 50 per cent in many provinces.

To recap 2024 tax policy changes, the federal government began the year with its sixth consecutive Canada Pension Plan tax hike. In 2018, before the government’s CPP “enhancements” (to use the government’s phrase), for a worker earning $85,000, the combined employer and employee CPP tax was $5,188. In 2024 the same worker’s tax bill was $8,111—or about 56 per cent higher including the government’s new “CPP2” tax.

Unfortunately, things will only get worse for Canadians in 2025. The CPP tax bill for the Canadian earning $85,000 will rise to $8,860 in 2025, bringing the total nominal tax increase to 71 per cent through the government’s seven annual CPP “enhancements.”

In addition to making the CPP tax more expensive yearly, the federal government also has been increasing the carbon tax each year. In April 2024, the Trudeau government increased the carbon tax to $80 per tonne from $65 per tonne, and like the CPP tax, the carbon tax will become more expensive yet again in 2025, rising another $15 per tonne to $95.

Another big tax change in 2024 was the capital gains tax hike announced in June. The Trudeau government claimed it was increasing taxes only on “0.13 per cent of Canadians in any given year”—a statistic that’s both misleading and incomplete. First, 0.13 per cent of Canadians “in any given year” are a different group than the 0.13 per cent of Canadians in the previous or following years, so many more than 0.13 per cent of Canadians will directly pay the tax.

Second, the tax hike also affects corporations, of which millions of Canadians are owners or part-owners (even excluding their ownership of publicly traded companies’ shares). Overall, economist Jack Mintz estimated that through their ownership of private corporations (based on 2021 data) about 4.74 million Canadians would be affected by the higher tax rate, or 15.8 per cent of tax filers. In other words, about 100 times more Canadians than the Trudeau government suggested.

And in reality, just about all Canadians will be made worse off by the tax hike because almost everyone will effectively be subject to the higher capital gains tax rate through their exposure to publicly traded corporations including through public pension plans.

Worse, because capital gains taxes are taxes on investment, the certain effect of the tax hike will be to reduce business investment. Unfortunately as multiple economic analyses have shown, business investment in Canada has already been extremely weak in the past decade, falling further behind the United States and other developed economies, and contributing to Canada’s productivity and economic stagnation crisis. The capital gains tax hike will make this even worse.

Finally, the Trudeau government ended 2024 with a so-called sales tax “holiday” for two months, which imposes severe administrative and logistical nightmares onto business owners (in a survey of small businesses, most opposed the change and 75 per cent said it would be costly and complicated to implement), and will do nothing to increase productivity or improve economic incentives.

Quite the opposite; government deficits fund the tax “holiday,” which will increase the future tax burden—something that will further reduce economic productivity in the future. Federal tax policy clearly was not kind to Canadians in 2024. Unfortunately, 2025 is looking no better.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute