National
Low and middle income Canadians hit hardest by high marginal effective tax rates

From the Fraser Institute
By Philip Bazel
A new study published by the Fraser Institute today finds that Canadian families and individuals with annual incomes between $30,000 and $60,000 face marginal effective tax rates near or above 50%.
Among the provinces, BC has the lowest tax rates of 38%.
Ontario has a rate of 50% – and high-income families at $300,000+ are taxed lower at 44%.
Families with modest income brackets consistently face disproportionately high marginal effect tax rates, raising questions of fairness and efficiency in the tax and transfer system.
Dig into the numbers and see how your province placed here.
Canadian families and individuals with annual incomes between $30,000 and $60,000 face marginal effective tax rates near or above 50 per cent, finds a new study published by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“Canadian families with modest incomes face high marginal effective tax rates, often higher rates than Canadians in top income tax brackets,” said Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute, which published Marginal Effective Tax Rates for Working Families in Canada by Philip Bazel, an associate at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary.
The marginal effective tax rate (METR) measures the personal income taxes paid (federal and provincial) and the reductions in government benefits, resulting from earning an extra dollar. For example, the Canada Child Benefit, a monthly payment, is reduced as family income increases. In other words, the effective tax rate is the combination of taxes you pay and benefits you lose as you make more money.
Crucially, across the provinces, individuals and families with relatively modest incomes face the highest rates. This unfortunately creates a disincentive for earning additional income, as the financial benefits are significantly offset by increased taxes and/or reduced government benefits.
Canadian families with modest incomes, particularly those earning between $30,000 and $60,000, face the highest marginal effective tax rates. For example, families earning a household income of $60,000 are subject to an effective tax rate of 50 per cent or higher in every province. In Quebec, the METR is as high as 67 per cent at this income level.
Among provinces, BC has the lowest rate (38 per cent) averaging across the $30,000 to $60,000 bracket. Ontario’s rate for the $30,000 to $60,000 bracket is 6 percentage points higher (50 per cent) than high-income families at $300,000 or higher (44 per cent).
“Families with modest income brackets consistently face disproportionately high METRs, raising questions of fairness and efficiency in the tax and transfer system,” Bazel said.
“These findings highlight the need to prioritize METR reductions for low-income families.”
Author:
2025 Federal Election
Carney’s budget is worse than Trudeau’s

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.
armed forces
Yet another struggling soldier says Veteran Affairs Canada offered him euthanasia

From LifeSiteNews
‘It made me wonder, were they really there to help us, or slowly groom us to say ‘here’s a solution, just kill yourself.’
Yet another Canadian combat veteran has come forward to reveal that when he sought help, he was instead offered euthanasia.
David Baltzer, who served two tours in Afghanistan with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, revealed to the Toronto Sun that he was offered euthanasia on December 23, 2019—making him, as the Sun noted, “among the first Canadian soldiers offered therapeutic suicide by the federal government.”
Baltzer had been having a disagreement with his existing caseworker, when assisted suicide was brought up in in call with a different agent from Veteran Affairs Canada.
“It made me wonder, were they really there to help us, or slowly groom us to say ‘here’s a solution, just kill yourself,” Baltzer told the Sun.“I was in my lowest down point, it was just before Christmas. He says to me, ‘I would like to make a suggestion for you. Keep an open mind, think about it, you’ve tried all this and nothing seems to be working, but have you thought about medical-assisted suicide?’”
Baltzer was stunned. “It just seems to me that they just want us to be like ‘f–k this, I give up, this sucks, I’d rather just take my own life,’” he said. “That’s how I honestly felt.”
Baltzer, who is from St. Catharines, Ontario, joined up at age 17, and moved to Manitoba to join the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, one of Canada’s elite units. He headed to Afghanistan in 2006. The Sun noted that he “was among Canada’s first troops deployed to Afghanistan as part Operation Athena, where he served two tours and saw plenty of combat.”
“We went out on long-range patrols trying to find the Taliban, and that’s exactly what we did,” Baltzer said. “The best way I can describe it, it was like Black Hawk Down — all of the sudden the s–t hit the fan and I was like ‘wow, we’re fighting, who would have thought? Canada hasn’t fought like this since the Korean War.”
After returning from Afghanistan, Baltzer says he was offered counselling by Veteran Affairs Canada, but it “was of little help,” and he began to self-medicate for his trauma through substance abuse (he noted that he is, thankfully, doing well today). Baltzer’s story is part of a growing scandal. As the Sun reported:
A key figure shedding light on the VAC MAID scandal was CAF veteran Mark Meincke, whose trauma-recovery podcast Operation Tango Romeo broke the story. ‘Veterans, especially combat veterans, usually don’t reach out for help until like a year longer than they should’ve,’ Meincke said, telling the Sun he waited over two decades before seeking help.
‘We’re desperate by the time we put our hands up for help. Offering MAID is like throwing a cinderblock instead of a life preserver.’ Meincke said Baltzer’s story shoots down VAC’s assertions blaming one caseworker for offering MAID to veterans, and suggests the problem is far more serious than some rogue public servant.
‘It had to have been policy. because it’s just too many people in too many provinces,” Meincke told the Sun. “Every province has service agents from that province.’
Veterans Affairs Canada claimed in 2022 that between four and 20 veterans had been offered assisted suicide; Meincke “personally knows of five, and said the actual number’s likely close to 20.” In a previous investigation, VAC claimed that only one caseworker was responsible—at least for the four confirmed cases—and that the person “was lo longer employed with VAC.” Baltzer says VAC should have military vets as caseworkers, rather than civilians who can’t understand what vets have been through.
To date, no federal party leader has referenced Canada’s ongoing euthanasia scandals during the 2025 election campaign.
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