Red Deer’s “Blue-Collar” Accountant Cory Litzenberger featured on national radio show by Charles Adler

The Blue Collar Accountant

Cory G. Litzenberger, CPA, CMA, CFP, C.Mgr

Since the time I went to school to become a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA), I’ve referred to myself as a Blue Collar worker trapped in a White Collar body.

My father, born in 1931, grew up on a farm… and eventually became a journeyman carpenter. My father built houses for his employer for most of his 32 years with that company before being laid off because a White Collar consultant was brought in and had said there was no record of what my father did.

My father was the service and warranty repairman in the twilight of his career and got his tasks each day on pink pieces of “while you were out” note paper.

Not the best record keeping.

My dad now had no job… and this experience had showed me that loyalty to your employer meant nothing.

I was 13 years old – and I (now a 6’6, 350 lb frame), hadn’t even hit my first growth spurt yet.

In order to feed his family, my father got a temporary job cleaning high schools from midnight to 8am. When an opening came up, he helped attach portable classrooms to the growing schools (one classroom I ended up sitting in during high school).

The GST had just become a reality, and the Chretien “Red Book” was going to solve everything.

We eventually moved into a seniors’ living complex as he got a full-time job as an on-site caretaker when I was in high school.

I had the biggest rec room of all my friends.

What did this hard work and determination from my Blue Collar father teach me? It taught me – don’t be “that” guy. Don’t be the White Collar business owner or consultant that comes in and makes it difficult for working class families trying to make ends meet.

As a result of my upbringing and education, I was a square peg in a round hole (or I guess based on my stature, a round peg in a square hole).

I started delivering flyers, became a busboy in a small family restaurant, eventually moving on to unloading semi-trucks at a grocery store, pumping gas, landscaping, working security at bars and Roughriders games, refereed basketball, and became a bank teller.

Yes… I could hold a job. The reality is that they were all part-time, and I worked four of them at the same time during the day, while going to school at night.

I was not going to end up in my father’s position. I was going to be a White Collar guy… but I was going to do it differently.

Eventually, I found my path into accounting and taxation, and much of my story has been documented since then.

The one thing I’ve always done, is stand up for small business owners, especially the Blue Collar trades businesses that needed someone in their corner.

To this extent, after listening to Charles Adler, I wrote a thread on Twitter after he spoke about his parents, and wondered how they would be treated today trying to get ahead.

I’ve reposted this thread below, but now you know why I am as passionate as I am about small business – the working class – the Blue Collar. This is not fake… this is me.

Yes, I have a White Collar job, but I’m going to do what I can to stand up for the Blue Collar clients that keep MY family fed… because if they take after their dad, they will eat a lot.

My thread below, also found here

The working class in Alberta is also your small business. Businesses with <100 employees accounted for 70.6% of private sector worker in 2017. 1/2 of that number had <20 employees. Energy sector prefers contractors over employees because of volatility in commodities…
… as a result, many contractors are laid off before any employee layoffs are even mentioned in the news. These trades contractors work away for weeks (sometimes months) at a time not knowing if the day they go home will be their last cheque or not. …
… Employment Insurance (EI) only covers employees. Contractors can opt in for EI Special Benefits like maternity and medical leave, but they are not eligible for EI Regular benefits like employees. We hear the laurentians of Eastern Canada say they should have saved money…
… saved it for a rainy day maybe… but they don’t realize that even Noah only had to make it last 40 days… not 40 weeks… not 40 months. We are now into month 48 of the downturn in the Energy sector… the rainy day fund is bone dry. So what has the government done? …
… since elected, we saw the introduction of the Specified Corporate Income (SCI) rules. Simply put, if you are in business in Canada; do a job for a relative that is more than 10% of your gross sales for the year, you lose your small business tax rate on that income…
… this was a massive blow to agriculture and rural Canada where many relatives work for each other. There are proposed relief coming to the agriculture sector, but not rural Canadians in business. Then came TOSI – Tax On Split Income…
… this does not target the downtown Toronto retailer, but it does target your small business trades. Remember ‘those people’ in Alberta’s energy sector? Yep, it hits them the most… especially those under 25… https://linkedin.com/pulse/how-would-mary-joseph-taxed-today-cory-g-litzenberger/… …
… the TOSI changes impacted the middle class the most… https://linkedin.com/pulse/targeting-middle-class-how-trudeau-government-tax-you-litzenberger/… … the math shows just how more punitive this rule is on low and middle income Canadians compared to wealthy ones…
… then came Adjusted Aggregate Investment Income (AAII) rules under the guise of “taxing the wealthy”. The talking points were about a $1M portfolio making 5%. The reality is that it is legislated as $50,000 of income. The size of the portfolio is irrelevant. …
… The most common way to hit $50k of income is to have sublet part of your business location since you don’t need it all. This AAII tax hit ONLY impacts small business. It does not hit pure holding companies; large corporations; or foreign controlled companies in Canada. …
… in addition to already paying 50.67% income tax on that rental income (Alberta rates), you would start to lose your small business tax rate at $5 to $1. In other words, $1 over the limit, didn’t change your federal active business rate from 11% to 27% on that dollar…
… it changed it on $5 of your income. So that means instead of paying an additional 16 cents of tax on that extra dollar of income, you were paying 5 x 16 = 80 cents. 80% income tax on that extra $1 of investment income. But that’s not all…
… this was over the 50.67% already taxed. This means on that $1.00 of extra investment income, you would be charged $1.3067 in tax. Remember: Large Corporations, Pure Holding Corporations, and Foreign controlled corporations still only pay 50.67% on that same dollar…
… Tell me in what world does a 130.67% tax rate on $1 of income make sense? Since 2015, the Federal Government has methodically attacked small business with tax changes, but has done so while convincing urban Ontario and Quebec that they are targeting the wealthy…
… the working class, small business in rural Canada has been slowly squeezed by tax policy. Which part of Canada do you think has to use the most carbon, just to get to work and buy groceries? Rural Canada. There is an urban vs rural divide happening right now. #cdnpoli
(addition)… throw into the mix the increase in CPP contributions required from 4.95% to 5.95% of earnings by 2023 and that 1% on someone making the projected maximum CPP amount is $600 extra. Both the employee and employer pay this in 2023… but don’t worry…
… the basic personal amount was projected to be $13,092 by then, and the gov’t is raising it to $15,000 instead. A difference of $286.20 in tax. So, you pay up to $600 more to CPP, and get back $286.20. But if you are self-employed, you pay $1,200 to get the same $286.20…
… if you are a small business with 5 employees… you pay $3,000 more for them… and get nothing more in return. An increase on the CPP amount is not to help pension, it is just another attack on small business and the working class.

https://omny.fm/shows/charles-adler-tonight/who-really-are-the-canadian-working-class

Related Topics:Charles Adler Cory Litzenberger feature

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CBC’s business model is trapped in a very dark place

Published on November 21, 2024

Todayville

David Clinton

I Testified Before a Senate Committee About the CBC

I recently testified before the Senate Committee for Transport and Communications. You can view that session here. Even though the official topic was CBC’s local programming in Ontario, everyone quickly shifted the discussion to CBC’s big-picture problems and how their existential struggles were urgent and immediate. The idea that deep and fundamental changes within the corporation were unavoidable seemed to enjoy complete agreement.

I’ll use this post as background to some of the points I raised during the hearing.

You might recall how my recent post on CBC funding described a corporation shedding audience share like dandruff while spending hundreds of millions of dollars producing drama and comedy programming few Canadians consume. There are so few viewers left that I suspect they’re now identified by first name rather than as a percentage of the population.

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about CBC performance and about the broadcast industry in general.

For instance, it’ll surprise exactly no one to learn that fewer Canadians get their audio from traditional radio broadcasters. But how steep is the decline? According to the CRTC’s Annual Highlights of the Broadcasting Sector 2022-2023, since 2015, “hours spent listening to traditional broadcasting has decreased at a CAGR of 4.8 percent”. CAGR, by the way, stands for compound annual growth rate.

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Dropping 4.8 percent each year means audience numbers aren’t just “falling”; they’re not even “falling off the edge of a cliff”; they’re already close enough to the bottom of the cliff to smell the trees. Looking for context? Between English and French-language radio, the CBC spends around $240 million each year.

Those listeners aren’t just disappearing without a trace. the CRTC also tells us that Canadians are increasingly migrating to Digital Media Broadcasting Units (DMBUs) – with numbers growing by more than nine percent annually since 2015.

The CBC’s problem here is that they’re not a serious player in the DMBU world, so they’re simply losing digital listeners. For example, of the top 200 Spotify podcasts ranked by popularity in Canada, only four are from the CBC.

Another interesting data point I ran into related to that billion dollar plus annual parliamentary allocation CBC enjoys. It turns out that that’s not the whole story. You may recall how the government added another $42 million in their most recent budget.

But wait! That’s not all! Between CBC and SRC, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) ponied up another $97 million for fiscal 2023-2024 to cover specific programming production budgets.

Technically, Canada Media Fund grants target individual projects planned by independent production companies. But those projects are usually associated with the “envelope” of one of the big broadcasters – of which CBC is by far the largest. 2023-2024 CMF funding totaled $786 million, and CBC’s take was nearly double that of their nearest competitor (Bell).

But there’s more! Back in 2016, the federal budget included an extra $150 million each year as a “new investment in Canadian arts and culture”. It’s entirely possible that no one turned off the tap and that extra government cheque is still showing up each year in the CBC’s mailbox. There was also a $93 million item for infrastructure and technological upgrades back in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. Who knows whether that one wasn’t also carried over.

So CBC’s share of government funding keeps growing while its share of Canadian media consumers shrinks. How do you suppose that’ll end?

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PBO report shows cost of bureaucracy up 73 per cent under Trudeau

Published on November 20, 2024

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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

By Franco Terrazzano

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on the federal government to rein in the bureaucracy following today’s Parliamentary Budget Officer report showing the bureaucracy costs taxpayers $69.5 billion.

“The cost of the federal bureaucracy increased by 73 per cent since 2016, but it’s a good bet most Canadians aren’t seeing anywhere close to 73 per cent better services from the government,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Taxpayers are getting soaked because the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy is out of control.”

Today’s PBO report estimates the federal bureaucracy cost taxpayers $69.5 billion in 2023-24. In 2016-17, the cost of the bureaucracy was $40.2 billion. That’s an increase of 72.9 per cent.

The most recent data shows the cost continues to rise quickly.

“Spending on personnel in the first five months of 2024-25 is up 8.0 per cent over the same period last year,” according to the PBO.

“I have noticed a marked increase in the number of public servants since 2016 and a proportional increase in spending,” said Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux. “But we haven’t seen similar improvements when it comes to service.”

The Trudeau government added 108,793 bureaucrats since 2016 – a 42 per cent increase. Canada’s population grew by 14 per cent during the same period. Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer federal employees today.

The government awarded more than one million pay raises to bureaucrats in the last four years, according to access-to-information records obtained by the CTF. The government also rubberstamped $406 million in bonuses last year.

“The government added tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats, rubberstamped hundreds of millions in bonuses and awarded more than one million pay raises and all taxpayers seem to get out of it is higher taxes and more debt,” Terrazzano said. “For the government to balance the budget and provide tax relief, it will need to cut the size and cost of Ottawa’s bloated bureaucracy.”