Trudeau hiking taxes again in 2024

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Brace for impact, taxpayers.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be reaching deeper into your pockets in the new year with payroll tax hikes, a carbon tax hike and alcohol tax hikes.

Canadians will be paying higher payroll taxes because of the mandatory rising Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance contributions.

If you make $73,200 or more, you’ll be paying an extra $347 in payroll taxes in 2024, for a total tax bill of $5,104.

Your employer will also be forced to fork over $5,524 in the new year.

The federal government is imposing a new tax, which it calls “CPP2.” The original CPP taxes your income at six per cent up to $68,500. The new CPP2 expands that threshold and taxes additional income at four per cent up to $73,200.

Trudeau likes to claim he’s “working to make life more affordable.” But he’s also hiking a tax that directly makes life more expensive: the carbon tax.

The carbon tax increases the price of gasoline, diesel and home heating fuels, which is a big deal in our vast, cold country. The carbon tax also makes groceries more expensive, as it increases costs for the farmers who grow our food and the truckers who deliver it.

The carbon tax will cost the average family up to $911 in 2024 even after the rebates, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The feds are also scheming up a digital services tax. This new tax targets social media platforms, companies operating digital marketplaces, and businesses earning revenue from online advertising, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb.

Consumers should expect to pay higher prices because of the tax. When faced with the three per cent DST in France, Amazon increased its commission charge to French vendors by the same amount.

You could be forgiven if all these tax hikes drive you to drink.

But when you pick up that case of Blue, a bottle of pinot or a mickey of rum, Trudeau will be taking an extra 4.7 per cent from you through his alcohol tax hikes.

Next year’s federal alcohol tax hike is expected to cost taxpayers almost $100 million.

Taxes in Canada already account for about half of the price of beer, 65 per cent of the price of wine and more than three quarters of the price of spirits.

While Trudeau hikes taxes, many other countries are providing relief.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation identified 51 national governments that provided tax relief during the pandemic or to ease the burdens of inflation. Those governments include more than half of the G7 and G20 countries and two-thirds of the countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Provincial governments – of all political stripes – are also providing relief.

Manitoba’s NDP government is suspending its fuel tax in the new year. Gas tax relief from Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives will save a family with a minivan and pick-up truck about $185 through June 2024. And the Liberals in Newfoundland and Labrador cut their gas tax by eight cents per litre.

The Alberta government promised to cut personal income taxes and passed legislation requiring a vote before a government can increase income or business taxes. Manitoba’s income tax cuts could save an individual taxpayer more than $2,000. Quebec lowered its income tax rate on the first two brackets. New Brunswick implemented significant income tax relief in 2023. And Prince Edward Island’s income tax cut will save middle-class taxpayers up to $200.

The fastest, simplest and easiest way for Trudeau to make all areas of life more affordable is to ditch his high-tax policies and allow Canadians to keep more of our money.

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Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.

Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.

While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.

The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.

Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.

Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.

Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.

Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.

Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.

Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.

With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”

The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”

Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.