Nova Scotia’s budgets do not always make national headlines, but the one recently delivered by Minister of Finance and Treasury Board Allan MacMaster got some well-deserved attention. It indexed the province’s personal income tax to inflation. Starting next January, the thresholds for all Nova Scotia’s tax brackets and its non-refundable credits for spouses and dependents will rise with the consumer price index each year.

As Alexandre Laurin and I argued in a recent C.D. Howe Institute report, this move is long overdue. Price surges during the pandemic reminded everyone that inflation and taxes are a toxic combination. Governments that tax nominal amounts even when inflation is eroding money’s purchasing power dodge…

Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has announced that the 2024 federal budget will be delivered on April 16. That is more than two weeks after the April 1 start of the budget year: fiscal 2024-25.

Late federal budgets have become a pattern. The 2023 budget was delivered March 28 – just three days ahead of April 1, and nowhere near early enough for Parliament or anyone else to even consider the fiscal plan before the year started. In both 2022 (April 7) and 2021 (April 19), the government also failed to get the budget out before the new fiscal year began. Go back a year earlier, and the situation was even worse. There was no budget.

It should be clear: Timely budgets with their tax and expenditure plans are good.…

Looking around the OECD, Canada is an average-tax nation overall but relies far more on income taxes and much less on consumption levies than most other industrialized nations. Leaning so hard on income taxes hurts our economic performance.

Every tax creates economic distortions but some overused taxes are more damaging than others. By raising more of our revenue from the less damaging taxes we could improve economic performance without reducing public services.

The latest C.D. Howe Institute Shadow Budget proposes a simple change in the federal tax mix: raise the GST rate by two percentage points — back to its original rate of seven per cent. At the same time, cut the federal corporate rate by two percentage points and…