Op-Eds
Along with rampant spending, erratic tax changes, and mounting debt, the federal government is developing another bad fiscal habit: its budgets are getting later.
The government has announced that it will present its budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, which runs from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025, on April 16. By then, we will be more than two weeks into the fiscal year. That is too late.
The record of the Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was somewhat better before that. While only one of the four budgets they delivered from 2016-17 to 2019-20 appeared before March—and not by much: it came out on Feb. 27, 2018—none appeared after April 1. But their overall record is bad. Of the budgets they should have…
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…
‘Tis the season for giving, and as the year ends, many Canadians are planning substantial donations. However, they should consider maximizing those donations in 2023 while full tax relief for charitable giving is still guaranteed. The federal government has yet to table its legislation for reforming the alternative minimum tax (AMT), but if it sticks to its commitments laid out in the 2023 budget, tax relief for charitable giving will be curtailed for some high-income filers in 2024.
Donating to charities can lower our taxes. The charitable tax credit lowers taxes by about half of the amount of donations in excess of $200. And, donated accrued capital gains from gifts of publicly listed securities are exempted from taxable income…
