One of the more controversial aspects of Ontario’s 2018 election campaign has been the complicated relationship between Ontario’s PC party, its new leader Doug Ford, and the party’s own election platform or— perhaps more accurately—platforms. For much of the campaign, the only formal platform document the PCs had was one…
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Canadians owe John Manley and Perrin Beatty a debt of gratitude … or do they? The president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada and the president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce have come out in favour of an expansion of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP)….
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The insurance industry has enjoyed tremendous profit on their retirement savings “products” for Canadians. The potential Canada Pension Plan (CPP) enhancement and the looming Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) pose major threats to the industry. Keith Ambachtsheer and Edward Waitzer’s recent call for for private competition to the ORPP is…
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Taking on the generous tax benefits available to the rich is a tough business. The rich are, well, rich. They have a lot of money to spend on fighting back. And because, as individuals, they have a lot at stake, it makes financial sense to spend a lot of their…
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Every year at this time, the marketing arms of Canada’s mutual funds go into high gear exhorting Canadians to dig deep to pour money into their RRSP investments in time to beat the end-of-February tax deadline. While it may be the officially supported time to think about adding to the…
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The big news out of the latest announcement from the Ontario government about the Ontario Registered Pension Plan (ORPP) is that there is no news. The province is pressing ahead with the implementation of the ORPP on the schedule it announced last August, with participation phased-in beginning in January 2017…
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In a CBC story about the CCPA’s January 4 executive compensation report, one of the go-to critics quoted in the piece resorted to a well-worn cliché to back up his dismissal of concerns about high CEO salaries. Edwin Locke of the University of Maryland said “a good CEO is worth…
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Over the past 10 years, the CCPA has documented annually the average pay of the highest-paid 100 CEOs of companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange as well as the relationship between that average and the annual employment earnings of a Canadian earning the average weekly wage for a full…
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Following the revelation of Volkswagen’s interesting and creative approach to compliance with emissions standards affecting its diesel-powered cars, conversation has focused on two questions: who is to blame, and how much should Volkswagen have to pay in fines and compensation? The answer to the first is certainly not the chair…
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What a surprise! The NDP makes a proposal for a very modest increase in corporate tax rates – not even to their level before Stephen Harper took office – and defenders of all things corporate in Canada turn on their scary corporate tax number generating machine and produce – wait…
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