The Ontario Conservatives’ first budget is being delivered on Thursday. Normally this is the first opportunity for the public to compare the government’s plan with any promises the governing party made trying to get elected. In this case, since there was no Conservative campaign platform, and the Ford government has…
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Despite a “surprise” boost in government revenue due to the strong economy, there aren’t many big ticket items compared to previous Liberal budgets. There are actually big risks in baking big programs into the budget before an election, as all the parties can use the increased fiscal room for their…
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At the start of January we released two reports looking at corporate executive pay. The first, our annual report on the 100 richest Canadian CEOs, calculated that by 11:33 a.m. on Jan 2, Canada’s richest CEOs had already made $50,759—the amount the average worker will make in a year. The…
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Social impact bonds…they’re back in case you didn’t get enough of them here or here. This time around they are in Manitoba and it’s a $3 million program that involves doulas helping Indigenous mothers keep their kids out of foster care. As usual, the intervention itself sounds interesting and innovative. It…
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Finance Minister Bill Morneau will deliver his fall economic statement this afternoon. As I was writing this, all indications were that the federal government would wisely sidestep a corporate tax cut war with the United States, much to the chagrin of rich investors in Canada. And let’s be honest. Canada’s…
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Am I happy with the 2018 federal budget? Well, many of the items in it can be found in this year’s and past Alternative Federal Budgets (AFB), which of course is a good thing. But in general I’d say this is an ambition constrained budget. The government had the fiscal…
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This summer, the federal government proposed a series of reforms to the Income Tax Act designed to close certain tax loopholes and address tax avoidance. Finance Canada says these changes would impact Canadian-Controlled Private Corporations (CCPCs) in three key areas: income “sprinkling” (a type of income splitting), passive investments made…
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Ontario’s big business lobbies continue their campaign against the government’s planned minimum wage hike—to $15 an hour by January 1, 2019 from the current rate of $11.40. They say the move is “arbitrary” and are threatening to flee the province unless the government backs down. This kind of rhetoric was…
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Ontario’s big business lobbies continue their campaign against the government’s planned minimum wage hike—to $15 an hour by January 1, 2019 from the current rate of $11.40. They say the move is “arbitrary” and are threatening to flee the province unless the government backs down. This kind of rhetoric was…
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Ontario announced plans in May to boost the minimum wage to $15 an hour by January 2019. In my recent report, Ontario Needs a Raise, I calculated who would benefit most from this overdue wage hike, but Indigenous workers were not included because the Labour Force Survey (LFS) public use…
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