Taxes and tax cuts

Subscribe to Taxes and tax cuts
On April 19, 2010, the Fraser Institute released The Canadian Consumer Tax Index, 2010.  This report overstates average taxes and ignores the introduction of new public services during the past half-century. It does so in the following ways: On taxes The Fraser Institute’s starting point is that all taxes are paid by individuals. According to the report, the “tax bill of the average Canadian family” includes $2,484 of corporate income tax and $397 of charges for natural resources. 
Now that Canada is in the fiscal red, taxes appear to be coming back into fashion. A surprisingly broad swath of Canadians — and not your usual suspects — are musing aloud about the need to raise taxes to tackle the deficit and to pay for the things we care most about, such as public health care. Almost three out of five Canadian CEOs surveyed in March say higher taxes are needed to get the country back into the fiscal black.
The 2010 BC Budget was a disappointment on the climate action front. Even as Premier Campbell waxed poetic in the Globe about the impact of climate change on the “Spring Olympics” – with its sunny days, crocuses, daffodils and cherry blossoms making it fun for people on the street but a big mess up at Cypress Bowl – the budget offered little assurance that this government still cares.
As we enter the second half of the oil age and the first half of the climate change era, the electrification of the drive train in automobiles is being heralded as the single-most important contribution to sustainable living. Even though road traffic is only part of a society's energy footprint, auto manufacturers around the globe are working feverishly towards the commercialization of electric vehicles, including pure battery, plug-in hybrid, and fuel cell cars.  
OTTAWA – It’s time to remove the rose-coloured glasses around the reliability of “consensus” forecasts used in the federal budget, says a new report released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) The report, by economist David Macdonald, highlights the underlying uncertainty of GDP “consensus” growth forecasts and extends the concerns recently expressed by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO).
On November 18th, 2009, in Ottawa, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Canadian Labour Congress held an event entitled "Recession, Recovery and Transformation: Meeting the policy challenges of our time." Ed Broadbent gave a keynote address entitled "Beyond the Crisis: Ten propositions for a resurgence of the progressive movement". Here is the audio, while the written commentary is attached below.
As Canada's recession winds down, there is growing talk of housing and debt bubbles but there is an even bigger bubble that's set to burst. It's the Harper government bubble – that carefully crafted, out-of-touch universe our Prime Minister has been living in since recession threw hundreds of thousands of Canadians out of work. Within the Harper bubble, the recession is over and so it's time to turn the taps off stimulus funding and get back to the original extreme Conservative program of gutting public services.
Determined to benefit from the shock of a global recession, conservatives are whipping up unnecessary hysteria over the fiscal deficits governments have incurred in the past year’s efforts to protect their citizens.
There has never been a better time in recent history when the core democratic value of equality can be seen as both an ethical and practical option. Governments in advanced democracies around the world have been forced by the current prolonged economic crisis to openly acknowledge that the dominant political and economic ideology has been a failure. Its system of values, with the minimal role assigned to government, has been proven by experience to be disastrously wrong, both in terms of stability and social justice.