Alberta's new royalty regime has made the province a more rewarding place for anyone looking to invest in conventional non-renewable resources. After Alberta's NDP government commissioned a review of the royalty regime to ensure the province was receiving its “fair share,” it ended up...

Who pays and how much? These are crucial questions for any tax system and, given the complexity of the economy, they are also among the most difficult to answer. This paper undertakes an analysis of the distribution of taxes and transfers in Canada using a static approach based on annual income...

Until now, assessments of the scope of enterprises in Canada that are owned by government have placed Canada roughly in the middle of OECD member countries in terms of how much direct control governments have over businesses in our economy. But that's because all of those assessments have relied...

Fossil fuel subsidies are of enormous import to policy-makers and public opinion, making it critical to properly define them. However, traditional methodologies tend to place subsidies in the realm of tax expenditure analysis, presenting a flawed picture. A recent report on government subsidies...

Oil price fluctuations, concerns over the division of resource revenues, and unconventional oil and gas developments are forcing governments to confront the same issue: how to design optimal royalty and corporate tax systems that bring in a publicly acceptable share of revenues without...

Canada lags behind many of its First World counterparts when it comes to business innovation, and urgently needs to improve its performance if it is to remain competitive and attractive to investment. The Expert Panel Report on Federal Support to Research and Development has recommended several...

The province of Ontario ended its most recent fiscal year with a $12 billion deficit and the Fraser Institute has calculated that the province is in worse financial shape than even the fiscally appalling state of California. One would think that a province so financially debilitated would want...

The Canadian personal income tax system does not pay much attention to whether the amount of money an individual brings home is supplemented by the income of a spouse or not. That means that families where one spouse earns more than the other get taxed at a higher rate than families where two...

For a government's fiscal program to best serve the public interest, while also ensuring sufficient public revenue collection, it has to meet three criteria: efficiency, simplicity and fairness. Unfortunately, the royalty and tax system currently in place for Saskatchewan's robust potash-mining...