Working families with children in Canada face high tax hurdles that could dissuade them from earning extra income, according to a report released today by the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Treading Water: The Impact of High METRs on Working Families in Canada,” authors Alexandre Laurin and Finn...

Policymakers are concerned that Canadian businesses invest too little in innovative processes, on the view that this inhibits productivity, growth, and incomes. The evidence can be found in Canada’s low rate of growth in patent registrations and low rates of commercialization of new products...

British Columbia is on the right track with its controversial move to a harmonized sales tax (HST), according to this report. The authors say the shift to a value-added tax mirrors patterns in most of the developed world, and helped move the province from being a high tax, investment-unfriendly...

What impact do the tax systems of Canada’s Western provinces have on families’take-home pay and seniors’ pension income, and how does it compare to other provinces? This report answers the question by looking at marginal effective tax rates (METRs) on personal income, which measure the...

Canada’s graduated personal income tax leads most taxpayers to expect higher tax rates when they are working than when they are living on lower incomes from their retirement savings. Yet for many people, marginal effective tax rates on income from retirement savings are higher than those they...

Spending restraint is key to achieving a balanced federal budget over the next five years and should form part of Ottawa’s March Budget. This Backgrounder demonstrates how to limit the rise in the federal debt by prudently reining in spending growth rather than raising taxes, so that past and...

Crown corporations are business enterprises owned by governments – having been established to achieve a range of public policy goals, they tend also to have revenue-generating objectives. In the financial sector, the Crowns typically had their origins in a perceived lack of credit – a credit...