Taxes

Have taxes changed all that much over the past half century?

Apr 20, 2010
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Yesterday, the Fraser Institute released its Consumer Tax Index report, which claims to show that the average Canadian family’s tax bill has increased by a whopping 1,624% since 1961. There are a lot of things wrong with Fraser Institute’s math. Here are just a few of them. To begin with, the numbers should have been… View Article

Are Canadians paying too much in taxes?

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It’s tax season and people are looking more closely at their incomes and the amount of taxes they pay. The Fraser Institute released their annual Consumer Tax Index report yesterday, claiming that the total tax bill of the average Canadian family now takes up 41.7% of their income. This seems like a big number, which… View Article

Income Taxes are a steal: Seth’s tax confessions

Apr 5, 2010
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I just did my taxes this weekend, and I’m wracked with guilt. Personally, I’ve never found completing my taxes particularly onerous. It takes me a few hours — no big deal. I’m paid well (and well above the average). I’ve never had to hire an accountant, as I’m not doing anything fancy. I’m only availing… View Article

Tax cuts don’t make up for BC’s low minimum wages

Apr 4, 2010
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Responding to news of Ontario’s latest minimum wage increase (to $10.25 per hour), BC’s labour minister Murray Coell held firm on his government’s commitment to leave BC’s $8 minimum wage unchanged. The Minister seems convinced that the tax cuts over the last decade were so beneficial to low wage workers in the province, that they… View Article

In defense of the stimulus

Mar 25, 2010
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Earlier this week, the Fraser Institute published a controversial report which argued that the government stimulus did not do much for economic growth in the last two quarters of 2009, suggesting that government spending on infrastructure was useless. While their analysis suffers from serious shortcomings, which I outlined in a previous blog post here, their… View Article

About that Copenhagen award

Feb 5, 2010
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Back in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens – in spite of the fact that there… View Article

Corporations are people too

Jan 31, 2010
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Advocates of democratic electoral reform are really out of step. Ideas like proportional representation and advertising spending limits are so retro, so 2004. The fashionable electoral reform idea this year is to give corporations a real say. It’s time for individual citizens to share their electoral democracy with corporations to give meaning to those old… View Article

Scrooge is alive and well

Dec 29, 2009
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In a Vancouver Sun article (Market wages would make a difference to city’s taxes, December 28, 2009) Philip Hochstein argues Vancouver civic workers who make a living wage should be made to suffer the fate of those in the private sector whose employers get away with paying under $15 an hour for labouring, or $10-15 an hour… View Article