Government Spending & Taxes

— May 7, 2024
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Understanding British Columbia’s Public Management Challenge

Understanding British Columbia’s Public Management Challenge finds that despite substantial spending increases by the B.C. government, the province’s health-care wait times have increased and student test scores have declined.

— Apr 30, 2024
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Personal Income Tax Compliance for Canadians: How and at What Cost?

Personal Income Tax Compliance for Canadians: How and at What Cost? uses a new survey and finds that roughly half of tax filers (50 per cent) prepared their 2022 income tax return themselves while more than one third (37 per cent) used a paid tax preparer—the study also suggests that one way to reduce these compliance costs is to produce prefilled income tax reports for Canadians, streamlining the process for taxpayers and saving them both time and money.

— Apr 23, 2024
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Marginal Effective Tax Rates for Working Families in Canada

Marginal Effective Tax Rates for Working Families in Canada is a new study that finds Canadian families and individuals with annual incomes between $30,000 and $60,000 face marginal effective tax rates near or above 50 per cent—meaning that across the provinces, individuals and families with relatively modest incomes face the highest rates.

— Apr 9, 2024
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Canada’s Rising Personal Tax Rates and Falling Tax Competitiveness, 2024

Canada’s Rising Personal Tax Rates and Falling Tax Competitiveness, 2024 is a new study that finds recent personal income tax rate increases at the federal and provincial levels have helped widen the income tax rate gap between the U.S. and Canada—among all 61 provinces and states, at $50,000 of annual income, the top 10 highest combined (federal plus provincial/state) personal income tax rates are in nine Canadian provinces—with all provinces in the top 15.

— Apr 3, 2024
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Undoing Alberta’s Personal Income Tax Hikes

Undoing Alberta’s Personal Income Tax Hikes is a new study that finds reversing the 2015 provincial personal income tax rate increases and instituting a flat eight per cent tax rate would help restore Alberta’s tax advantage while saving taxpayers $1,573 a year, on average.

— Mar 28, 2024
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Can the Carbon Tax Be Reformed or Not?

As the federal carbon tax continues to rise, two new essays— Reforming the Federal Government's Carbon Tax Plan and Carbon Tax Is Beyond Redemption—make two opposing arguments, to retain the tax (after fixing it) and to scrap it.

— Mar 26, 2024
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The Size of Government in Canada in 2022

The Size of Government in Canada in 2022 measures federal, provincial, and local government spending in each province as a share of the economy (GDP) from 2007 to 2022 (the most recent year of comparable data) finding that government size grew in every province except Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan during that period. In 2022, the size of government relative to the economy as a whole across Canada ranged from a low of 26.8 per cent in Alberta to a high of 63 per cent in Nova Scotia--and was 40.5 of Canada’s total economy.

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