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Canada needs a minimum tax on corporate book profits

Thursday, March 2nd, 2023

In 2021, tax avoidance by 123 of Canada’s largest corporations cost the public $30 billion… Corporate tax avoidance nearly doubled in 2021, compared to the pre-pandemic average. More robust policies are needed… A minimum tax on book profits is the major revenue generator within the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act… If Canada had a 15-per-cent minimum tax on book profits in 2021, it would have reduced the tax gap by $11 billion.

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Canada’s parliamentary watchdogs struggle for more financial independence

Saturday, April 30th, 2022

The auditor general is Canada’s first officer of Parliament, created shortly after Confederation to check government spending. In the firmament of the nine agents of Parliament, the auditor general, with a $117-million budget, is the uber-watchdog, the most visible and often better known than ministers… the auditor general’s office has a deeply entrenched culture of independence and a “semi-adversarial role” in dealing with government.

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Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »


No good reason for Ontario to delay signing child-care agreement

Friday, February 11th, 2022

… a small minority is trying to weaken the pan-Canadian policy. They are trying to undermine the national approach, for reasons that include skepticism, financial self-interest and old-fashioned nostalgia for the 1950s family… There is no reason to cave to those who seek to weaken child-care policy. For more than 838,000 children five and under years – and for everyone who relies on someone who relies on child care – a solid Ontario child-care agreement can’t come soon enough.

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National child-care plan would accelerate post-COVID recovery

Sunday, January 3rd, 2021

… while most of the initiative and fiscal support for national ELCC is coming from Ottawa, provincial governments would benefit enormously from the new system. Provincial GDP would grow, tens of thousands of jobs would be created, and provincial revenues would grow by $8-14 billion per year… In the wake of COVID-19, Canada needs the economic benefits of high-quality, universal ELCC more urgently than ever. Investing in a national plan is an economic “no-brainer” that will pay for itself.

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Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »


Can we ensure everyone has an affordable life?

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

Health is the great equalizer. No matter where we’re from, what our values are, what our age or our political beliefs, we all want to have a healthy and long life. And if we agree on that, then we can say affordability is about the amount and type of resources we need to live a healthy and thriving life… Individual income is only one component of a broader social safety net that supports a thriving population; employers, government and community all play pivotal roles too.

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Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »


Big hurdles remain in pharmacare implementation plan

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019

The national pharmacare advisory council’s ambitious report presents a staged, eight-year plan to reduce drug costs and make public drug coverage universal with the participation of the provinces. But there are major stumbling blocks ahead. The report is silent on how the initiative would be paid for; it proposes a convoluted and unequal federal funding transfer to encourage provincial and territorial participation; and, it makes potentially naïve assumptions about how private insurers will react to the expansion of public drug insurance.

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