Year: 2008

This Is Ludicrous

Commissions across the country, each operating on their own codes but upon similar premise, have fallen into disrepute of late because of cases they’ve taken on, dealing with freedom of speech. There are growing demands to clip the extraordinary powers of commissions to stray into adjudication of constitutionally protected rights and laws within the Criminal Code.

Will New Brunswick Dare To Pull Out All The Stops?

New Brunswick’s strategic objectives in its tax-reform exercise are impeccable. It seeks to achieve “self-sufficiency” – independence from federal equalization payments – by 2026. The corporate tax reform cited here is one of the more radical options presented in the New Brunswick discussion paper. But it doesn’t go quite far enough. New Brunswick needs a corporate tax rate that will reverberate across the country and around the world.

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Profile Series: Arthur Laffer

“Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I’ve never  heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I’ve never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.” Arthur Betz “Art” Laff er is one of the world’s most renowned...

Taxes or User Charges?

Taxes or User Charges?

Like all governments, municipalities have the option of using a number of revenue-raising tools that have different characteristics. We examine, in this Charticle, the use of property taxes versus user charges for the funding of municipal services in 30 Canadian cities. FC038

Municipal Tax and Municipal Tax Reliance

Municipal Tax and Municipal Tax Reliance

Frontier’s Local Government Frontiers Project collected various financial data from Canada’s 30th largest cities in 2007. This Charticle presents the levels of taxation imposed collected divided by the number of households counted in each jurisdiction. FC037

Is Ontario the Patsy Because of Equalization?

Why, he asks, can Manitoba spend $1.2-billion to subsidize electricity prices while it collects $1.8-billion this year in equalization payments? How can Atlantic Canada, with a population of just two million, afford 15 universities? The answer, he says, is the “tidal wave” of funding it gets from Alberta and from Ontario, whose taxpayers provide 44 per cent of federal revenues.