Economy
Twitter is embroiled in a fresh legal battle over alleged unpaid severance to its former employees. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco federal court, accuses the company of failing to pay at least $500 million in promised severance to thousands of employees who were laid off following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.
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Read MoreA current narrative, echoed by the federal government, is that the “rich” don’t pay their fair share of taxes. To test this notion, Leger Marketing conducted a poll on behalf of the Fraser Institute to solicit the opinions of Canadians on appropriate personal income tax rates and tax fairness.
Current top marginal personal income tax rates on personal income are greater than 47% in all provinces, and exceed 50% in all but two provinces.
Half of Canadians (50%) surveyed felt that the highest personal income tax rate charged on an extra $100 of income should be 20% or less. More than three quarters (78%) believed the tax rate should not exceed 50%.
The majority (70%) of respondents believed that some Canadians don’t pay their fair share of taxes, but only 35% thought that high-income earners should pay more in taxes.
Roughly half (49%) of surveyed Canadians felt that the highest marginal personal income tax rate levied on the top 20% of income-earning households should be at or below 45%; 58% of respondents said that top tax rates should not exceed 50%.
Results from the survey demonstrate that only a minority of Canadians want high-income earners to pay more in total taxes, suggesting a discrepancy between current tax policy and Canadians’ taxation preferences.
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Read MoreAlberta Premier Danielle Smith mandated several key ministers to bolster the province’s energy and fertilizer industries – counter to top-down targets imposed by the Trudeau government concerning carbon emission reductions.
The Alberta Government published its 2023 mandate letters on Wednesday, signalling some of Smith’s priorities as she begins her first term as Premier.
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Read MoreNursing assistant Terri Smith-Fraser says the high cost of living has forced her to live in a van for the last year.
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Read MoreOttawa resident Tomislav Mitar describes the path of destruction a tornado left behind in his neighbourhood.
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Read MoreThe age of energy ideology is over in Ontario, replaced by power pragmatism. The Ontario government’s new and ambitious plan to meet the province’s power needs until 2050 draws on pretty much every known technology to meet a demand for power that could double by that year.
One doesn’t have to look too far back to remember the era of overhyped and overpriced wind and solar projects that former premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government was so eager to foist off on Ontarians. Across the province, the countryside is scarred with wind farms and solar installations. It was the sort of approach that a government could toy with, knowing that the province had surplus power so it didn’t need to rely on wind and solar.
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Read MoreDespite turning in solid headline growth in recent years, Canada has lagged behind the U.S. and other advanced economies in terms of standard of living performance (or real GDP per capita).
This underperformance accelerated after the 2014-15 oil price shock and has continued in the wake of the pandemic. What’s more, little turnaround appears to be on the horizon.
There may be a tendency to pin the blame for Canada’s sagging per-capita showing on the country’s rapidly-growing population base given that it has inflated the denominator of the calculation. However, at the crux of the problem is insufficient growth in the numerator, which in turn is tied to longstanding productivity issues.
Regionally, commodity-based economies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland & Labrador) continue to record the highest per-capita GDP levels, but their status as leaders has come under some pressure over the past decade. Post-pandemic, only British Columbia and PEI have managed to recover back to 2019 GDP per capita levels.
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Read MoreLeaders of the nation’s labour federations yesterday warned the Prime Minister not to invoke any emergency legislation to end a British Columbia port strike now in its 12th day. Cabinet enforced a back-to-work order to end an earlier strike at the Port of Montréal after five days.
“Legislation would be a serious misstep and would be met with strong resistance from the entire labour movement,” said the petition jointly signed by Canadian Labour Congress President Bea Bruske and her provincial and territorial counterparts. Back-to-work legislation “tramples on every Canadians’ Charter right to freedom of association,” the petition added.
“The union is still at the table and remains committed to the federal mediation process, ready to get a deal done,” said the petition. “We urge your government to allow the parties to finish bargaining the outstanding issues in good faith.”
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Read MoreCabinet must address “housing injustice” with new laws and policies, says the Federal Housing Advocate. Marie-Josée Houle in a report to Parliament faulted current programs as a “sorry disappointment.”
“There has been housing injustice in Canada,” Houle wrote in her first Annual Report. The Advocate complained of seeing tent cities in city parks surrounded by urban wealth.
“In Vancouver the disparity was staggering,” wrote Houle. “The tent encampment where people are living in Crab Park was silhouetted against a luxury cruise ship in the distance. In Montréal I visited a 24-hour shelter space that serves unhoused and precariously housed people each day which is located not far from a sparkling new luxury condo building.”
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Read MoreAirlines cannot blame factors they “should have known about” to deny passengers compensation for poor service, federal regulators said yesterday. The Canadian Transportation Agency itemized excuses it would no longer accept under Air Passenger Protection Regulations.
Compensation for flight delays must be paid “except in exceptional circumstances which regulations will identify,” the Agency wrote in a consultation paper. Exceptions must be spelled out for the benefit of travelers, it said.
“Circumstances that would not be considered exceptional: flight crew or cabin crew unavailability, staff shortages at the airline, technical problems that are an inherent part of normal airline operations, any situation the airline knew about or should have known about when it sold the ticket to the passenger, and any action or failure to act by the airline or others with which the airline has a contractual relationship,” wrote the Agency.
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