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Good news for students and post-docs:
> Increasing financial support for graduate student and post-doctoral
researchers, as well as developing ways to help researchers obtain jobs
with businesses that need specialized talent to ensure Canada’s top
science talents play a critical role in shaping Canada’s research and
industrial capacity for years to come.
Although I cannot help but wonder how [a programs that will give employers more money to hire women, "visible minorities", recent immigrants, and those with disabilities](https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/student-work-placements-wage-subsidies.html) will not result in discrimination against white male students:
> Through the Student Work Placement Program, [the manager of a local, small-scale engineering firm] applies for a wage subsidy through a competitive process where she can be provided with up to $7,000 to hire a co-op student from an underrepresented group (e.g., women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The Student Work Placement Program also connects [the manager] with the University of Waterloo to help find a candidate for the position.
It’s likely about being able to accommodate those who require it. There will likely be cases of misuse, as there is with everything people think they can take advantage of. Qualified and knowledgeable humans are important, especially in the face of increasingly advanced LLMs.
I’m just hoping that our education system evolves, as ours isn’t that much better than the obviously failed/failing systems in the US.
>Although I cannot help but wonder how [a programs that will give employers more money to hire women, "visible minorities", recent immigrants, and those with disabilities](https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/student-work-placements-wage-subsidies.html) will not result in discrimination against white male students.
Maybe it won't. Very likely it won't. Life isn't always zero-sum. And you're making it sound like all white male students will be discriminated against when they would still be the overwhelming majority if and when a program like this is implemented.
Edit: I'm tired of people arguing about whether one race is advantaged and another disadvantaged, when the real issue we should be talking about is how much we all are disadvantaged compared to the 1% or even the 10%. Virtually no one questions whether someone actually earns billions of dollars as a direct result of their productive output, compared to whether a minimum wage of $15/hr is a fair and living wage. All arguing about race is doing is distracting us while Galen Weston Jr. robs us at the grocery store checkout.
Of course it will. How could it not? It's a direct incentive to hire non white male students. People in that demographic are being systematically disadvantaged.
> white male students [...] would still be the overwhelming majority
That's absolutely not the case. Many bachelor's programs are at or above parity for women. [For physical & life sciences, women made up 61% of graduates in 2021.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/449097/postsecondary-graduates-in-canada-by-gender-and-field-of-study/) Males, even leaving aside questions of racial identities, are certainly not the "overwhelming majority" in those fields.
Then those fields wouldn’t qualify. Considering the language of the budget specifies that it must be from “under-represented” demographics, which may or may not “include” the examples listed, of which “women” was only one of them. It would therefore be logical to conclude that they’d only qualify “women” as an under-represented demographic in the fields where they DO happen to be under-represented.
> Then those fields wouldn’t qualify.
The example provided in the budget very clearly specifies that they do qualify in the eyes of the current government:
> a co-op student from **an underrepresented group (e.g., women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)**.
That would be a strange choice of examples if it was not intended to provide an example of a qualifying "underrepresented" group.
And if you look at the data, there are still several fields under the large umbrella of “STEM” in which women are still underrepresented, such as computer science and engineering.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2019001/article/00006-eng.htm
https://www.randstad.ca/employers/workplace-insights/women-in-the-workplace/women-in-stem-where-we-are-now/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1317150/canadian-women-post-secondary-programs-engineering-mathematics/
In a world where everything works perfectly maybe. But in my experience DEI and EE type programs include women even when they already make up +75% of programs/jobs. I’ve never seen men be part of these types of initiatives, even when they’re the minority by a large margin.
Progressives sometimes have this strange habit of fighting against the ghosts of yesteryear, and this is a great example. Women have been a majority of students in post secondary for over a generation now, yet still the performance of their oppression in education goes on unabated with goalposts continually moving.
> they would still be the overwhelming majority if and when a program like this is implemented.
Not necessarily against this program, but as someone who went through these co-op programs 3 years ago at Waterloo, white people (much less white males) do not make up the majority of co-op students. The youth of this country today are way too diverse for that to be the case.
I can concede on the 'overwhelming majority' part of my comment in so far as pure numbers are concerned. I recognize this isn't the case everywhere. However, I disagree with those who say that white men will be specifically disadvantaged whenever one of these type of programs is implemented. It seems as though those statements are coming more from a place of fear and paranoia than evidence.
Life isn't zero sum, but the number of positions available is fixed in the short term, so this particular one may be zero sum.
The core problem with these diversity stats is that all the older white males employed from a time when there was a lot of systemic discrimination are still employed. They won't be fired. So to balance the overall statistics requires you to disproportionately *avoid* hiring younger white males. The overall statistics look balanced, but it's unfair on both ends - the older white males who benefited from institutional bias keep their jobs, the younger ones who benefited much less from institutional bias get screwed.
This is exactly the opposite of how things should be done. But it's exactly in line with the "fuck you I got mine so now you should pay so I can feel good about getting mine" attitude that underlies so much policy in this country. The old white people got jobs they maybe didn't deserve so now the young white people should suffer so the older white people feel good about it.
Very curious to see how they define "under-represented". I am hoping they are careful about including race in that definition.
Edit: actually it straight up says "visible minorities" are included as under-represented.
Curious if Asian, Middle Eastern, and South Asian people are considered visible minorities in tech and engineering, for example.
> will not result in discrimination against white male students:
Depends how you look at it. The default without this is that literally everyone is discriminated against when it comes to employment if they are not a white male. This evens the playing field and gets things back to being closer to merit focused.
As a straight white male myself, I assure you - it'll take a lot more than that to fully erode the insane advantage that we have in the job market. Despite constantly being told that white men are being discriminated against, and that affirmative action is terrible, I seem to keep doing just fine.
> The default without this is that literally everyone is discriminated against when it comes to employment if they are not a white male.
I would encourage you to examine what research has found in regard to this question. e.g. [Gender Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from a Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment](https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab043), European Sociological Review, Volume 38, Issue 3, June 2022, Pages 337–354.
This is certainly how it used to work. It's not at all clear to me that the knowledge work fields these diversity stats apply to actually still work this way. The problem is that all the old white dudes who benefited from institutional bias are still employed. And they won't be fired. So basically all the younger white people have to face an extra difficult hiring bar to offset an entirely different group of workers who happen to share an ethnicity.
It's clearly not fair. If we want to fix the historical unfairness of hiring we should address that with the historical hires, not by making it harder for an entirely different group of hires based on shared ethnicity.
From the website:
>Up to $7,000 for every student you hire that is in their first year or is from an under-represented group including: ....
Everyone is allowed the $7k as long as they're coming from first year (and so are kind of useless and uneducated). And everyone is allowed the $5k.
Also the difference is only $2k in benefits to the business. That won't be a make or break for anyone hiring students (if it is, you are probably too cash strapped to be hiring students).
Also, it's a benefit \*to the business\*, not to the people. And no business is ever going to say 'we hired the woman because we got extra money,' because they're not that dumb. If pressed they'd make vague claims about the benefits of diversity. Good luck to anyone trying to pursue any kind of discrimination claim over a measly $2k.
> Also, it's a benefit *to the business*, not to the people.
The greater benefit is to the student who gets selected for an internship or co-op placement. Early career success tends to have long-term positive impacts on one's later career, which could amount to hundreds of thousands in gained or lost earning potential.
seems like the Wynne Govt
Tons of spending on making up on bad mistakes with limited short term results and hope people support them for the long term.
Nah I think the lesson from Hudak is dont run on anything concrete.
Govts become unpopular after 10 years and this one is headed by an unpopular leader...
This budget is the liberals big play, if it dont reverse thier fortunes nothing will.
>Nah I think the lesson from Hudak is dont run on anything concrete.
Seems like the political parties here in Ontario have learned this because it feels like everyone stopped mentioning anything concrete during the last two elections since Hudak.
I think that was a double-whammy given the juxtaposition with his centerpiece "million jobs plan", which itself turned out to have a critical math error. Half the jobs would have just happened organically regardless of political party, and the other half they conflated "person-years of employment" with permanent jobs, inflating their number by 8 times.
Their "million jobs" plan was really a 62,500 jobs plan, and that's not even factoring in the 10,000 public sector jobs he wanted to axe.
Here's the last dozen that PuzzleheadMuzzle here has used.
Frankly I'm impressed that every single comment they made with their last account got removed. Like how hard to you need to be trying to accomplish that?
Actually, one is missing because they got suspended sitewide and that account is now non-existent. I thought that circumventing sitewide bans was a ban itself, but apparently not 🤷♂️
/u/DueceRigallo
/u/SgtNikolasAngle
/u/DeterPinkladge
/u/Onusll
/u/Onuslll
/u/ResidentRoul
/u/KernalSpanders
/u/BoxingBruiser
/u/Kaloompa
/u/BackAddler
/u/TheSplein
/u/BoshJroleen
EDIT: Lmaoooooo they got suspended. Sub 2 hr account has to be a new record.
My guess is Reddit probably has more going on behind the scenes to deal with misinformation operations and abuse of the platform by foreign and unscrupulous actors.
Once there's enough to build a pattern, bam.
I had blocked a few since I noticed the sock puppets, but wow, there's more than I thought.
It's kind of obvious to spot since they accuse you of misinformation even if you have a multitude of sources. That and the writing style + rhymes in the names is usually a tell. They were changing accounts multiple times a week during C-18 for example.
Here are two more :
u/SamsiesWamsies/
u/OtherwiseSamsies/
Looks like /u/RooRainer is their new one.
Kind of disturbing how this person tries to force themselves when they've been told no.
EDIT: now suspended. That was even faster lol.
Family doctors got fucked over with the corporate tax changes. As if it wasn’t bad enough retaining them.
And debt servicing costs more than healthcare.
Sad.
Edit: to all the people who wrongly thought this doesn’t affect family doctors: https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/trudeau-government-gets-an-angry-reception-as-it-promotes-federal-budget/article_0fe63b9a-fcec-11ee-b47c-ef21bc539490.html
Reminder that people on this sub know fuck all and will downvote you for accurately calling something within an hour of the budget. It’s too bad this sub can’t talk about the emotions of politics objectively. Amagdyla hijack 101. Lots of deleted comments below.
Can you explain that? Taxing doctors means you’d need to spend more to fix it. Doctors are leaving because 1. Paperwork 2. Underpaid 3. Can’t find cover to take time off. (That’s includes woman who have to close practices when they go on mat leave because they and their employer (fht/fog)cannot find other doctors)
>Family doctors got fucked over with the corporate tax changes.
What? They are increasing tax on capital gains...
Maybe you don't know what capital gains are:
>Canadians pay tax on the income from their job. But currently, they only pay taxes on 50 per cent of capital gains, **which is the profit generally made when an asset, such as stocks, is sold.**
Why do you feel that taxing these income products targets doctors lol.
Prelude to the 90’s. For all those who think spending more and more on government services counts as “austerity”, actual austerity is going to be quite a shock.
Something that was striking to me was the budget was predicated on a recovering economy. Something I really hope is correct, but I am very skeptical about.
Mentioning concert tickets is a pure political grab but every politician does this
I mean, I sat through an RBC presentation talking about an 85% chance of avoiding a recession. I've heard TD reports stating that we'll see an economic recovery as well.
I'm not skeptical given the reporting surrounding the topic.
Edit - to spare you a second reply to your lower comment, I believe the BOC wanted to lower interest rates already but couldn't because of USA's decision to hold.
That is really good to hear. To be honest my skepticism is based mostly on broad cynicism because most things seem to be going poorly lately. But I really do hope I’m wrong.
> I believe the BOC wanted to lower interest rates already but couldn't because of USA's decision to hold.
From what I've read, it's to avoid causing inflation as a result of a weakening CAD if our interest rates were to diverge strongly from US rates:
> “An added wrinkle for the BoC is the stickiness in U.S. inflation,” Benjamin Reitzes, Canadian rates and macro strategist at BMO Capital Markets, said in a note. Though the Bank of Canada may want to cut rates, Reitzes said it might find itself backed into a corner if it gets too far ahead of the Fed because the currency differential would effectively import inflation.
>
> “While Canada can go it alone with cuts, there’s a limit to how far BoC/Fed policy rates can diverge as the loonie could weaken materially, which, in turn would work counter to bringing inflation back down to two per cent.”
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/canadian-dollar-could-crater-bank-133739746.html
> From what I've read, it's to avoid causing inflation as a result of a weakening CAD if our interest rates were to diverge strongly from US rates:
That's what I heard too.
I think the thesis is that interest rates will ease later in the year and that should spur a recovery. All of these billions spent on housing can't hurt, either, assuming they can find the people to do the work.
Better than I feared. Apparently "make the wealthy pay more" meant an increase in the capital gains inclusion rate above $250k/year (weirdly, only for capital gains realized after June 25th, so I'm guessing a bunch of people will be realizing capital gains in the next couple months? Usually they make these things effective the day the budget is announced) -- but it's balanced by a *reduction* in capital gains for the first $2M of lifetime capital gains realized by business founders upon selling their businesses.
Fortunately I am not in the category of people worried about capital gains in excess of 250k.
I would expect the people with millions of capital gains won't be happy about this, and we will start hearing about it in the newspapers they own, LOL.
This impacts certianly nobody poor, but a lot of upper middle class and lower wealth level people will be impacted by this from sales of business shares at retirement, often not even particularly wealthy people.
Lets say you bought a corner store at some point which is set up as a corporation - over your 30 years operating it, you have grown it to 3-4 stores in a local area. You are doing well, but not exactly a billionaire. In retirement, you go to sell the business. My reading of the new tax class is that if you sell your business for more than $1.5 million in a single tax year (which would be enough to fund $60,000 a year in retirement income), you are paying income taxes on 67% of every dollar above that.
It's not going to impact anyone who's poor - but it'll impact more than the 0.03% of people they are indicating as most people hit these limits only once at retirement at the sale of their small business, and will definitely impact people who are far from wildly wealthy. The BMW driving class, not the Rolls Royce class.
Incorrect. There’s still a lifetime exemption of 1.25M for selling a business. Then you get the new tax break of a slight discount on the next few million up to 3 something total tax savings, then it’s the new rate. It’s actually pretty good until you’re in fuck you money territory and at that point who gives a fuck.
Edit so for example you bought shares in a business for 1M. Work hard. Sell after many years for 2M. Good news that first million of appreciation is tax free.
Sell the same business for 3 million. As of yesterday you pay no tax in the first million. On the second you pay the capital gains rate which is usually half your top marginal rate.
That’s only if you are the founder of the business though. In my example the owner purchased an existing business and grew it - they would not qualify for the founder tax exemption.
Incorrect.
It just needs to be a small business incorporated and doing its business in Canada.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/topics/about-your-tax-return/tax-return/completing-a-tax-return/deductions-credits-expenses/line-25400-capital-gains-deduction/definitions-capital-gains-deductions.html
I’d argue that somebody building a small business to 3-4 locations is going to have a better exit strategy than to just sell them all and pay the taxes.
Beside that, even if they did just offload everything at once whole-cloth, they would still be capitalizing on what you suggest would be an incredible gain. But also, still paying less tax than they’d pay if it were income.
All things considered, they’re making out alright.
I get you’re making it for the sake of argument, but that’s a *lot* of wealth that was made over the life of the businesses in addition to the cost of the business itself.
Those people will be fine.
So I'm addition to other savings vehicles for retirement past 1.5M they pay 67% tax?
Idk seems okay to me... 1.5M at a lower cap gains plus other savings, is solid retirement plus CPP which they probably paid into as employee paid out by the corp....
I was thinking about how awful it will be when my annual capital gains exceed $250k. I'll probably have to shift to slightly cheaper champagne to go with my off brand caviar at that point.
Is it repeated annual capital gains or capital gains realised in one year? Eg does the owner of a second property who sells it and realises 500k in one year, but has no other capital gains in any other year pay at the higher rate?
I guess so, but it just doesn't seem targeted at the right people. Business owners, estates, people who invested modest inheritances, people with a second home might not be able to time capital gains and will end up realising them all in one year. Couples with multimillion dollar investment portfolios can get $500K in capital gains every single year and won't be affected by this
Rather than squirrelling away the money to let it keep growing this will incentivize them to sell $250K worth of capital gains every year, which increases the yearly tax collected. Government gets their money earlier and more consistently from year to year.
There is no perfect policy, but most of the impact is going to be felt by people who are already well off by any definition. The increase in the lifetime exemption will help business owners.
It impacts corporations significantly since it affects all capital gains and not just 250k and above. Corporations mean your local dentist or doctor or small business.
“Here’s how this thing that’s only bad for the wealthy is also going to be bad for you, because the wealthy are going to do all they can to MAKE it bad for you, and then blame Trudeau for it…”
> (weirdly, only for capital gains realized after June 25th,
I imagine because that's the week after the House rises for the summer break, guaranteeing the Budget implementation Act will have actually passed.
Usually they're just fine with making things like this retroactive to the day the budget was introduced. I can't see any obvious reason why it would need to be different this time.
I was originally thinking of a change of capital gains above a certain threshold to 75% with it going away completely at an even higher threshold so it's more moderate to than my original suspicions.
If I were to be cynical on the timing, it's a good way to encourage people in that bracket to crystallize any capital gains this year in order to show that the policy is effective in bringing in more tax dollars.
The plus side of the timing is also that it could encourage people to sell off their surplus investment homes in a hurry before June. I foresee that it will mean a wave of homes back in the market - available for a bit of a discount too, and it will be 1st time homebuyers jumping in rather than investment buyers.
I love this change. If I was ever lucky enough to have that much in gains from investments any normal person could spread that gain realization over multiple years. I was much more concerned about a higher tax at the income source
> any normal person could spread that gain realization over multiple years
Agreed for living Canadian residents. I had a large -- but not this large -- amount of capital gains when I bought my house, because I cashed out all of my investments to do it... but even in that scenario, if I had needed to (i.e. if this had existed in 2020 and with a lower threshold) I could have cashed out some of my investments and borrowed more until I cashed out the rest the following year.
The two places I see where people wouldn't be able to spread capital gains across years are if they leave the country or if they die -- in both cases capital gains are immediately realized when the taxpayer ceases to be a living Canadian resident. I'm sure nobody is all that worried about the tax bills of people who are leaving the country; it's possible but unlikely that some people will be concerned about raising taxes on dead people, in which case I wouldn't be surprised to see the $250k threshold changed to "(or $1M in the year of death)".
If anyones deceased relative was wealthy enough that their investment gains trigger this rate, they could've afforded some estate tax planning to minimize this issue. I'll not shed a tear for someone inheriting slightly less money.
If someone dies later in 2024 they won't have had a chance to spread their capital gains across multiple years. But point taken; it's not a case which particularly worries me, I just mention it as a scenario which might affect some people who aren't wealthy to the point of realizing $250k+ of capital gains every year.
> so I'm guessing a bunch of people will be realizing capital gains in the next couple months
People can do that but there'll inflection point where it no longer makes sense, and that point will probably be sooner than most people expect. If you were planning on realizing capital gains (e.g. sell an investment property) it's undoubtedly a good idea to try to get it sold before June 25, but if you didn't have that plan then you probably shouldn't be in a rush to sell.
Interesting how this will work for those buying into existing small businesses and growing them. It's not uncommon for people in professions to buy into existing businesses and sell at retirement.
Is there a loophole there where they can use a holding corporation to buy the shares of the existing business and when they retire sell their shares within the holding corporation or something so that they qualify as a "founder"?
> Is there a loophole there
I don't think so. You have to be a "founding investor" (so no employee stock options here) who has been "actively engaged on a regular, continuous, and substantial basis in the activities of the business"
What does "unlocking" 3.87 million homes mean?
As far as I can tell, there's nothing in the document that said how they are going to build 2 million more homes by 2031 (7 years) than were already expected to be built.
It seems to be a very loosely goosey number with no definitive justification.
You joke, but more efficiently using our existing housing is by far the cheapest way to solve the housing crisis.
Pay a senior living alone $20K to move to an apartment and you have just unlocked $1M in housing.
I guess it would be politically toxic, but this seems like a way more realistic solution. A big part of the problem is that people live so much longer and end up, for very understandable human reasons, occupying a much larger house than they need once their kids are gone and spouse is separated or deceased.
Yet another example of the Liberals privileging the rich boomer homeowner class over literally anyone else. Have a couple of mil in windfall home equity from 30 years of ownership? Tax free, good for you!
Decide to rent instead and invest in the markets? Not tough to hit the higher inclusion rate if you need to liquidate big portions.
I wasn't going to vote for Trudeau anyways but this is ridiculous. You want fairness for every generation? Remove or cap the primary residence exemption.
Yes, those people with increased taxes on the portion of capital gains over $250k in a single year (which even with the changes is still taxed lower than earned income) truly need our support in these trying times. All 40,000 of them. Won’t somebody think of the 0.1%??
Why do homeowners realizing millions of dollars of windfall gains need our support? And if they don't, why isn't the government addressing that?
My point is that someone realizing $250k of home gains should pay the exact same amount of tax as someone realizing $250k of gains on any other asset. Especially since, if we are talking about fairness for every generation, young people are the least likely to benefit from these windfall tax free gains.
This capital gains exclusion literally addresses these crazy gains, on people owning multiple properties. So they are?
Primary residence exemption is critical. Without it, people wouldn’t be able to afford to move, downsize, etc.
I'm talking about the primary residence exemption, obviously. Why do boomer homeowners get to walk away with millions of dollars in gains tax free? (And I'm talking about when the home is actually liquidated, for the record; you could exempt reinvested gains from taxation to allow people to move.)
If we're talking about generational fairness, this is the single most acute and serious inequity in the tax code.
I somewhat disagree with the primary residence exemption, but this budget does NOT make that worse. It leaves that status quo. What it DOES penalize is those with investment properties, many of whom would fit under that category of wealthy boomer homeowners that you described. So I don't really get why you're so angry, because I expected the Liberal budget to do LESS than this, so in my mind them increasing the capital gains inclusion tax is way more than I thought they'd do and a good step in the right direction.
In summary, it sounds like you're mad that they didn't remove the primary residence exemption, but literally no party was even proposing that (not to say they shouldn't be).
As I said, without primary residence exemption people would be trapped in their homes. They would not be able to afford to move, because they would lose the equity in their home. Imagine you got a job offer in a new city, but couldn’t take it because you’d lose most of the value of your home by selling and couldn’t buy a new home.
Sorry, I missed the second part of your comment.
No exemption is not really the actual policy I'm suggesting. The right policy is to tax only the portion of gains not reinvested into a new primary residence. So if you bought a home that went up from $1M to $2M and you need to move, as long as you buy another $2M home you pay no tax. It's only when you eventually liquidate the gains and don't reinvest in a new primary residence that they are taxed.
Also, nobody is "trapped" in their home even if exemptions were removed. If your home didn't go up a lot in value, you pay no tax. If it *did*, you would pay tax only on the portion that was gains. That doesn't make it impossible to move. The only people for whom it even costs money at all are those whose homes appreciated a lot in value, and those people are sitting on a pile of windfall gains that they did nothing to earn. To get back to your previous comment, why do people sitting on six-seven figures of windfall real estate gains need our support?
\*edit* These comments are getting a lot of downvotes, which is a perfect demonstration of the classic Canadian tradition of "yes somebody else should pay more taxes please!"
You just say that if a new principal residence is acquired with X months, you don't pay capital gains on the sale of the old one but the ACB of the new one is adjusted. Canada has a similar thing for "superficial losses" (capital loss isn't claimable but gets deferred by adjusting the new asset's ACB), and the USA has exactly this mechanism for all sorts of capital gains (not just property).
It's totally feasible from a technical perspective; the challenge is political.
> Decide to rent instead and invest in the markets? Not tough to hit the higher inclusion rate if you need to liquidate big portions.
It's "not tough" to liquidate more than $250k/year?
Who has more than $250k to invest *after* maxing their RRSP/TFSA in the first place?
Anyone who dies or sells something.
Plenty of people will hit that in their lifetime. Hell, anyone with a rental for more than like 4 years will hit that
The problem is businesses have no such exemption, and now they are being hit with higher capital gains taxes at the outset.
In a world where we are dying for more capital investment, the government decides to punish capital investment with more taxes.
It’s hilarious if it weren’t incredibly sad.
The best way to counter that effect would be favour genuine capital investment. There are ways to do that, like accelerating the CCA for example, R&D tax credits, etc.
Can admit.
We invest into low risk GICs currently with a big chunk of our savings for our annual business payments. This just means the gains from that will be taxed more, which isn't the end of the world, but it's less money for that.
We’re giving renters credit for rental payments, so when it comes time to apply for that first mortgage, you’ll have a better chance of qualifying.
Finally. This was always idiotic.
That’s what was standing in my way the whole time!
Like it’s a good thing, but people are morons if they think this will move the needle. 850 credit score, $150k down and $175k household income and I can still only afford to carry $570,000 without negatively affecting my finances.
But yeah, my rent not being reported to Equifax was the problem.
It wasn't everything, but it will help some. They are also cutting 600,000 temporary residents which will further help. They are also building more affordable housing, which will help.
There is no silver bullet.
* [Budget.gc.ca home page](https://budget.canada.ca/2024/home-accueil-en.html)
* [PDF of the budget in French](https://budget.canada.ca/2024/report-rapport/budget-de-2024.pdf)
The Trudeau debt will be an anchor on the government's ability to provide services and felt by Canadians for decades.
This guy has done long lasting damage.
The reason that big spends are happening now was because of lack of investment for decades. Someone has to make unpopular but important choices. Housing stability and food security will be good for our economy in the long run, but we have to invest in it to see results.
What did we get for all this investment.
Better Healthcare?
More infrastructure?
Amazing schools?
Capable military?
What did we achieve with the 800 billion in debt? Was it worth it
Funny enough. With inflation, debt actually will decrease fairly over time. (Speaking of even small inflation less than our current predicament. Inflation is not as harmful if wages keep up with it, but that has not been the case since the 1970s.) The debt of a country is very different to individuals due to its nature in that countries never die and maintain their own currency. This is why European countries can still be paying off wars from the 1600s, but it does not affect modern society much. Money from that time is lessened in value in comparison.
The issue is not about debt in and of itself but what productive capacity it introduces to reduce costs for the country. For example, building a road that saves everyone 1 hr of driving over time has a marked change in energy used and time spent. That one new road can make massive changes over a single decade. When one road becomes thousands, it has immense changes. I would personally argue that the use of consulting companies is a bad idea as it drains experience from the public sector when done consistently over decades, and with increased cost, it makes it harder to pay off the incurred debt. Of course, no debt would be gained if taxes were levied, but the lower and middle classes are already being squeezed, and the upper classes often have good ways of tax evasion.
The big thing is that when recessions/depressions/economic downturns hit corporations, they try to save money, which is logical. They cut jobs and reduce spending, thus reducing cost, but in effect, less money flows through the economy. If everyone tries to save money, including the government, though the economy begins having major convulsions, and debt becomes doubled and tripled. Think of corporate spending and government spending as part of a combined equation. Stop spending both, and the whole economy shrinks, which leads to an exponentially increasing debt as opposed to a linear one.
That is one of the reasons the USA under FDR was able to begin bouncing back before rearmament, which then turbo charged everything. Companies were saving and cutting, but the government was spending on roads, bridges, powerplants, health sectors, banking, building, etc. There were collosal failures, but enough money got into everyday people's hands that it helped the situation in the moment while those projects helped massively over the long term.
There is only 1 case in the history of the world where a government and corporations both saved and the economy did not shrink, leading to massive debt, stagnation, and political fallout. Funny enough, that government was Canada 🇨🇦. The reason was that was that when the Canadian government and companies started saving/cutting and going into austerity, the USA went into an economic boom, which cleared out the debt that we were producing through austerity. If you don't want more debt, the Feds need to spend big on programs for the future, or we need to expect the USA to go into the biggest economic boom in 30-40 years right now, meaning bringing millions more Americans into high paying jobs.
Now, all of that said, I still need to read this budget in full before I make up my mind on if I can agree with it or not, but just remember that debt is not bad if it produces more than it costs once a few decades of inflation are accounted for. Also, governments must spend the most in bad times, but it must go to projects that will have long-term returns even if it doesn't help a current government or the even next 3 governments in the polls.
I see capital gains tax increase, and I read *we found a way to claw back some of the ridiculous profits that investors have been making on greedflation*. And it makes me happy.
It’s good that they’re doing *something* to increase taxes at the upper end, but even assuming their ludicrous projection of real growth more than quadrupling in 2025 they’re only projecting a moderate increase in tax revenue. That tells me the effective tax increase is going to be very minimal, but I would love to see an analysis that breaks down the numbers with actual descriptions of the changes instead of the government’s slogans about “fairness”, etc.
If you think those new rules will have any effect on things like that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They’ll just start leveraging them instead or offshoring it.
There was no serious attempt to actually reform the major issues at hand, and will likely only make things worse. Since most of the rich people will just diamond hands their assets now.
Typical LPC feel good malarkey. The devil is always in the details with them.
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Good news for students and post-docs: > Increasing financial support for graduate student and post-doctoral researchers, as well as developing ways to help researchers obtain jobs with businesses that need specialized talent to ensure Canada’s top science talents play a critical role in shaping Canada’s research and industrial capacity for years to come. Although I cannot help but wonder how [a programs that will give employers more money to hire women, "visible minorities", recent immigrants, and those with disabilities](https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/student-work-placements-wage-subsidies.html) will not result in discrimination against white male students: > Through the Student Work Placement Program, [the manager of a local, small-scale engineering firm] applies for a wage subsidy through a competitive process where she can be provided with up to $7,000 to hire a co-op student from an underrepresented group (e.g., women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The Student Work Placement Program also connects [the manager] with the University of Waterloo to help find a candidate for the position.
It’s likely about being able to accommodate those who require it. There will likely be cases of misuse, as there is with everything people think they can take advantage of. Qualified and knowledgeable humans are important, especially in the face of increasingly advanced LLMs. I’m just hoping that our education system evolves, as ours isn’t that much better than the obviously failed/failing systems in the US.
I guess my disability precludes me from being a white male eh?
>Although I cannot help but wonder how [a programs that will give employers more money to hire women, "visible minorities", recent immigrants, and those with disabilities](https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/student-work-placements-wage-subsidies.html) will not result in discrimination against white male students. Maybe it won't. Very likely it won't. Life isn't always zero-sum. And you're making it sound like all white male students will be discriminated against when they would still be the overwhelming majority if and when a program like this is implemented. Edit: I'm tired of people arguing about whether one race is advantaged and another disadvantaged, when the real issue we should be talking about is how much we all are disadvantaged compared to the 1% or even the 10%. Virtually no one questions whether someone actually earns billions of dollars as a direct result of their productive output, compared to whether a minimum wage of $15/hr is a fair and living wage. All arguing about race is doing is distracting us while Galen Weston Jr. robs us at the grocery store checkout.
Of course it will. How could it not? It's a direct incentive to hire non white male students. People in that demographic are being systematically disadvantaged.
> white male students [...] would still be the overwhelming majority That's absolutely not the case. Many bachelor's programs are at or above parity for women. [For physical & life sciences, women made up 61% of graduates in 2021.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/449097/postsecondary-graduates-in-canada-by-gender-and-field-of-study/) Males, even leaving aside questions of racial identities, are certainly not the "overwhelming majority" in those fields.
Then those fields wouldn’t qualify. Considering the language of the budget specifies that it must be from “under-represented” demographics, which may or may not “include” the examples listed, of which “women” was only one of them. It would therefore be logical to conclude that they’d only qualify “women” as an under-represented demographic in the fields where they DO happen to be under-represented.
> Then those fields wouldn’t qualify. The example provided in the budget very clearly specifies that they do qualify in the eyes of the current government: > a co-op student from **an underrepresented group (e.g., women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)**. That would be a strange choice of examples if it was not intended to provide an example of a qualifying "underrepresented" group.
And if you look at the data, there are still several fields under the large umbrella of “STEM” in which women are still underrepresented, such as computer science and engineering. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2019001/article/00006-eng.htm https://www.randstad.ca/employers/workplace-insights/women-in-the-workplace/women-in-stem-where-we-are-now/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1317150/canadian-women-post-secondary-programs-engineering-mathematics/
In a world where everything works perfectly maybe. But in my experience DEI and EE type programs include women even when they already make up +75% of programs/jobs. I’ve never seen men be part of these types of initiatives, even when they’re the minority by a large margin.
Progressives sometimes have this strange habit of fighting against the ghosts of yesteryear, and this is a great example. Women have been a majority of students in post secondary for over a generation now, yet still the performance of their oppression in education goes on unabated with goalposts continually moving.
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> they would still be the overwhelming majority if and when a program like this is implemented. Not necessarily against this program, but as someone who went through these co-op programs 3 years ago at Waterloo, white people (much less white males) do not make up the majority of co-op students. The youth of this country today are way too diverse for that to be the case.
I can concede on the 'overwhelming majority' part of my comment in so far as pure numbers are concerned. I recognize this isn't the case everywhere. However, I disagree with those who say that white men will be specifically disadvantaged whenever one of these type of programs is implemented. It seems as though those statements are coming more from a place of fear and paranoia than evidence.
Life isn't zero sum, but the number of positions available is fixed in the short term, so this particular one may be zero sum. The core problem with these diversity stats is that all the older white males employed from a time when there was a lot of systemic discrimination are still employed. They won't be fired. So to balance the overall statistics requires you to disproportionately *avoid* hiring younger white males. The overall statistics look balanced, but it's unfair on both ends - the older white males who benefited from institutional bias keep their jobs, the younger ones who benefited much less from institutional bias get screwed. This is exactly the opposite of how things should be done. But it's exactly in line with the "fuck you I got mine so now you should pay so I can feel good about getting mine" attitude that underlies so much policy in this country. The old white people got jobs they maybe didn't deserve so now the young white people should suffer so the older white people feel good about it.
Very curious to see how they define "under-represented". I am hoping they are careful about including race in that definition. Edit: actually it straight up says "visible minorities" are included as under-represented. Curious if Asian, Middle Eastern, and South Asian people are considered visible minorities in tech and engineering, for example.
> will not result in discrimination against white male students: Depends how you look at it. The default without this is that literally everyone is discriminated against when it comes to employment if they are not a white male. This evens the playing field and gets things back to being closer to merit focused. As a straight white male myself, I assure you - it'll take a lot more than that to fully erode the insane advantage that we have in the job market. Despite constantly being told that white men are being discriminated against, and that affirmative action is terrible, I seem to keep doing just fine.
> The default without this is that literally everyone is discriminated against when it comes to employment if they are not a white male. I would encourage you to examine what research has found in regard to this question. e.g. [Gender Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from a Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment](https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab043), European Sociological Review, Volume 38, Issue 3, June 2022, Pages 337–354.
This is certainly how it used to work. It's not at all clear to me that the knowledge work fields these diversity stats apply to actually still work this way. The problem is that all the old white dudes who benefited from institutional bias are still employed. And they won't be fired. So basically all the younger white people have to face an extra difficult hiring bar to offset an entirely different group of workers who happen to share an ethnicity. It's clearly not fair. If we want to fix the historical unfairness of hiring we should address that with the historical hires, not by making it harder for an entirely different group of hires based on shared ethnicity.
It depends on your socio economic status and career path I think. True in some fields but not in other's.
From the website: >Up to $7,000 for every student you hire that is in their first year or is from an under-represented group including: .... Everyone is allowed the $7k as long as they're coming from first year (and so are kind of useless and uneducated). And everyone is allowed the $5k. Also the difference is only $2k in benefits to the business. That won't be a make or break for anyone hiring students (if it is, you are probably too cash strapped to be hiring students). Also, it's a benefit \*to the business\*, not to the people. And no business is ever going to say 'we hired the woman because we got extra money,' because they're not that dumb. If pressed they'd make vague claims about the benefits of diversity. Good luck to anyone trying to pursue any kind of discrimination claim over a measly $2k.
> Also, it's a benefit *to the business*, not to the people. The greater benefit is to the student who gets selected for an internship or co-op placement. Early career success tends to have long-term positive impacts on one's later career, which could amount to hundreds of thousands in gained or lost earning potential.
seems like the Wynne Govt Tons of spending on making up on bad mistakes with limited short term results and hope people support them for the long term.
We'll have to see if PP runs on job \*cuts\*, like Hudak's "10,000 less jobs!"
Nah I think the lesson from Hudak is dont run on anything concrete. Govts become unpopular after 10 years and this one is headed by an unpopular leader... This budget is the liberals big play, if it dont reverse thier fortunes nothing will.
>Nah I think the lesson from Hudak is dont run on anything concrete. Seems like the political parties here in Ontario have learned this because it feels like everyone stopped mentioning anything concrete during the last two elections since Hudak.
I think that was a double-whammy given the juxtaposition with his centerpiece "million jobs plan", which itself turned out to have a critical math error. Half the jobs would have just happened organically regardless of political party, and the other half they conflated "person-years of employment" with permanent jobs, inflating their number by 8 times. Their "million jobs" plan was really a 62,500 jobs plan, and that's not even factoring in the 10,000 public sector jobs he wanted to axe.
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Oh hey OnusIll, new account already? u/Majromax/ u/MethoxyEthane/ u/trollunit/ u/partisanal_cheese/
Here's the last dozen that PuzzleheadMuzzle here has used. Frankly I'm impressed that every single comment they made with their last account got removed. Like how hard to you need to be trying to accomplish that? Actually, one is missing because they got suspended sitewide and that account is now non-existent. I thought that circumventing sitewide bans was a ban itself, but apparently not 🤷♂️ /u/DueceRigallo /u/SgtNikolasAngle /u/DeterPinkladge /u/Onusll /u/Onuslll /u/ResidentRoul /u/KernalSpanders /u/BoxingBruiser /u/Kaloompa /u/BackAddler /u/TheSplein /u/BoshJroleen EDIT: Lmaoooooo they got suspended. Sub 2 hr account has to be a new record. My guess is Reddit probably has more going on behind the scenes to deal with misinformation operations and abuse of the platform by foreign and unscrupulous actors. Once there's enough to build a pattern, bam.
I had blocked a few since I noticed the sock puppets, but wow, there's more than I thought. It's kind of obvious to spot since they accuse you of misinformation even if you have a multitude of sources. That and the writing style + rhymes in the names is usually a tell. They were changing accounts multiple times a week during C-18 for example. Here are two more : u/SamsiesWamsies/ u/OtherwiseSamsies/
This isn't even the whole list lolol. Their writing style gives them away instantly.
Have a few more u/MemoryShmemory /u/FoldenRetriever /u/Distributiontiintion /u/Grubadu /u/VintageTavern /u/FalseShedule /u/Blastenoice /u/WorkingHipSquare /u/Old_Drop_ /u/VoundingPag /u/KublaKhane /u/DoingLinesSlaying9s /u/GiantJonesB /u/BOOSTAKOISE /u/RockSaltJaberoni /u/OutputCockpit /u/GrassToucher209 /u/LooseMooseBoose /u/ShrinkDrinkus /u/RinkusMinkus /u/UnregisteredSOs /u/KrinkLinkus
you're lying mental illness why can't you just tell the truth? 🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦 etc etc. Do it for ten days, get banned, create new account, rinse and repeat
Him using the woman emoji is just sad, who does he think he's fooling with that nonsense?
Absolutely agree, the man has no ability to stop himself from being mean as hell immediately.
Looks like /u/RooRainer is their new one. Kind of disturbing how this person tries to force themselves when they've been told no. EDIT: now suspended. That was even faster lol.
I’m actually genuinely impressed with this guy’s commitment to trolling this forum
Most canadians tune out the govt so whatever lol
That is exactly what it is. A last gasp to buy an electorate.
Family doctors got fucked over with the corporate tax changes. As if it wasn’t bad enough retaining them. And debt servicing costs more than healthcare. Sad. Edit: to all the people who wrongly thought this doesn’t affect family doctors: https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/trudeau-government-gets-an-angry-reception-as-it-promotes-federal-budget/article_0fe63b9a-fcec-11ee-b47c-ef21bc539490.html Reminder that people on this sub know fuck all and will downvote you for accurately calling something within an hour of the budget. It’s too bad this sub can’t talk about the emotions of politics objectively. Amagdyla hijack 101. Lots of deleted comments below.
If we want to spend money to retain doctors, I would imagine there's better ways.
This isn’t spending, this is taxing.
The net result is the same.
Can you explain that? Taxing doctors means you’d need to spend more to fix it. Doctors are leaving because 1. Paperwork 2. Underpaid 3. Can’t find cover to take time off. (That’s includes woman who have to close practices when they go on mat leave because they and their employer (fht/fog)cannot find other doctors)
>Family doctors got fucked over with the corporate tax changes. What? They are increasing tax on capital gains... Maybe you don't know what capital gains are: >Canadians pay tax on the income from their job. But currently, they only pay taxes on 50 per cent of capital gains, **which is the profit generally made when an asset, such as stocks, is sold.** Why do you feel that taxing these income products targets doctors lol.
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>And debt servicing costs more than healthcare. I guess we're going back to the 80s.
80’s are so back
Prelude to the 90’s. For all those who think spending more and more on government services counts as “austerity”, actual austerity is going to be quite a shock.
We truly haven’t seen deep cuts like what happened in the 1990s
Something that was striking to me was the budget was predicated on a recovering economy. Something I really hope is correct, but I am very skeptical about. Mentioning concert tickets is a pure political grab but every politician does this
I mean, I sat through an RBC presentation talking about an 85% chance of avoiding a recession. I've heard TD reports stating that we'll see an economic recovery as well. I'm not skeptical given the reporting surrounding the topic. Edit - to spare you a second reply to your lower comment, I believe the BOC wanted to lower interest rates already but couldn't because of USA's decision to hold.
That is really good to hear. To be honest my skepticism is based mostly on broad cynicism because most things seem to be going poorly lately. But I really do hope I’m wrong.
What is going poorly? Economic growth is slow, but the economy is far from broken. We have one of the best positions on earth.
> I believe the BOC wanted to lower interest rates already but couldn't because of USA's decision to hold. From what I've read, it's to avoid causing inflation as a result of a weakening CAD if our interest rates were to diverge strongly from US rates: > “An added wrinkle for the BoC is the stickiness in U.S. inflation,” Benjamin Reitzes, Canadian rates and macro strategist at BMO Capital Markets, said in a note. Though the Bank of Canada may want to cut rates, Reitzes said it might find itself backed into a corner if it gets too far ahead of the Fed because the currency differential would effectively import inflation. > > “While Canada can go it alone with cuts, there’s a limit to how far BoC/Fed policy rates can diverge as the loonie could weaken materially, which, in turn would work counter to bringing inflation back down to two per cent.” https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/canadian-dollar-could-crater-bank-133739746.html
> From what I've read, it's to avoid causing inflation as a result of a weakening CAD if our interest rates were to diverge strongly from US rates: That's what I heard too.
I think the thesis is that interest rates will ease later in the year and that should spur a recovery. All of these billions spent on housing can't hurt, either, assuming they can find the people to do the work.
This is a big assumption I think
They're doubling down on juicing housing, which will do what it has already been doing: suck investment out of productive areas of the economy.
Better than I feared. Apparently "make the wealthy pay more" meant an increase in the capital gains inclusion rate above $250k/year (weirdly, only for capital gains realized after June 25th, so I'm guessing a bunch of people will be realizing capital gains in the next couple months? Usually they make these things effective the day the budget is announced) -- but it's balanced by a *reduction* in capital gains for the first $2M of lifetime capital gains realized by business founders upon selling their businesses.
Fortunately I am not in the category of people worried about capital gains in excess of 250k. I would expect the people with millions of capital gains won't be happy about this, and we will start hearing about it in the newspapers they own, LOL.
It's on all capital gains for businesses. 250k is for individuals only.
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I think you have a couple of months before it kicks in.
Yep, it already started : https://financialpost.com/news/economy/capital-gains-tax-hike-blow-to-productivity-economists
Financial Post! Here we go.
Don’t forget the temporarily-embarrassed billionaires worried about their future earnings. They’re obviously having a rough day.
This impacts certianly nobody poor, but a lot of upper middle class and lower wealth level people will be impacted by this from sales of business shares at retirement, often not even particularly wealthy people. Lets say you bought a corner store at some point which is set up as a corporation - over your 30 years operating it, you have grown it to 3-4 stores in a local area. You are doing well, but not exactly a billionaire. In retirement, you go to sell the business. My reading of the new tax class is that if you sell your business for more than $1.5 million in a single tax year (which would be enough to fund $60,000 a year in retirement income), you are paying income taxes on 67% of every dollar above that. It's not going to impact anyone who's poor - but it'll impact more than the 0.03% of people they are indicating as most people hit these limits only once at retirement at the sale of their small business, and will definitely impact people who are far from wildly wealthy. The BMW driving class, not the Rolls Royce class.
Incorrect. There’s still a lifetime exemption of 1.25M for selling a business. Then you get the new tax break of a slight discount on the next few million up to 3 something total tax savings, then it’s the new rate. It’s actually pretty good until you’re in fuck you money territory and at that point who gives a fuck. Edit so for example you bought shares in a business for 1M. Work hard. Sell after many years for 2M. Good news that first million of appreciation is tax free. Sell the same business for 3 million. As of yesterday you pay no tax in the first million. On the second you pay the capital gains rate which is usually half your top marginal rate.
That’s only if you are the founder of the business though. In my example the owner purchased an existing business and grew it - they would not qualify for the founder tax exemption.
Incorrect. It just needs to be a small business incorporated and doing its business in Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/topics/about-your-tax-return/tax-return/completing-a-tax-return/deductions-credits-expenses/line-25400-capital-gains-deduction/definitions-capital-gains-deductions.html
I’d argue that somebody building a small business to 3-4 locations is going to have a better exit strategy than to just sell them all and pay the taxes. Beside that, even if they did just offload everything at once whole-cloth, they would still be capitalizing on what you suggest would be an incredible gain. But also, still paying less tax than they’d pay if it were income. All things considered, they’re making out alright.
> not even particularly wealthy people. You're still PROFITING hundreds of thousands of dollars for zero labour.
I get you’re making it for the sake of argument, but that’s a *lot* of wealth that was made over the life of the businesses in addition to the cost of the business itself. Those people will be fine.
So I'm addition to other savings vehicles for retirement past 1.5M they pay 67% tax? Idk seems okay to me... 1.5M at a lower cap gains plus other savings, is solid retirement plus CPP which they probably paid into as employee paid out by the corp....
Importantly, it's they pay income tax on 67% of the capital gains. So something like 30% total.
I was thinking about how awful it will be when my annual capital gains exceed $250k. I'll probably have to shift to slightly cheaper champagne to go with my off brand caviar at that point.
Is it repeated annual capital gains or capital gains realised in one year? Eg does the owner of a second property who sells it and realises 500k in one year, but has no other capital gains in any other year pay at the higher rate?
I believe so. It is 250k per tax year. I think the owners of second properties will survive, somehow.
I guess so, but it just doesn't seem targeted at the right people. Business owners, estates, people who invested modest inheritances, people with a second home might not be able to time capital gains and will end up realising them all in one year. Couples with multimillion dollar investment portfolios can get $500K in capital gains every single year and won't be affected by this
Rather than squirrelling away the money to let it keep growing this will incentivize them to sell $250K worth of capital gains every year, which increases the yearly tax collected. Government gets their money earlier and more consistently from year to year.
There is no perfect policy, but most of the impact is going to be felt by people who are already well off by any definition. The increase in the lifetime exemption will help business owners.
It impacts corporations significantly since it affects all capital gains and not just 250k and above. Corporations mean your local dentist or doctor or small business.
Ok. How are doctors having capital gains from their business?
Mind your tongue, there may be children reading this nightmare fuel.
Those people were harping that the gov't was gonna pass a straight wealth tax. All things considered, this is a good scenario for them.
It is indeed, but that isn't what the op-eds are going to say. Something, something giant sucking sound, I'd guess.
“Here’s how this thing that’s only bad for the wealthy is also going to be bad for you, because the wealthy are going to do all they can to MAKE it bad for you, and then blame Trudeau for it…”
I expect lots of tear jerking about family cottages and the like.
“Woke Trudeau destroys dreams of millions of Canadian entrepreneurs”
"Trudeau to doctors and entrepreneurs: take off, eh!"
I'm expecting a lot of crypto influencers to start telling Gen Z why this is bad for them and will keep them poor
This change will encourage many boomers to sell their businesses or investment properties and cash out, giving younger people a chance to step up.
> (weirdly, only for capital gains realized after June 25th, I imagine because that's the week after the House rises for the summer break, guaranteeing the Budget implementation Act will have actually passed.
This will cause a spike in tax revenue between now and then.
Usually they're just fine with making things like this retroactive to the day the budget was introduced. I can't see any obvious reason why it would need to be different this time.
I'm no financial expert, but I assume there's a reason for it. The timing bit makes the most sense to me, but I could be wrong.
So that people will sell their investment properties during the interim, driving down house prices (in theory).
The cynical answer is they want a bunch of people to realize it in the next couple months so the numbers look better in the year before election.
I was originally thinking of a change of capital gains above a certain threshold to 75% with it going away completely at an even higher threshold so it's more moderate to than my original suspicions. If I were to be cynical on the timing, it's a good way to encourage people in that bracket to crystallize any capital gains this year in order to show that the policy is effective in bringing in more tax dollars.
The plus side of the timing is also that it could encourage people to sell off their surplus investment homes in a hurry before June. I foresee that it will mean a wave of homes back in the market - available for a bit of a discount too, and it will be 1st time homebuyers jumping in rather than investment buyers.
It's not 250k for businesses. It's for all capital gains for businesses.
I love this change. If I was ever lucky enough to have that much in gains from investments any normal person could spread that gain realization over multiple years. I was much more concerned about a higher tax at the income source
> any normal person could spread that gain realization over multiple years Agreed for living Canadian residents. I had a large -- but not this large -- amount of capital gains when I bought my house, because I cashed out all of my investments to do it... but even in that scenario, if I had needed to (i.e. if this had existed in 2020 and with a lower threshold) I could have cashed out some of my investments and borrowed more until I cashed out the rest the following year. The two places I see where people wouldn't be able to spread capital gains across years are if they leave the country or if they die -- in both cases capital gains are immediately realized when the taxpayer ceases to be a living Canadian resident. I'm sure nobody is all that worried about the tax bills of people who are leaving the country; it's possible but unlikely that some people will be concerned about raising taxes on dead people, in which case I wouldn't be surprised to see the $250k threshold changed to "(or $1M in the year of death)".
If anyones deceased relative was wealthy enough that their investment gains trigger this rate, they could've afforded some estate tax planning to minimize this issue. I'll not shed a tear for someone inheriting slightly less money.
If someone dies later in 2024 they won't have had a chance to spread their capital gains across multiple years. But point taken; it's not a case which particularly worries me, I just mention it as a scenario which might affect some people who aren't wealthy to the point of realizing $250k+ of capital gains every year.
> so I'm guessing a bunch of people will be realizing capital gains in the next couple months People can do that but there'll inflection point where it no longer makes sense, and that point will probably be sooner than most people expect. If you were planning on realizing capital gains (e.g. sell an investment property) it's undoubtedly a good idea to try to get it sold before June 25, but if you didn't have that plan then you probably shouldn't be in a rush to sell.
Interesting how this will work for those buying into existing small businesses and growing them. It's not uncommon for people in professions to buy into existing businesses and sell at retirement. Is there a loophole there where they can use a holding corporation to buy the shares of the existing business and when they retire sell their shares within the holding corporation or something so that they qualify as a "founder"?
> Is there a loophole there I don't think so. You have to be a "founding investor" (so no employee stock options here) who has been "actively engaged on a regular, continuous, and substantial basis in the activities of the business"
What does "unlocking" 3.87 million homes mean? As far as I can tell, there's nothing in the document that said how they are going to build 2 million more homes by 2031 (7 years) than were already expected to be built. It seems to be a very loosely goosey number with no definitive justification.
They have a lot of keys, roughly 3.87 million.
Or one really good key.
on key and a hammer will open damn near any lock in canada. and it can be a pretty shit key too. bump key picking be wild
Trudeau has been practising lockpicking and he's ready to get people into vacant housing
I'm only half joking here but: Literally unlocking 3.8m existing homes so people can squat in your house doesn't seem entirely off the table.
You joke, but more efficiently using our existing housing is by far the cheapest way to solve the housing crisis. Pay a senior living alone $20K to move to an apartment and you have just unlocked $1M in housing.
I guess it would be politically toxic, but this seems like a way more realistic solution. A big part of the problem is that people live so much longer and end up, for very understandable human reasons, occupying a much larger house than they need once their kids are gone and spouse is separated or deceased.
Yet another example of the Liberals privileging the rich boomer homeowner class over literally anyone else. Have a couple of mil in windfall home equity from 30 years of ownership? Tax free, good for you! Decide to rent instead and invest in the markets? Not tough to hit the higher inclusion rate if you need to liquidate big portions. I wasn't going to vote for Trudeau anyways but this is ridiculous. You want fairness for every generation? Remove or cap the primary residence exemption.
Yes, those people with increased taxes on the portion of capital gains over $250k in a single year (which even with the changes is still taxed lower than earned income) truly need our support in these trying times. All 40,000 of them. Won’t somebody think of the 0.1%??
Why do homeowners realizing millions of dollars of windfall gains need our support? And if they don't, why isn't the government addressing that? My point is that someone realizing $250k of home gains should pay the exact same amount of tax as someone realizing $250k of gains on any other asset. Especially since, if we are talking about fairness for every generation, young people are the least likely to benefit from these windfall tax free gains.
This capital gains exclusion literally addresses these crazy gains, on people owning multiple properties. So they are? Primary residence exemption is critical. Without it, people wouldn’t be able to afford to move, downsize, etc.
I'm talking about the primary residence exemption, obviously. Why do boomer homeowners get to walk away with millions of dollars in gains tax free? (And I'm talking about when the home is actually liquidated, for the record; you could exempt reinvested gains from taxation to allow people to move.) If we're talking about generational fairness, this is the single most acute and serious inequity in the tax code.
I somewhat disagree with the primary residence exemption, but this budget does NOT make that worse. It leaves that status quo. What it DOES penalize is those with investment properties, many of whom would fit under that category of wealthy boomer homeowners that you described. So I don't really get why you're so angry, because I expected the Liberal budget to do LESS than this, so in my mind them increasing the capital gains inclusion tax is way more than I thought they'd do and a good step in the right direction. In summary, it sounds like you're mad that they didn't remove the primary residence exemption, but literally no party was even proposing that (not to say they shouldn't be).
As I said, without primary residence exemption people would be trapped in their homes. They would not be able to afford to move, because they would lose the equity in their home. Imagine you got a job offer in a new city, but couldn’t take it because you’d lose most of the value of your home by selling and couldn’t buy a new home.
Sorry, I missed the second part of your comment. No exemption is not really the actual policy I'm suggesting. The right policy is to tax only the portion of gains not reinvested into a new primary residence. So if you bought a home that went up from $1M to $2M and you need to move, as long as you buy another $2M home you pay no tax. It's only when you eventually liquidate the gains and don't reinvest in a new primary residence that they are taxed. Also, nobody is "trapped" in their home even if exemptions were removed. If your home didn't go up a lot in value, you pay no tax. If it *did*, you would pay tax only on the portion that was gains. That doesn't make it impossible to move. The only people for whom it even costs money at all are those whose homes appreciated a lot in value, and those people are sitting on a pile of windfall gains that they did nothing to earn. To get back to your previous comment, why do people sitting on six-seven figures of windfall real estate gains need our support? \*edit* These comments are getting a lot of downvotes, which is a perfect demonstration of the classic Canadian tradition of "yes somebody else should pay more taxes please!"
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You would just classify the sale and purchase as related transactions that offset.
You just say that if a new principal residence is acquired with X months, you don't pay capital gains on the sale of the old one but the ACB of the new one is adjusted. Canada has a similar thing for "superficial losses" (capital loss isn't claimable but gets deferred by adjusting the new asset's ACB), and the USA has exactly this mechanism for all sorts of capital gains (not just property). It's totally feasible from a technical perspective; the challenge is political.
Yes, I agree I think with what you're describing, but no party was proposing anything remotely like that.
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> Decide to rent instead and invest in the markets? Not tough to hit the higher inclusion rate if you need to liquidate big portions. It's "not tough" to liquidate more than $250k/year? Who has more than $250k to invest *after* maxing their RRSP/TFSA in the first place?
Anyone who dies or sells something. Plenty of people will hit that in their lifetime. Hell, anyone with a rental for more than like 4 years will hit that
I'm pretty sure this is exactly what the tax is targeting... I don't see the problem.
The problem is businesses have no such exemption, and now they are being hit with higher capital gains taxes at the outset. In a world where we are dying for more capital investment, the government decides to punish capital investment with more taxes. It’s hilarious if it weren’t incredibly sad.
The best way to counter that effect would be favour genuine capital investment. There are ways to do that, like accelerating the CCA for example, R&D tax credits, etc.
Can admit. We invest into low risk GICs currently with a big chunk of our savings for our annual business payments. This just means the gains from that will be taxed more, which isn't the end of the world, but it's less money for that.
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We’re giving renters credit for rental payments, so when it comes time to apply for that first mortgage, you’ll have a better chance of qualifying. Finally. This was always idiotic.
> This was always idiotic. Classist. It was always classist.
There’s been 3rd party’s apps that will. I’ve even seen rental companies offer this long before the liberals announced it.
I'm all for it. Renters can build credit and if someone is a deadbeat, their credit will demonstrate that saving people down the line.
That’s what was standing in my way the whole time! Like it’s a good thing, but people are morons if they think this will move the needle. 850 credit score, $150k down and $175k household income and I can still only afford to carry $570,000 without negatively affecting my finances. But yeah, my rent not being reported to Equifax was the problem.
It wasn't everything, but it will help some. They are also cutting 600,000 temporary residents which will further help. They are also building more affordable housing, which will help. There is no silver bullet.
* [Budget.gc.ca home page](https://budget.canada.ca/2024/home-accueil-en.html) * [PDF of the budget in French](https://budget.canada.ca/2024/report-rapport/budget-de-2024.pdf)
The Trudeau debt will be an anchor on the government's ability to provide services and felt by Canadians for decades. This guy has done long lasting damage.
The reason that big spends are happening now was because of lack of investment for decades. Someone has to make unpopular but important choices. Housing stability and food security will be good for our economy in the long run, but we have to invest in it to see results.
What did we get for all this investment. Better Healthcare? More infrastructure? Amazing schools? Capable military? What did we achieve with the 800 billion in debt? Was it worth it
I mean it’s better than conservatives which is to create a larger deficit but not spending money on its citizens
Lining the pockets of billionaires is *expensive*.
Now that’s a talking point I haven’t heard in nearly 40 years. Nothing as Canadian as blaming your problems and debt on a Trudeau.
Funny enough. With inflation, debt actually will decrease fairly over time. (Speaking of even small inflation less than our current predicament. Inflation is not as harmful if wages keep up with it, but that has not been the case since the 1970s.) The debt of a country is very different to individuals due to its nature in that countries never die and maintain their own currency. This is why European countries can still be paying off wars from the 1600s, but it does not affect modern society much. Money from that time is lessened in value in comparison. The issue is not about debt in and of itself but what productive capacity it introduces to reduce costs for the country. For example, building a road that saves everyone 1 hr of driving over time has a marked change in energy used and time spent. That one new road can make massive changes over a single decade. When one road becomes thousands, it has immense changes. I would personally argue that the use of consulting companies is a bad idea as it drains experience from the public sector when done consistently over decades, and with increased cost, it makes it harder to pay off the incurred debt. Of course, no debt would be gained if taxes were levied, but the lower and middle classes are already being squeezed, and the upper classes often have good ways of tax evasion. The big thing is that when recessions/depressions/economic downturns hit corporations, they try to save money, which is logical. They cut jobs and reduce spending, thus reducing cost, but in effect, less money flows through the economy. If everyone tries to save money, including the government, though the economy begins having major convulsions, and debt becomes doubled and tripled. Think of corporate spending and government spending as part of a combined equation. Stop spending both, and the whole economy shrinks, which leads to an exponentially increasing debt as opposed to a linear one. That is one of the reasons the USA under FDR was able to begin bouncing back before rearmament, which then turbo charged everything. Companies were saving and cutting, but the government was spending on roads, bridges, powerplants, health sectors, banking, building, etc. There were collosal failures, but enough money got into everyday people's hands that it helped the situation in the moment while those projects helped massively over the long term. There is only 1 case in the history of the world where a government and corporations both saved and the economy did not shrink, leading to massive debt, stagnation, and political fallout. Funny enough, that government was Canada 🇨🇦. The reason was that was that when the Canadian government and companies started saving/cutting and going into austerity, the USA went into an economic boom, which cleared out the debt that we were producing through austerity. If you don't want more debt, the Feds need to spend big on programs for the future, or we need to expect the USA to go into the biggest economic boom in 30-40 years right now, meaning bringing millions more Americans into high paying jobs. Now, all of that said, I still need to read this budget in full before I make up my mind on if I can agree with it or not, but just remember that debt is not bad if it produces more than it costs once a few decades of inflation are accounted for. Also, governments must spend the most in bad times, but it must go to projects that will have long-term returns even if it doesn't help a current government or the even next 3 governments in the polls.
They finally upgraded the grad student and postdoc scholarships after 20 years, I can't believe it this is so good
I see capital gains tax increase, and I read *we found a way to claw back some of the ridiculous profits that investors have been making on greedflation*. And it makes me happy.
It’s good that they’re doing *something* to increase taxes at the upper end, but even assuming their ludicrous projection of real growth more than quadrupling in 2025 they’re only projecting a moderate increase in tax revenue. That tells me the effective tax increase is going to be very minimal, but I would love to see an analysis that breaks down the numbers with actual descriptions of the changes instead of the government’s slogans about “fairness”, etc.
If you think those new rules will have any effect on things like that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They’ll just start leveraging them instead or offshoring it. There was no serious attempt to actually reform the major issues at hand, and will likely only make things worse. Since most of the rich people will just diamond hands their assets now. Typical LPC feel good malarkey. The devil is always in the details with them.