It's Just An Economy

Let them eat whatever:

The average Canadian family spends more of its income on taxes than it does on the basic necessities of food, shelter and clothing, a new report reveals.

Numbers from “Taxes versus the Necessities of Life: The Canadian Consumer Tax Index, 2026 Edition” by The Fraser Institute found that the average family loses 41.9 per cent of its income to a variety of taxes, while food, shelter and clothing combined eat up just 36 per cent.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in 1961, the first year for which the report has data, just 33.5 per cent of the average family’s income went to taxes, while more than half (56.5 per cent) covered basic necessities.

The report notes that, until about 1980, Canadians paid less on taxes than they did on the three categories of basic necessities. Taxes then outstripped necessities as a percentage of income until about 1992, when they were briefly about the same. But since then the gap has widened to where we see it today.

“At a time when the cost of living is top of mind across the country, taxes remain the largest household expense for Canadian families,” said Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of the report.

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A middle-class society is one where ordinary work creates a real path to ownership. A useful education should lead to a job that pays enough to buy a home and save, leaving room to absorb a setback or take a risk. That is how wages become agency, and how families acquire a durable stake in the country.

Liberal democracy depends on the accessibility of that stake. Citizens who can see themselves advancing have reason to build institutions and accept obligations to the people around them. But when work no longer offers a plausible route upward, the material basis of citizenship begins to erode.

Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch recently calculated how long a median-wage earner saving 15 percent would need to climb from the bottom quarter of the wealth distribution to the top in several Western countries. Mufan Li, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Waterloo, replicated the method for Canada and Ontario. In 2000, the climb took about 23 years. Today, it takes 55 years nationally and 60 in Ontario, against a working career of roughly 40.

Simply put, income from labour in Canada has lost power to change a person’s class position.

There is also a policy verdict buried in the arithmetic. If a career of diligently saved wages can no longer cross the wealth distribution, then clearly wages are too low and the taxes loaded onto them are too high.

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Rents in Canada are so high that minimum-wage earners have to allocate much of their full-time work hours to cover the average cost an apartment, thereby jeopardizing their push for financial independence, according to a new report by Zoocasa Realty Inc.

“Financial independence and stable housing have long been seen as markers of adulthood, but for many young Canadians, these milestones are slipping out of reach,” the report released on Aug. 10 said.

The Zoocasa report said 29 of the 60 cities it looked at required minimum-wage workers to dedicate 120-plus hours of an average 174-hour work month at eight hours a day to cover their rent. People in only eight cities could work less than 100 hours a month to cover rent.

But in North Vancouver, a minimum-wage employee would need to direct 95 per cent or 164 hours from the month toward rent, based on a provincial minimum wage of $18.25 and the average rent for all apartments, which is $2,983.

The other top five cities where rent gobbles up the most working hours are clustered in British Columbia and Ontario.

In Vancouver, 87 per cent of their hours worked would need to be earmarked for rent, while it’s 84 per cent in North York, part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), tech-hub Kanata, just outside Ottawa, and the City of Toronto.

The report said all the areas in the GTA were “uniformly high-cost,” requiring between 118 and 146 hours of work.

Ontario had the widest variance between hours needed to cover rent, ranging from the lowest at 95 in Sarnia to a high of 146 hours in North York.

Zoocasa said the cross-provincial gaps are due to the cost of rent rather than to different minimum wages.

“Since provinces set minimum wage uniformly, any variation in the number of work hours needed to afford rent comes entirely from differences in local rent levels, making rent the key lever for closing the affordability gap, not wage policy,” it said.

For example, B.C. has the highest provincial minimum wage at $18.25 an hour, but that isn’t helping with affordability. Four B.C. cities ranked among the top 10 for most hours needed to cover rent.

Alberta, meanwhile, has the lowest minimum wage at $15 an hour. Affordability problems have risen in communities around Calgary.

In Airdrie, just outside the oil capital, workers need to dedicate 79 per cent of their work hours to rent compared with 73 per cent in Calgary.

The situation is better in other Alberta cities such as Edmonton, Red Deer, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat.

In Saskatchewan, where Zoocasa said “rents haven’t escalated the way they have in B.C. or Ontario,” 95 hours of work in Regina will cover rent.

Halifax ranked sixth for the number of hours needed to cover rent at 143, or 85 per cent of people’s time on the job. The most affordable place nationally was St. John’s NL, where 74 hours of work would cover rent for the month.

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Debt levels for the working poor are now “staggering,” says one of the country’s largest credit monitors. Equifax Canada yesterday in a report to the Commons industry committee said financial circumstances for millions are much worse than headlines indicate: “This gap has widened drastically.”

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As U.S. President Donald Trump’s Wednesday tariff deadline looms, there are worrying signs that Canadian manufacturers are going to pack up and move south of the border. This is unsurprising for a country that imposes high costs on businesses and seems to have resigned itself to being Trump’s whipping boy.

Last month, KPMG Canada released the results of a survey of 275 Canadian manufacturers conducted in May, which found that 42 per cent of them have considered, or are currently considering, moving production south of the border. Eleven per cent said they’re thinking of moving their head offices to the United States.

A few weeks later, the Financial Post reported that Vancouver-based Interfor Corp., one of the world’s largest lumber producers, plans to “shift its corporate and functional support operations” from British Columbia to Georgia, largely due to Trump’s crippling 45 per cent tariffs on softwood lumber.

Coercing manufacturers to relocate production to the U.S. is, of course, exactly what Trump hoped to achieve. It also explains why the president has singled Canada out for disproportionate punishment: while the U.S. can’t compete with developing countries on labour costs and moving operations from Europe is a costly endeavour, Canada is situated right next door, has an economy that’s already highly integrated with the U.S. and has relatively high wages and an uncompetitive tax system.

 

What did the failed banker and his ”strong” plans do to avoid this?

Did he remove the pre-existing tariffs on the US?

Did he lower corporate taxes?

Did he eliminate mandates for Chinese-made EVs?

No, that took a much longer time.

Carney did nothing.

It’s not like his Brookfield stocks will fold if Canada goes under.

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An executive who questioned why Canadians “glorified this idea of homeownership” yesterday was named chair of cabinet’s latest housing agency, Build Canada Homes. Evan Siddall as $459,000-a year CEO of CMHC also financed research into a home equity tax but dropped the scheme when Blacklock’s made it public: ‘Mr. Siddall brings deep experience.’