So what are they defining as “middle class” for this round? gotta love the journalism of CTV that seemed OK leaving this as “will lower tax for some Canadians”… some precise reporting there
Disappointing to see adoption of CPC/PP platform cluelessness policy priority. Canada needs to spend on industrial policy to fight US, and prepare for hardships. His first BS of offering US empire more weapons purchases for more force multiplier warmongering was embarassing enough. Head in the sand “negotiations” is not going to go well.
Priority needs to be to destroy US economy, to save Canada’s. If plan is to do nothing, we can do without an auto industry too, but waiting until the crisis evolves is just negligent.
It is time for a radical change in how we progress as a society. Money sure ain’t working. “Let’s keep turning these money knobs and see what happens” should not be the ultimate answer for forward progress towards something resembling a utopia, which should be the goal. I have no answers but it seems that fiddling around with economy and hoping for the best is nothing more than just killing time.
Instead of tax cuts to help the middle class, what they should really do is:
Reduce privatization.
So much of our country is owned privately for the sake of profit.
This is why everything is so expensive, it’s because we let rent seekers own our infrastructure.
I want my government to start making money without further relying on middle class income.
Yeah, private ownership concentration is a huge problem leading to monopolies, lack of innovation, and worsening treatment of both customers and employees in general. As I understand it, all funds have increasingly gone to parasitic shareholders more than ever since CEO pay has shifted more and more to pay in company stock.
I’d love more publicly-run utility and transportation networks as you said, but in other less critical areas we could probably benefit from a more competitive system of small-to-medium-sized cooperatives that could (ideally, in a perfect world) replace corporations entirely. I would love to see support for worker groups with solid business plans to receive government grants (or at least forgiving loans) to help them buy their private sector workplaces for conversion to a democratic business model where employee-owners don’t get treated like serfs.
Yea but that’s the Liberal party you’re talking about. If you want that, you should vote NDP.
The NDP does not support land value tax.
Do you think that’s something they could easily do? It’s a nice idea, but it’s much more complicated to do anything about that
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What if the government just started running crown corporations again? They could price things a lot lower and take business away from the private entities. It’ll take some initial investment, but that’s money well spent I think.
Maybe start with insurance and undercut that entire industry. Then use the profit to fund the establishment of other crown corps. Since they don’t have to appease shareholders, all of the profit can go towards this.
I am very happy with the crown Corp car insurance we have in Manitoba.
I’d add transportation, utilities and natural ressources to that.
Well we have been feeding them every growing amounts of money, billions going to consultants, and it seems like everything has gotten significantly worse. Housing is dramatically more expensive, far wait times for doctors with shortages in family doctors, food is way more expensive, and our Canadian monopolies are actively abusing their power. Its enough to lose faith in their ability to manage anything.
I assume by “them” you mean the government?
The government doesn’t manage housing or food. That’s all the work of the free market baby! If there was a government run food store, for example, it would be able to operate at cost since it doesn’t necessarily need to turn a profit. Heck, it could even run at a loss if we as a society agreed it has value beyond dollars. In other words, we could offset the loss with tax dollars if we agreed it was of benefit to society.
I agree that monopolies are a problem though and that the government needs to actually start enforcing some anti trust. But taking an active role with crown corporations will also help reduce monopoly power, so its a tool to use along with enforcement.
As for health care, that’s a provincial concern but I also agree. Where I come from, the people around me keep voting in the very party who for over 40 years has proven to be incapable of managing health care. And yet there are functional public health care systems out there. So it’s not a matter of a government being incapable of managing health care. Rather, we have strong evidence that a conservative government is incapable of managing health care.
Of course there are lots of examples of governments managing things poorly, but there are also countless examples of private companies managing things poorly. The difference I think is that with the government you at least have some say. I don’t think the government should run everything, but certain key industries (mostly infrastructure type things) I think would be better off in public hands.
So? We can do hard things.
I don’t think we can, actually.
I could be convinced, but you’d need to give me details, and I suspect you’d convince yourself first if you looked into it.
This is to placate people who think voting gives you instant gratification. This isn’t for people who pay attention.
It’s all a big show regardless of who is in office and people eat it up. Drama for the masses.
Sweet now let’s raise it on foreign billionaires who try to defraud our EV rebates
Let’s also do domestic billionaires (yea we have some).
Why have an EV rebate at all. Im sure the poor are overjoyed to gift their landlord a rebate for their new EV sports car. Meanwhile we are the only country in the G7 without high speed rail, while many of our highways were built in the 1960s.
I’ll repeat again, I don’t need a fucking tax cut. I need the price of housing to start going down.
Increase taxes on property significantly, and use 100% of that money to give everyone a basic income.
This incentivizes both people and developers to be efficient with their housing choices. Using too much housing for the area you live in? You pay extra to help out everyone. Using the right amount? No harm to you. Using less than the average? Here’s a payout, thank you.
Prices overall will drop, because it’s no longer profitable to simply own a home due to the taxes, and especially not if there’s no people in it because the taxes won’t be offset by the basic income.
Yes but what about the profits of investors? Have you thought of them? You meany.
I have a much more clear cut policy:
- You can live in one home
- You can’t own a home you don’t live in
Occasionally someone has a big place and someone has a small place, but this would solve way more issues.
It really wouldn’t.
A) It prevents renting at all except for basement suites. So no more rental buildings, which make up the majority of rentals available. Renting is an important housing option, as not everyone wants to own, nor should they have to. Move to a city to go to university, and you have to buy a house just to live in for 2-4 years before you have to sell it to move elsewhere for a job? Have a job that requires you go somewhere else for a few months while you <build a bridge> <implement a new computer system> <train some people>, too bad hotel for 6 months instead of being able to rent an apartment.
B) If you do the math and even take out dedicated rental buildings, there really aren’t that many homes that are owned as a second place. It’s about 15% of the total market, and a large chunk of that are cottages and lake houses away from the cities where people actually want to live.
The big place/small place issue is actually more of a problem than the the double ownership you’re talking about. There are more total bedrooms in Canada than there are people, and once you account for couples usually sharing a bedroom, there’s actually a ton of extra bedrooms across the country. The problem is that they’re not distributed properly across the population, 4+ bedroom family homes that were bought to raise children are being kept for decades by empty-nest couples who don’t want to downsize.
That’s true, rentals are important. So how about instead mom and pop landlords can rent a couple/small number of units, but anything above that you must register as a corporation and the tenants union gets to be on the board, and there are strong incentives to turn you into a housing cooperative. Let’s throw in some more tenant protection legislation for good measure.
Basically, treat housing as a right, not as a financial asset, an investment, or a profit-driven enterprise.
I agree with you on the second part, but even allowing a single home still keeps housing as an investment/profit generator.
You have to actually do something to force every owner to lose money. Hence my original suggestion to heavily tax homes and return that to citizens equally.
All they need to do is make it so you can only own one residence, if you own a second as income property it should be taxed to the point that you want to sell it.
I was in the rental stream before and at least 1 landlord was foreign owners from mainland China–the property had sat empty for six months before us because owner was rich and didn’t care about the 2k month they were losing. Another was an unlocatable landlord, the strara paperwork showed China owner, but correspondence was coming from Korean contact info. It started to look more like shell company ownership. Also have two friends who’s Vancouver places are Asian owned. Owners moved back to China and main house was vacant for 2+ years, just single basement tennant paying utilities to make place “occupied”.
This is a red herring.
I ran the calculations a while back, that may free up 2-4% of all housing, that is not enough to fix the problem of expensive housing. That’s only 1-2 years of new building stock.
It won’t hurt to do it, but it’s simply not the main reason real estate is expensive.
As someone who’s trying to move back to Canada, I’m also reading that a lot of the places owned by these investors are basically useless boxes that no local would live in. So even if they got freed up, there’d be very little demand for them.
We definitely need more housing across canada, but BC has been notorious for vacant homes and airbnb units, thus the ban on airbnb and the added vacancy tax out here.
And thus many of those buyers moved to other Canadian cities and did the same thing as Vancouver.
And it should be obvious that despite new regulations being put in for Foreign buyers, Vacant units, and Airbnb, the prices haven’t dropped to even pre-pandemic levels, let alone any useful amount, and they’re expected to keep climbing this year.
These are all small red herrings that are easy PR wins for the government, but don’t actually do anything useful to the prices.
They did drop for us in Vancouver. I’m not suggesting it accounts for the high prices everywhere but it definetly had a market affect as airbnb people dumped their additional units. One owner had over 40
Or it just happened to coincide with a massive jump in interest rates which also affected prices elsewhere that didn’t implement these policies.
No there are articles about the affect upon announcement and then institution
There’s an idea I hadn’t thought of before. I wonder if there’s any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable. And how that’d change base on how many others are in the same space. Could be interesting idea to tax people based on their space to people ratio 🤔
There are studies on that, but they’re not super relevant because the appropriate amount of space is determined by how many people want to live somewhere, not based on the specific size.
People are willing to live in smaller places the closer they are to amenities. It’s a gradient, not a single value even for each location.
For sure, definitely an interesting way to think of property taxes and how to encourage people to not have frivolous space.
Average square footage of homes:
- 1920: 1,048 square feet
- 1930: 1,129
- 1940: 1,177
- 1950: 983
- 1960: 1,289
- 1970: 1,500
- 1980: 1,740
- 1990: 2,080
- 2000: 2,266
- 2010: 2,392
- 2014: 2,657
https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-decade-by-decade.html
I wonder if there’s any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable.
Culturally dependent, I’m pretty sure. Housing in Japan can be pretty tiny. Canada’s on the large side.
It also depends on the person and their habits: introverts and people who spend more time at home are likely to want more personal space.
For sure, a thorough study of what Canadians need would be helpful to something like this. Could inform what a good space to person ratio could be. Especially in Canada.
If I’m understanding this correctly, you wouldn’t need to adjust any taxes based on occupancy. The property tax would be fixed based on the value, as it is now but higher. If a single person lived in a big house the new guaranteed income might be less than the tax increase, if you added a second person you’d double the income and potentially cancel out the increase. If you had a family of four in that same house, you’d potentially pay no taxes at all or even get some back.
Maybe not no taxes, but less? Could be an interesting way to tackle low occupancy rates. If it’s possible to pay no taxes at all, it might cause people to sardine can a house to save on $.
I see where you’re coming from, but I can’t really see how that outcome would be any more or less common than it would be currently. I suppose I should’ve said effectively no tax, as it would simply be the new combined income being higher than the total property tax.
Some quick hypothetical math:
For illustrative purposes we can pretend every house is worth the same amount so we can deal simply with averages. At the same time we’ll round the average household to 2.5 people. Let’s say every house currently pays $5000/yr in property tax and that gets doubled, then we distribute the total evenly between every person in the country. We should end up with every individual person getting $2000/yr. If your household is 2 people, you’d effectively pay $6000, if your household is 5, you’d pay $0.
In the real world values obviously differ, but it would theoretically lower taxes on full houses and raise taxes on underutilized houses, with the impacts felt much less on small single occupancy houses and much more on huge mansions occupied by a small family.
I’m no expert, I’m simply a normal guy taking someone else’s commented idea and running with it, so I’m sure there would be issues. In fact I see one already. This sort of sounds like how the carbon tax was supposed to work, where the average consumer breaks even, but in reality people in more rural areas felt like they were being punished because they didn’t have realistic options to cut down on their fuel usage. This housing idea would have a similar issue where people in the least affordable cities would feel punished, because their shoebox sized studio might cost as much as a house fit for a multi generational family in a different province.
Carneys housing minister said he doesn’t want prices to fall.
Congrats, you voted Liberal. The party of debt and future austerity, and importing people to hide falling GDP and to prop up home values.
I didn’t vote liberal.
I voted NDP, but even they didn’t have a plan to actually drop housing prices.
No party wants prices to fall because the economy is so built around ever-increasing prices that if prices do fall then the economy falls with it.
What was the conservative plan again?
Tying immigration to housing completions. Forcing rezoning around mass transit. Withholding federal money from areas that dont build enough housing, due to bureaucracy and high developer taxes. Removing GST was his idea as well.
https://www.conservative.ca/poilievre-will-build-2-3-million-homes-in-five-years/
Instead we got a guy who says he doesnt want prices to fall.
I think that increasing the basic personal exemption would have helped a lot more lower income Canadians
Yes, but functionally no one voted NDP this year, and that was their pitch, IIRC.
Wasn’t it also the CPC plan?
The CPC had a plan?
My bad, it was to lower the rate on the lowest bracket. https://www.conservative.ca/poilievre-to-cut-income-tax-by-15-for-the-average-canadian/
I don’t know what Carney has planned, but a middle class tax cut could be this.
Edit: It is, but going from 15% to 14% instead of Poilievre’s proposed 12.5% https://globalnews.ca/news/11180306/liberals-budget-middle-class-tax-cut/
VERB the NOUN
It may yet be part of things: a promised cut to middle class taxes should infer inclusion of the poorer.
One would hope so, but I won’t hold my breath.
why do they say it’s for “middle class” if it’s for poor people?
I don’t know if I count as middle class. But I remember the first year I didn’t get all my taxes back on rebate. I was SO HAPPY to be making enough money to pay taxes.
Still feeling that way even though I am getting broker over time as the rent goes up and my wage doesn’t.
It would be more worthwhile to do price controls on those loblaws assholes.
Middle class is a made up term meant to separate the working class. It doesn’t mean anything. The definition of middle class is vibes alone because it’s a term that means nothing used by pandering politicians.
I agree that systemic solutions should be the focus but unfortunately the Liberals are incapable of challenging the system.
