Taxes

About that Copenhagen award

Feb 5, 2010
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Back in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens – in spite of the fact that there… View Article

Corporations are people too

Jan 31, 2010
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Advocates of democratic electoral reform are really out of step. Ideas like proportional representation and advertising spending limits are so retro, so 2004. The fashionable electoral reform idea this year is to give corporations a real say. It’s time for individual citizens to share their electoral democracy with corporations to give meaning to those old… View Article

Scrooge is alive and well

Dec 29, 2009
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In a Vancouver Sun article (Market wages would make a difference to city’s taxes, December 28, 2009) Philip Hochstein argues Vancouver civic workers who make a living wage should be made to suffer the fate of those in the private sector whose employers get away with paying under $15 an hour for labouring, or $10-15 an hour… View Article

HST And Family Budgets

Dec 15, 2009
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A recent report from the CCPA national office analyzed the impact of tax harmonization on family budgets in Ontario.  Not a Tax Grab After All: A Second Look at Ontario’s HST made a splash with its finding that the introduction of HST will be largely a wash for Ontario families, as most households would be… View Article

Vancouver City Budget Woes: Are the Cuts Really Necessary?

Dec 3, 2009
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In this round of municipal budgeting, the city of Vancouver finds itself in exactly the same predicament as the federal and provincial governments faced earlier in the year – projected revenues would not be sufficient to meet their rising expenditures. The big difference is that municipal governments are prohibited by law from running a deficit…. View Article

Property taxes: are major industries suffering?

Nov 3, 2009
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Businesses across Canada have been complaining about what they pay in property taxes, well, since there were property taxes.  But the issue in BC came into sharper definition in July when Catalyst Paper hand-delivered cheques to four municipalities that only covered 25% of their property tax bill.  Timberwest, Celgar and West Fraser Timber joined Catalyst… View Article

Strengthening the CPP: Maybe the Americans are on to something

Oct 31, 2009
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As we emerge from the financial crisis, a new and welcome debate is beginning about how we stabilize and strengthen our pension system. The financial crisis provided a rude (and in some cases surprising) reminder to many retirees (and near retirees) that their private pensions are far from secure. Many took a beating on their… View Article

HST: Why do the Feds want it so bad?

Oct 7, 2009
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As the debate rages in BC about the Harmonized Sales Tax, one curious dimension I’ve been puzzling over is this––why do the Feds want the HST implemented so badly that they are willing to fork over $1.6 billion to the province as an enticement? And it isn’t just the federal Conservatives. Ever since the introduction… View Article

James at the UBCM: A welcome move off revenue-neutrality

Oct 6, 2009
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In her  speech last Thursday to the annual meeting of the Union of BC Municipalities, NDP leader Carole James declared: “I am calling on the provincial government to cancel the corporate tax cuts that are scheduled to come in over the next two years related to the carbon tax. And let’s put that money into… View Article