Business
Taxpocalypse 2025: Trudeau Rings in the New Year with Higher Taxes and Empty Wallets
Taxpayer Federation’s report reveals how Trudeau’s government is using new taxes to crush the middle class, fund wasteful projects, and expand a bloated bureaucracy while Canadians struggle
When the clock strikes midnight, it won’t just be the start of 2025—it’ll mark the beginning of Taxpocalypse 2025, a year where Justin Trudeau’s government will hit the middle class harder than ever before.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has released a report that lays bare the financial storm Canadians are about to endure. It’s not just inflation draining your wallet; it’s an avalanche of new taxes designed to fund Trudeau’s bloated government and its endless corruption. Let’s go through the numbers, because you deserve to know what’s really happening.
First, payroll taxes are going up. If you earn $81,200 or more, you’ll be paying $403 more in Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance contributions this year. Your employer will also fork out nearly $6,000 per employee. Small businesses—already struggling with inflation and high costs—are being crushed under this weight. This isn’t job creation; it’s job destruction.
Then there’s the carbon tax. Starting tomorrow, it jumps from $80 per tonne to $95, adding 20.9¢ per litre to the cost of gasoline. Filling up a 70-litre tank will now cost you almost $15 in carbon taxes alone. If you heat your home with natural gas, get ready to pay an additional $415 this year. Trudeau claims this is about fighting climate change, but in reality, it’s just another excuse to fill government coffers.
And if you thought inflation was bad, bracket creep makes it worse. As your income grows slightly due to inflation, you’re pushed into higher tax brackets without actually having more buying power. So, you’ll pay more in income tax on money that doesn’t go as far as it did last year. Meanwhile, the wealthy use loopholes to avoid taxes, and the poor get targeted rebates. Once again, it’s the middle class holding the bag.
Don’t believe me about how bad things have gotten under Trudeau? Let’s talk inflation—specifically food inflation. Here are the year-over-year increases:
- 2021: 4.0% (September)
- 2022: 11.0% (October)
- 2023: 8.3% (June)
- 2024: 2.7% (October)
Now, let’s compound that year over year. Since 2021, food prices have soared 28.37%. Think about that—almost a third of your grocery budget wiped out. A dollar that used to buy a loaf of bread now barely buys three-quarters of one. And this year, Trudeau’s new taxes will take even more out of your wallet.
But while you’re paying more for less, Trudeau has been busy inflating something else: the federal public service. Since he took office in 2015, he has added 108,793 new public servants to the federal payroll—a 42% increase in the size of the federal public service. And for what? Are hospitals better staffed? Are services more efficient? Absolutely not. Wait times for healthcare are worse than ever. Infrastructure projects are endlessly delayed.
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If you ask me, Trudeau bloated the public sector to artificially keep unemployment numbers down. Let’s be clear: it’s the private sector that provides for the public sector, not the other way around. Every new bureaucrat added to the payroll is funded by taxes from hardworking Canadians—people like you—who are already struggling to make ends meet.
So, under Trudeau, you’re paying more for groceries, more in taxes, and getting less in return. This isn’t governance; it’s theft. But here’s the real insult: all of this money is going to fund Trudeau’s swamp of waste and corruption. Take the ArriveCAN app, a disaster that cost $54 million—for what? A glorified QR code. Contracts were handed out to insiders, many of whom didn’t even do any work.
Then there’s the Green Slush Fund, which has wasted nearly $400 million on pet projects rife with conflicts of interest. Liberal insiders funneled taxpayer money into their own businesses, and Trudeau’s government just shrugged.
The alcohol escalator tax is going up too, adding 2% more to the already sky-high taxes on beer, wine, and spirits. And don’t forget the digital services tax, a 3% levy on platforms like Amazon and Netflix. Experts say most of this cost will be passed directly to consumers.
Final Thoughts
This is Justin Trudeau’s Canada: a nation where the poor are shielded, the rich find their loopholes, and the middle class—the backbone of this country—is bled dry. Payroll taxes, carbon taxes, alcohol taxes, income taxes—it’s all part of an elaborate scheme to fund the bloated vanity projects and corruption of a government that no longer even pretends to care about the people footing the bill.
And while Canadians are working longer hours to afford less, struggling to put food on their tables, start families, or even dream of owning a home, Trudeau jet-sets around the world like royalty. Whether it’s sipping top-shelf wine at a global summit or skiing the pristine slopes of Red Mountain, this guy lives like a king while the rest of you pick up the tab.
It’s no wonder Canadians are booing him in public—it’s not only justified, it’s well deserved. He’s earned every jeer, every shout of frustration, because his leadership has failed this country at every turn. Under Trudeau, affordability has become a joke, and hard work no longer guarantees success.
But here’s the best part, Justin: there’s an election this year. Canadians finally get the chance to tell you exactly what they think of your disastrous leadership. They’ll send your Liberal ship straight into the iceberg, where it belongs.
So, go ahead, call the election. Take the globalist agenda you’ve been so proud to champion, pack it up with your carbon-tax hypocrisy, and prepare for your next gig as a keynote speaker for the World Economic Forum. You’ve proven you’re great at reading from a script that someone else writes—just not at running a country.
Enjoy your top sirloin tonight, Justin. Canadians? They’ll be eating Kraft Dinner while watching your government fall apart. Happy New Year. And Canada, don’t forget: Taxpocalypse 2025 starts tomorrow. Let’s make it the year we take our country back.
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It finally happened. Canada received a federal budget earlier this month, after more than a year without one. It’s far from a budget that’s great. It’s far from what many expected and distant from what the country needs. But it still passed.
With the budget vote drama now behind us, there may be space for some general observations beyond the details of the concerning deficits and debt. What kind of budget did Canada get?
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For a government that built its political identity on social-program expansion and moralized spending, Budget 2025 arrives wearing borrowed clothing. It speaks in the language of productivity, infrastructure, and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, yet keeps the full spending reflex of the Trudeau era. The result feels like a cabinet trying to change its fiscal costume without changing the character inside it. Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this same rhetoric before lead to nothing. So, I remain skeptical of what they say and how they say it.
The government insists it has found a new path, one where public investment leads private growth. That sounds bold. However, it is more a rebranding than a reform. It is a shift in vocabulary, not in discipline.
A comparison with past eras makes this clear.
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budgets were cut deeply, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. The Chrétien years were unsentimental. Political capital was spent so financial capital could return. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. Nothing in this plan resembles the structural surgery of the mid 1990s.
Stephen Harper, by contrast, treated balanced budgets as policy and principle. Even during the global financial crisis, his government used stimulus as a bridge, not a way of life. It cut taxes widely and consistently, limited public service growth, and placed the long-term burden on restraint rather than rhetoric. Budget 2025 nods toward Harper’s focus on productivity and capital assets, yet it rejects the tax relief and spending controls that made his budgets coherent.
Then there is Justin Trudeau, the high tide of redistribution, vacuous identity politics, and deficit-as-virtue posturing. Ottawa expanded into an ideological planner for everything, including housing, climate, childcare, inclusion portfolios, and every new identity category. Much of that ideological scaffolding consisted of mere words, weakening the principle of equality under the law and encouraging the government to referee culture rather than administer policy.
Budget 2025 is the first hint of retreat from that style. The identity program fireworks are dimmer, though they have not disappeared. The social policy boosterism is quieter. Perhaps fiscal gravity has begun to whisper in the prime minister’s ear.
However, one cannot confuse tone for transformation.
Spending is still vast. Deficits grew. The new fiscal anchor, balancing only the operating budget, is weaker than the one it replaced. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale that economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. The budget announces new funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds. These are presented as productivity measures, yet they continue the Trudeau-era instinct to centralize housing policy rather than fix the levers that matter. Permitting delays, zoning rigidity, municipal approvals, and labour shortages continue to slow actual construction. Ottawa spends, but the foundations still cure at the same pace.
Defence spending tells the same story. Budget 2025 offers incremental funding and some procurement gestures, but it avoids the core problem: Canada’s procurement system is broken. Delays stretch across decades. Projects become obsolete before contracts are signed. The system cannot buy a ship, an aircraft, or an armoured vehicle without cost overruns and missed timelines. Spending more through this machinery will waste time and money. It adds motion, not capability.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax competitiveness agenda, no strategy for shrinking a federal bureaucracy that has grown faster than the economy it governs. Ottawa presides over a low-productivity country but insists that a new accounting framework will solve what decades of overregulation and policy clutter have created. More bluster.
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From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation, energy, mining, agriculture, and transportation receives more rhetorical respect in Budget 2025, yet the same regulatory thicket that blocks pipelines and mines remains intact. The government praises capital formation but still undermines the key sectors that generate it.
Budget 2025 tries to walk like Chrétien and talk like Harper while spending like Trudeau. That is not a transformation; it is a costume change. The country needed a budget that prioritized growth rooted in tangible assets and real productivity. What it got instead is a rhetorical turn without the courage to cut, streamline, or reform.
Canada does not require a new budgeting vocabulary. It requires a government willing to govern in the best interest of the country.
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I view the recent announcements by the Government of Canada as window dressing, and not addressing the fundamental issue which is that projects are drowning in bureaucratic red tape and regulatory overburden. We don’t need them picking winners and losers, a fool’s errand in my opinion, but rather make it easier to do business within Canada and stop the hemorrhaging of Foreign Direct Investment from this country.
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Changes are afoot—reportedly, carve-outs and tweaks to federal regulations that would help attract investment in a new oil pipeline from Alberta. But any private proponent to come out of this deal will presumably be handpicked to advance through the narrow Bill C-5 window, aided by one-off fixes and exemptions.
That approach can only move us so far. It doesn’t address the underlying problem.
Anyone in the investment world will tell you a patchwork of adjustments is nowhere near enough to unlock the large-scale energy investment this country needs. And from that investor’s perspective, the horizon stretches far beyond a single political cycle. Even if this government promises clarity today in the much-anticipated memorandum of understanding (MOU), who knows whether it will be around by the time any major proposal actually moves forward.
With all of the talk of “nation-building” projects, I have often been asked what my thoughts are about what we must see from the federal government.
The energy sector is the file the feds have to get right. It is by far the largest component of Canadian exports, with oil accounting for $147 billion in 2024 (20 percent of all exports), and energy as a whole accounting for $227 billion of exports (30 percent of all exports).
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Furthermore, we are home to some of the largest resource reserves in the world, including oil (third-largest in proven reserves) and natural gas (ninth-largest). Canada needs to wholeheartedly embrace that. Natural resource exceptionalism is exactly what Canada is, and we should be proud of it.
One of the most important factors that drives investment is commodity prices. But that is set by market forces.
Beyond that, I have always said that the two most important things one considers before looking at a project are the rule of law and regulatory certainty.
The Liberal government has been obtuse when it comes to whether it will continue the West Coast tanker ban (Bill C-48) or lift it to make way for a pipeline. But nobody will propose a pipeline without the regulatory and legal certainty that they will not be seriously hindered should they propose to build one.
Meanwhile, the proposed emissions cap is something that sets an incredibly negative tone, a sentiment that is the most influential factor in ensuring funds flow. Finally, the Impact Assessment Act, often referred to as the “no more pipelines bill” (Bill C-69), has started to blur the lines between provincial and federal authority.
All three are supposedly on the table for tweaks or carve-outs. But that may not be enough.
It is interesting that Norway—a country that built its wealth on oil and natural gas—has adopted the mantra that as long as oil is a part of the global economy, it will be the last producer standing. It does so while marrying conventional energy with lower-carbon standards. We should be more like Norway.
Rather than constantly speaking down to the sector, the Canadian government should embrace the wealth that this represents and adopt a similar narrative.
The sector isn’t looking for handouts. Rather, it is looking for certainty, and a government proud of the work that they do and is willing to say so to Canada and the rest of the world. Foreign direct investment outflows have been a huge issue for Canada, and one of the bigger drags on our economy.
Almost all of the major project announcements Prime Minister Mark Carney has made to date have been about existing projects, often decades in the making, which are not really “additive” to the economy and are reflective of the regulatory overburden that industry faces en masse.
I have always said governments are about setting the rules of the game, while it is up to businesses to decide whether they wish to participate or to pick up the ball and look elsewhere.
Capital is mobile and will pursue the best risk-adjusted returns it can find. But the flow of capital from our country proves that Canada is viewed as just too risky for investors.
The government’s job is not to try to pick winners and losers. History has shown that governments are horrible at that. Rather, it should create a risk-appropriate environment with stable and capital-attractive rules in place, and then get out of the way and see where the chips fall.
Link to The Hub article: Large-scale energy investments remain a pipe dream
Formerly the head of institutional equity research at FirstEnergy Capital Corp and ATB Capital Markets. I have been involved in the energy sector in either the sell side or corporately for over 25 years
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