Trudeau not doing the little things to make life affordable

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Figuring out how to make life more affordable for Canadians shouldn’t be like unravelling Einstein’s theory of relativity.

If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won’t do the big things to make life more affordable, he could at least do the little things.

“We know Canadians are facing challenging times right now, people are squeezed between the cost of groceries, rents,” Trudeau said during a cabinet retreat in Montreal aimed at “bringing down the cost of living.”

Trudeau knows “people are squeezed” because his tax hikes are some of the things that are doing the squeezing.

Take the carbon tax. Trudeau may never scrap his carbon tax, but he could at least not raise it again on April 1.

Even after the rebates, average families will be out hundreds of dollars this year because of the higher heating bills, gas prices, inflation and the economic damage wrought by the carbon tax, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

Governments of all political stripes have paused fuel taxes to provide relief.

British Columbia’s New Democrats delayed their carbon tax hike during the pandemic. Manitoba’s NDP government suspended its fuel tax. Newfoundland and Labrador’s Liberals are also providing fuel tax relief, and so have the Conservative governments in Alberta and Ontario.

The United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal also provided fuel tax relief.

To add insult to injury: the feds charge their sales tax on top of the carbon tax. That’s right. The federal government applies its sales tax after all the per-litre taxes are added.

This tax-on-tax is costing Canadians about $500 million this year, according to the PBO. By the end of 2030, the GST on the carbon tax alone will have cost Canadians $6.2 billion.

Ending the tax-on-tax is a simple way to save Canadians billions when fuelling up or heating their homes.

Trudeau knows taxes make it more expensive to stay warm during the winter. Otherwise, why would he have taken the carbon tax off home heating oil for three years?

That political ploy was an attempt to help Atlantic Canadians amid tanking poll numbers in this typical Liberal stronghold.

But 97 per cent of Canadian families use other forms of energy to heat their homes. Trudeau should extend the relief he provided to Atlantic Canadians to everyone by taking the carbon tax off all forms of home heating. That would save the average family using natural gas about $1,100 over three years.

Trudeau can also give farmers relief and ease grocery prices by making sure the original Bill C-234 becomes law this year, which would remove the carbon tax from the natural gas and propane used on farms.

The House of Commons already passed this relief twice, but it still isn’t law because of shenanigans in the Senate.

The carbon tax on natural gas and propane that’s used to heat barns and dry grain will cost farmers $1 billion by 2030, according to the PBO.

By making it more expensive for farmers to grow food, the carbon tax makes it more expensive for Canadians to buy food.

There’s one more easy way for Trudeau to provide relief: stop his upcoming 4.7 per cent alcohol tax hike.

Last year, the feds capped the annual increase at two per cent. Trudeau shouldn’t have hiked the tax at all, but the smaller increase reduced the tax burden by $100 million. At a time when both consumers and businesses are struggling, freezing the alcohol tax is the least Trudeau could do.

The Trudeau government doesn’t need an expensive get-away in Montreal to figure out how to make life more affordable. There’s a simple solution: stop taking so much money from Canadians.

Related Topics:#Affordability #CanadianTaxpayersFederation #FrancoTerrrazzano

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Massive government child-care plan wreaking havoc across Ontario

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Massive government child-care plan wreaking havoc across Ontario

Published on June 30, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

It’s now more than four years since the federal Liberal government pledged $30 billion in spending over five years for $10-per-day national child care, and more than three years since Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government signed a $13.2 billion deal with the federal government to deliver this child-care plan.

Not surprisingly, with massive government funding came massive government control. While demand for child care has increased due to the government subsidies and lower out-of-pocket costs for parents, the plan significantly restricts how child-care centres operate (including what items participating centres may purchase), and crucially, caps the proportion of government funds available to private for-profit providers.

What have families and taxpayers got for this enormous government effort? Widespread child-care shortages across Ontario.

For example, according to the City of Ottawa, the number of children (aged 0 to 5 years) on child-care waitlists has ballooned by more than 300 per cent since 2019, there are significant disparities in affordable child-care access “with nearly half of neighbourhoods underserved, and limited access in suburban and rural areas,” and families face “significantly higher” costs for before-and-after-school care for school-age children.

In addition, Ottawa families find the system “complex and difficult to navigate” and “fewer child care options exist for children with special needs.” And while 42 per cent of surveyed parents need flexible child care (weekends, evenings, part-time care), only one per cent of child-care centres offer these flexible options. These are clearly not encouraging statistics, and show that a government-knows-best approach does not properly anticipate the diverse needs of diverse families.

Moreover, according to the Peel Region’s 2025 pre-budget submission to the federal government (essentially, a list of asks and recommendations), it “has maximized its for-profit allocation, leaving 1,460 for-profit spaces on a waitlist.” In other words, families can’t access $10-per-day child care—the central promise of the plan—because the government has capped the number of for-profit centres.

Similarly, according to Halton Region’s pre-budget submission to the provincial government, “no additional families can be supported with affordable child care” because, under current provincial rules, government funding can only be used to reduce child-care fees for families already in the program.

And according to a March 2025 Oxford County report, the municipality is experiencing a shortage of child-care staff and access challenges for low-income families and children with special needs. The report includes a grim bureaucratic predication that “provincial expansion targets do not reflect anticipated child care demand.”

Child-care access is also a problem provincewide. In Stratford, which has a population of roughly 33,000, the municipal government reports that more than 1,000 children are on a child-care waitlist. Similarly in Port Colborne (population 20,000), the city’s chief administrative officer told city council in April 2025 there were almost 500 children on daycare waitlists at the beginning of the school term. As of the end of last year, Guelph and Wellington County reportedly had a total of 2,569 full-day child-care spaces for children up to age four, versus a waitlist of 4,559 children—in other words, nearly two times as many children on a waitlist compared to the number of child-care spaces.

More examples. In Prince Edward County, population around 26,000, there are more than 400 children waitlisted for licensed daycare. In Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton County, the child-care waitlist is about 1,500 children long and the average wait time is four years. And in St. Mary’s, there are more than 600 children waitlisted for child care, but in recent years town staff have only been able to move 25 to 30 children off the wait list annually.

The numbers speak for themselves. Massive government spending and control over child care has created havoc for Ontario families and made child-care access worse. This cannot be a surprise. Quebec’s child-care system has been largely government controlled for decades, with poor results. Why would Ontario be any different? And how long will Premier Ford allow this debacle to continue before he asks the new prime minister to rethink the child-care policy of his predecessor?

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

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Canada Caves: Carney ditches digital services tax after criticism from Trump

Published on June 30, 2025

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From The Center Square

By Brett Rowland

Canada caved to President Donald Trump demands by pulling its digital services tax hours before it was to go into effect on Monday.

Trump said Friday that he was ending all trade talks with Canada over the digital services tax, which he called a direct attack on the U.S. and American tech firms. The DST required foreign and domestic businesses to pay taxes on some revenue earned from engaging with online users in Canada.

“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” the president said. “We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

By Sunday, Canada relented in an effort to resume trade talks with the U.S., it’s largest trading partner.

“To support those negotiations, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, announced today that Canada would rescind the Digital Services Tax (DST) in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States,” according to a statement from Canada’s Department of Finance.

Canada’s Department of Finance said that Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump agreed to resume negotiations, aiming to reach a deal by July 21.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Monday that the digital services tax would hurt the U.S.

“Thank you Canada for removing your Digital Services Tax which was intended to stifle American innovation and would have been a deal breaker for any trade deal with America,” he wrote on X.

Earlier this month, the two nations seemed close to striking a deal.

Trump said he and Carney had different concepts for trade between the two neighboring countries during a meeting at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, in the Canadian Rockies.

Asked what was holding up a trade deal between the two nations at that time, Trump said they had different concepts for what that would look like.

“It’s not so much holding up, I think we have different concepts, I have a tariff concept, Mark has a different concept, which is something that some people like, but we’re going to see if we can get to the bottom of it today.”

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump hit Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs for allowing fentanyl and migrants to cross their borders into the U.S. Trump later applied those 25% tariffs only to goods that fall outside the free-trade agreement between the three nations, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Trump put a 10% tariff on non-USMCA compliant potash and energy products. A 50% tariff on aluminum and steel imports from all countries into the U.S. has been in effect since June 4. Trump also put a 25% tariff on all cars and trucks not built in the U.S.

Economists, businesses and some publicly traded companies have warned that tariffs could raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.

Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families, and pay down the national debt.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods paid by the person or company that imports them. The importer can absorb the cost of the tariffs or try to pass the cost on to consumers through higher prices.

Trump’s tariffs give U.S.-produced goods a price advantage over imported goods, generating revenue for the federal government.