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budget 2016
Spring has sprung, and while spring season is normally an occasion to celebrate, with days growing longer, weather getting warmer and real estate heading into busy season, everything feels a little different this year. Canada's real estate markets are dealing with myriad of issues.
Politics aside, the concept behind infrastructure spending in theory makes sense: with interest rates near all-time lows and little expectation of them going up in the short term, now is probably as a good a time as any to borrow money and put it to work.
And New Democrats charge the government's budget bill is omnibus legislation.
The finance minister was also asked how he sleeps at night.
Yes folks, we’ve become the Luke Skywalker of the world economy.
There's a disconnect between Canada's capacity to innovate and our capacity to commercialize those innovations -- or so the story goes. It's been repeated so often it's become a mantra in certain circlles. The solution is always the same: reject investments in purely academic research in favour of market-driven research. The thing is, that mantra is built on a myth.
Budget 2016 is a step in the right direction, and a welcome course correction from the repeated cuts of the past five years. But it's a very small step. Much more will be needed to match the ambitions of the new government to the needs of the planet and its people.
The first budget delivered by the Liberals signaled a return to 1970s Trudeaupian Liberalism, not just with its flagrant disregard for balanced budgets and ballooning debt, but also by disregarding a core accountability under our Constitution: Canada's military.
By making it easier to navigate the tax rules and meet their obligations, Canadians will spend less time and less of their money on preparing their taxes, leaving more in their pockets. For Canadian businesses, productivity could improve as they spend less time, effort and capital dealing with tax compliance and red tape.
The changes are designed to distribute benefits and programs more fairly based on income. Families and students are the main beneficiaries of the new budget, though many of the proposed changes will not take effect until next year's tax return.
