Ideas from the CCPA’s Alternative Federal Budget
Budget 2023 can effectively address problems like inflation, insufficient healthcare, unaffordable housing, and the climate crisis with a series of reasonable—and easy-to-implement—fair tax measures, according to this year's Alternative Federal Budget (AFB), released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
Here’s how the Alternative Federal Budget says we can raise money for major problems and make our tax system fairer:
| Fair Tax Measure | Est. Revenue* |
|---|---|
| Impose an annual wealth tax of 1% on wealth over $10 million, 2% of wealth over $100 million, and 3% of wealth above $1 billion. | $26 billion |
| Implement a minimum tax of 25% on foreign profits of Canadian corporations. | $19.3 to $22.6 billion |
| Raise the corporate income tax rate from 15% to 20%. | $11 billion |
| Apply a windfall profits tax to extraordinary pandemic profits by huge corporations. | $11 billion |
| Tax the compensation and profits of the financial sector (a “financial activities tax”), as proposed by the IMF. | $10 billion |
| Tax income from capital gains at 75% instead of only at 50%. | $9.5 billion |
| Make corporations with annual income over $1 billion pay a minimum corporate income tax of at least 15%, and base that on the “book profits” they report to shareholders - not the other story they tell the CRA. | $4 billion |
| Apply the carbon tax to all emissions from large emitters (no exceptions). Also apply carbon tariffs to imports from countries that don’t price carbon emissions, while providing rebates to Canadian exports to those countries. | $3 billion |
| Limit the corporate dividend tax credit to ‘tax already paid’. (This credit gets claimed by shareholders for tax paid by the corporations they own.) | $1–$5 billion |
| Eliminate the corporate tax exemption for Real-Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). | $130 million |
| End Canada’s tax agreements with countries known to facilitate tax avoidance. | n/a |
| Significantly increase funding for the CRA to crack down on tax-dodging. | n/a |
| Stop letting corporations deduct executive salary amounts above $1 million from their taxable income. | n/a |
| Make huge transnational corporations publicly disclose how much they make and how much tax they pay in every country where they operate. | n/a |
| Implement a progressive wealth tax on houses worth more than $1 million. | n/a |
| Update Canada’s General Anti-Avoidance Rule so tax authorities and courts can crack down on avoidance schemes that contradict the spirit of our laws. | n/a |
| Close the other loopholes that allow the biggest corporations and richest people to avoid paying their taxes. | n/a |
| Switch to automatic tax filing, so everyone saves time and money, and people get their benefits. | n/a |
*Estimated annual revenue
Source: The Alternative Federal Budget 2023, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 22 September 2022, p.157-162.
