Taxes connect us to one another, to the common good, and to the future. This is a book about taxes: who pays what and who gets what. More than that, it’s about the role of government, about citizenship and our collective well-being, about the Canada we want. The contributors, leading Canadian practitioners and scholars, explore how taxes have become a political “no-go zone” and how changes in taxation are changing Canada. They challenge the view that any tax is a bad tax and provide broad directions for fairer and smarter approaches. This is a book that will be of interest to anyone concerned with public policy and public affairs, economics, and political science and to anyone interested in challenging the conventional wisdom that lower taxes and smaller government are the cures to what ails us.

Nothing can better protect hard-earned income and help to accumulate wealth than savvy tax strategies. In this comprehensive guide, Canada's foremost tax expert, Tim Cestnick, offers 101 tips for year-round tax planning that can save Canadians from all walks of life thousands of dollars on their tax bill. It shows readers how they can best build a successful game plan that will reduce their taxes and maximize after-tax investment returns. Cestnick's simple and proven advice makes 101 Tax Secrets for Canadians an essential tool for all Canadians seeking to accumulate wealth and protect their income.

This paper assesses the costs of internal trade barriers and proposes policies to improve internal trade. Estimates suggest that complete liberalization of internal trade in goods can increase GDP per capita by about 4 percent and reallocate employment towards provinces that experience large productivity gains from trade. The positive impact highlights the need for federal, provincial and territorial governments to work together to reduce internal trade barriers. There is significant scope to build on the new Canadian Free Trade Agreement to more explicitly identify key trade restrictions, resolve differences, and agree on cooperative solutions.

This volume provides a comprehensive review of the theoretical concepts and empirical models of entrepreneurship from a non-conventional perspective. It makes recent advances in the theory and application of the economics of entrepreneurship accessible to a wider audience, including policy makers. It emphasizes data requirements to advance the future research agenda and to allow for a better design and monitoring of entrepreneurial policy.

In 1957 after a century of scathing debates and threats of provincial separation Ottawa finally tackled the dangerous fiscal inequalities among its richer and poorer provinces. Equalization grants allowed the poorer provinces to provide relatively equal services for relatively equal levels of taxation. The Art of Sharing tells the dramatic history of Canada's efforts to save itself. The introduction of federal equalization grants was controversial and wealthier provinces such as Alberta – wanting to keep more of their taxpayers' money for their own governments – continue to attack them today. Mary Janigan argues that the elusive ideal of fiscal equity in spite of dissent from richer provinces has helped preserve Canada as a united nation. Janigan goes back to Confederation to trace the escalating tensions among the provinces across decades as voters demanded more services to survive in a changing world. She also uncovers the continuing contacts between Canada and Australia as both dominions struggled to placate disgruntled member states and provinces that blamed the very act of federation for their woes. By the mid-twentieth century trapped between the demands of social activists and Quebec's insistence on its right to run its own social programs Ottawa adopted non-conditional grants in compromise. The history of equalization in Canada has never been fully explored. Introducing the idealistic Canadians who fought for equity along with their radically different proposals to achieve it The Art of Sharing makes the case that a willingness to share financial resources is the real tie that has bound the federation together into the twenty-first century.

Formula apportionment as a way to attribute taxable profits of multinationals across jurisdictions is receiving increased attention. This paper reviews existing literature and discusses experiences in selective federal states to evaluate the economic properties of formula apportionment relative to the current international tax regime that is based on separate accounting. It highlights major advantages, such as the elimination of profit shifting within multinational groups; and it discusses new distortions and the impact on tax competition. The analysis exploits different datasets to assess the direct revenue implications for individual countries under alternative formulas. The distributional effects across countries are found to be large, reflecting major discrepancies between where profits are currently attributed and where factors of production are located or sales take place. The largest losses appear in investment hubs (i.e. countries with a disproportionate ratio of foreign direct investment to GDP), while several large advanced countries are likely to gain. Developing countries gain most likely if employment receives a large weight in the formula; they also tend to benefit, on average, from a formula based on sales by destination.

Canadians can never not argue about taxes. From the Chinese head tax to the Panama Papers, from the National Policy to the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, tax grievances always inspire private resentments and public debates. But if resentment and debate persist, the terms of the debate have continually altered and adapted to reflect changing social, economic, and political conditions in Canada and the wider world. The centenary of income tax is the occasion for Canadian scholars to wrestle with past and present debates about tax equity, efficiency, and justice. Who Pays for Canada? explores the different ways governments can and should tax their peoples and evaluates how well Canada has done so. It brings together a diverse group of perspectives from academia - law, economics, political science, history, geography, philosophy, and accountancy - and from the wider world of activists and public servants. It asks how Canada compares to other countries and how other countries - especially the United States - influence Canadian tax policies. It also surveys internal tax tensions and politics, through the lenses of region and jurisdiction, as well as race, class, and gender. Reasoning from tax perplexities and reforms in the past and the present, it argues that fair taxation requires an informed populace and a democratically inclined public will. Above all, this book serves as a reminder that it is not only what counts as fair that is important, but how fairness is evaluated. Revealing how closely tax policy is tied to mainstream politics, human rights, and morality, Who Pays for Canada? represents new perspectives on a matter of tremendous national urgency.