70% of Canadians say crushing taxes destroying standard of living: Poll
· Toronto Sun
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OTTAWA — We’re tapped out.
That’s the message Canadians have for Ottawa in a new Ipsos poll conducted for the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), which shows 70% of Canadians believe high tax burdens are having a negative impact on their cost of living.
The results, released July 16, suggest a growing disconnect between government spending policy and the priorities of taxpayers. According to MEI’s vice-president of communications Renaud Brossard, Canadians are feeling the stress that high taxes are putting on their lives.
“What they’re seeing is that a lot of what Ottawa is doing doesn’t necessarily seem to be alleviating that,” he said.
Canadians want Carney to scuttle ‘sovereign wealth fund’
Much of the concern surrounds Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to establish a so-called “sovereign wealth fund,” Brossard said — a scheme the PM announced in April but isn’t gaining very much traction among Canadians.
“Let’s not forget that this sovereign wealth fund proposal from Ottawa is not a sovereign wealth fund like that of Norway, it’s not built from budget surpluses, and isn’t aimed at generating the highest returns — it’s aimed at subsidizing a bunch of different projects in Canada,” he said.
“It’s not so much like a sovereign wealth fund as it is an industrial policy fund in which people can take ownership.”
Entitled the “Canada Strong Fund,” the proposed fund will launch with an initial $25-billion endowment, managed by an arms-length Crown corporation.
Exact details on the plan and the agency tasked with running it have yet to be released.
Within Canada, Alberta has successfully operated its own $30-billion sovereign wealth fund for over half a century.
Founded by former premier Peter Lougheed, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund banks profits from the province’s oil and gas resources.
In the MEI poll, 58% said they oppose Canada borrowing $25 billion to finance the fund’s creation.
“The 58% that oppose the borrowing for this new infrastructure bank is quite telling, but more than that, I think the fact that there’s only 20% of Canadians that think it’s a good idea should signal this government that that it should abandon such a plan,” Brossard said.
“It’s clearly very unpopular.”
Subsidies also contentious
Sixty-three per cent of those polled say they pay too much income tax, while 66% say government-funded subsidies are not worth the cost.
In a separate MEI study released last week , Ontario now far outpaces Quebec in corporate welfare, with Ontario’s spending on subsidies increasing by 209% over the past decade.
“Canadians are feeling they’re not getting their money’s worth on this,” Brossard said, pointing to costly blunders like Quebec’s failed billion-dollar Northvolt battery plant, and the Ontario government’s failed plan to fund EV battery plant projects in the province’s southwest.
“They’ve seen a lot of very expensive, very high-profile failures, and they say that these policies are very expensive and yielding very low results.”