this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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[–] swordgeek@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

Step one: tax the rich.

Tax. The. Rich.

Tax them until we eliminate working poverty. Tax them until we can move away from destroying the environment. Tax them until we eliminate billionaires entirely.

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 73 points 3 days ago (12 children)

Instead of tax cuts to help the middle class, what they should really do is:

Reduce privatization.

So much of our country is owned privately for the sake of profit.

This is why everything is so expensive, it’s because we let rent seekers own our infrastructure.

I want my government to start making money without further relying on middle class income.

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 26 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yea but that's the Liberal party you're talking about. If you want that, you should vote NDP.

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[–] LostWon@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, private ownership concentration is a huge problem leading to monopolies, lack of innovation, and worsening treatment of both customers and employees in general. As I understand it, all funds have increasingly gone to parasitic shareholders more than ever since CEO pay has shifted more and more to pay in company stock.

I’d love more publicly-run utility and transportation networks as you said, but in other less critical areas we could probably benefit from a more competitive system of small-to-medium-sized cooperatives that could (ideally, in a perfect world) replace corporations entirely. I would love to see support for worker groups with solid business plans to receive government grants (or at least forgiving loans) to help them buy their private sector workplaces for conversion to a democratic business model where employee-owners don’t get treated like serfs and businesses have to win over customers to survive, rather than trapping them and getting complacent.

*edited to add that last bit in italics

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[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago

So what are they defining as "middle class" for this round? gotta love the journalism of CTV that seemed OK leaving this as "will lower tax for some Canadians"... some precise reporting there

[–] shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works 59 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Sweet now let's raise it on foreign billionaires who try to defraud our EV rebates

[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 22 points 2 days ago

Let's also do domestic billionaires (yea we have some).

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 days ago

I'm kind of hoping they will. The government does not have too much money right now. I see no reason not to add a few percent to the top or second-to-top tax bracket.

[–] toastmeister@lemmy.ca 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Why have an EV rebate at all. Im sure the poor are overjoyed to gift their landlord a rebate for their new EV sports car. Meanwhile we are the only country in the G7 without high speed rail, while many of our highways were built in the 1960s.

[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 hours ago

Tbf high speed rail is now in the works, although moving at a pretty glacial pace.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alto_(high-speed_rail)

[–] MapleEngineer@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

How about giving us income splitting so that I don't pay more in taxes than a two income family that makes more than I do?

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It is time for a radical change in how we progress as a society. Money sure ain't working. "Let's keep turning these money knobs and see what happens" should not be the ultimate answer for forward progress towards something resembling a utopia, which should be the goal. I have no answers but it seems that fiddling around with economy and hoping for the best is nothing more than just killing time.

[–] eurisko@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago

Absolutely. Money is a signifier that only has meaning when integrated in material exchanges. Radical, bold restructurations are needed in order to ameliorate our country's socioeconomic reality.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 36 points 3 days ago (29 children)

I'll repeat again, I don't need a fucking tax cut. I need the price of housing to start going down.

Increase taxes on property significantly, and use 100% of that money to give everyone a basic income.

This incentivizes both people and developers to be efficient with their housing choices. Using too much housing for the area you live in? You pay extra to help out everyone. Using the right amount? No harm to you. Using less than the average? Here's a payout, thank you.

Prices overall will drop, because it's no longer profitable to simply own a home due to the taxes, and especially not if there's no people in it because the taxes won't be offset by the basic income.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 19 points 3 days ago (2 children)

All they need to do is make it so you can only own one residence, if you own a second as income property it should be taxed to the point that you want to sell it.

I was in the rental stream before and at least 1 landlord was foreign owners from mainland China--the property had sat empty for six months before us because owner was rich and didn't care about the 2k month they were losing. Another was an unlocatable landlord, the strara paperwork showed China owner, but correspondence was coming from Korean contact info. It started to look more like shell company ownership. Also have two friends who's Vancouver places are Asian owned. Owners moved back to China and main house was vacant for 2+ years, just single basement tennant paying utilities to make place "occupied".

It would also be fun to have squatting laws like some other countries do. Vacant properties can be taken over (e.g. someone does a B&E then just starts living there) and if the "owner" doesn't notice soon enough they start losing their rights to the property. If you get mail at an address, if your stuff is there, if you are the one doing maintenance, all that counts in your favor as a resident. Even if your initial entry was aided by an angle grinder. In some cases actual ownership can end up transferred to the functional residence without any cost. The absentee owner loses their rights.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 days ago (10 children)

This is a red herring.

I ran the calculations a while back, that may free up 2-4% of all housing, that is not enough to fix the problem of expensive housing. That's only 1-2 years of new building stock.

It won't hurt to do it, but it's simply not the main reason real estate is expensive.

[–] vaccinationviablowdart@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

extremely curious what such a calculation entails?

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

I looked up the statscan data for home ownership and cross referenced it against other statscan data on rental buildings and locations of secondary homes(cottages and lake homes)

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[–] vaccinationviablowdart@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I have a much more clear cut policy:

  1. You can live in one home
  2. You can't own a home you don't live in

Occasionally someone has a big place and someone has a small place, but this would solve way more issues.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago (5 children)

It really wouldn't.

A) It prevents renting at all except for basement suites. So no more rental buildings, which make up the majority of rentals available. Renting is an important housing option, as not everyone wants to own, nor should they have to. Move to a city to go to university, and you have to buy a house just to live in for 2-4 years before you have to sell it to move elsewhere for a job? Have a job that requires you go somewhere else for a few months while you , too bad hotel for 6 months instead of being able to rent an apartment.

B) If you do the math and even take out dedicated rental buildings, there really aren't that many homes that are owned as a second place. It's about 15% of the total market, and a large chunk of that are cottages and lake houses away from the cities where people actually want to live.

The big place/small place issue is actually more of a problem than the the double ownership you're talking about. There are more total bedrooms in Canada than there are people, and once you account for couples usually sharing a bedroom, there's actually a ton of extra bedrooms across the country. The problem is that they're not distributed properly across the population, 4+ bedroom family homes that were bought to raise children are being kept for decades by empty-nest couples who don't want to downsize.

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[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 days ago

Yes but what about the profits of investors? Have you thought of them? You meany.

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[–] Candid_Andy@lemmy.ca 31 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I think that increasing the basic personal exemption would have helped a lot more lower income Canadians

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 21 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Yes, but functionally no one voted NDP this year, and that was their pitch, IIRC.

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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 days ago

Make it an official tax bracket too, instead just a refund everyone qualifies for. I don't know why TF it's set up that way.

[–] miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It may yet be part of things: a promised cut to middle class taxes should infer inclusion of the poorer.

[–] HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 days ago

One would hope so, but I won't hold my breath.

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[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Disappointing to see adoption of CPC/PP platform cluelessness policy priority. Canada needs to spend on industrial policy to fight US, and prepare for hardships. His first BS of offering US empire more weapons purchases for more force multiplier warmongering was embarassing enough. Head in the sand "negotiations" is not going to go well.

Priority needs to be to destroy US economy, to save Canada's. If plan is to do nothing, we can do without an auto industry too, but waiting until the crisis evolves is just negligent.

[–] toastmeister@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The Liberals don't care about debt, that is for some future party to worry about, during a debt crisis.

The NDP want a lot of social programs with high taxes, the Cons want low taxes and fewer programs, the Liberals offer a lot of social spending and low taxes by shamelessly abusing government debt.

The debt can be abused because its backed by our ability to liquidate our public pension to pay creditors, as outlined in the last budget Freeland released.

[–] cheeseburger@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is to placate people who think voting gives you instant gratification. This isn't for people who pay attention.

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