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Share the Wealth!
How we can tax Canada’s super-rich and create a better country for everyone
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, millions of Canadians suddenly found themselves out of work as businesses shuttered and the country went into lockdown. While many were struggling to make ends meet or were risking their lives performing essential work, Canada’s billionaires were making record profits.
A huge portion of the increase in Canada’s wealth in the past 20 years has gone to a small number of the very wealthy. The country’s one per cent have seen their share of Canada’s wealth grow almost six times since 1999 to $2,203,000,000,000 US. Meanwhile half of all Canadian families have little in the way of savings, struggle with low incomes, and experience declining public services.
In this book, Jonathan Gauvin and Angella MacEwen show how this growing gap was intentionally created by decisions made by Conservative and Liberal governments during the past 20 years. Now that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has underscored the deep inequality in Canadian society, Canadians are ready for measures that would share the wealth more fairly and give governments the money they need to improve public services and that create a fairer society.
This book identifies the tax measures that would use Canada’s wealth to pay for these measures. Jonathan Gauvin and Angella MacEwen show exactly how this can be done with a wealth tax, higher taxes on the highest incomes, higher taxes on large corporations, higher taxes on big profits coming from capital gains, shutting down tax loopholes and tax havens and taxing web giants. Targeting wealthy individuals and corporations with these measures will generate the funds needed for pharmacare, paid sick leave, long-term care and high-quality daycare. Sharing the wealth of the one per cent is more than enough to pay for the public services Canadians want.
Canada is a wealthy country. Jonathan Gauvin and Angella MacEwan show how we can share the wealth so everyone will be better off — even the richest.
Contributors
Jonathan Gauvin
JONATHAN GAUVIN has been the federal NDP's Director of Policy since December 2017 and contributed to the drafting of the NDP’s election platform in 2019. Prior to that, he was an issue coordinator in the NDP leader's office. He holds degrees from the University of Ottawa and l’Université Laval. He's a political buff who deeply wishes to build a better world for everyone, especially his two children. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec.
Angella MacEwen
ANGELLA MACEWEN is senior economist with the Canadian Union of Public Employees, a policy fellow with the Broadbent Institute and was an NDP candidate in the 2019 federal election. Angella writes a quarterly publication with CUPE, Economy at Work, which examines fiscal and social policy for workers. She holds a MA in Economics from Dalhousie University. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.