Mock Turtle

Economic and Fiscal Update November, 2005:

- Decrease lowest tax rate from 16% to 15%, retroactive to January 1, 2005

- Increase basic personal amount over 3 years to reach $10,000 in 2009

Economic and Fiscal Update October, 2007:

- Decrease lowest tax rate to 15% from 15.5%, retroactive to January 1, 2007

- Increase basic personal amount over three years (retroactive to January 1, 2007) to $10,100 in 2009

What happened in between?

Well, in Budget 2006, aka Canada’s New Government’s first budget, the lowest personal tax rate was increased:

The lowest personal income tax rate will be reduced to 15 per cent from 16 per cent effective January 1, 2005. The rate will be 15.5 per cent effective July 1, 2006. Accordingly, the full-year rate for 2005 will be 15 per cent, for 2006, 15.25 per cent and, for the 2007 and subsequent taxation years, 15.5 per cent.

and the basic personal amount was lowered:

The basic personal amount—the amount that an individual can earn without paying federal personal income tax—will be increased by $500 to $8,648 for the 2005 taxation year. For the first half of 2006 it will then be increased by indexation plus a further $200, for a total of $9,039. The basic personal amount will be reduced by $400 to $8,639 on July 1, 2006 at the same time as the GST rate is reduced.

Cynical Leadership. An eerily identical Canada.

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RBC Royal Bank is feeling so confident about the Canadian economy that it thought it would hold a press conference to share its sunny outlook yesterday. According to Jim Westlake:

“If the U.S. economy settles down and they get the types of growth that are forecasted right now, and you don’t see any more secondary effect, we think it’s not going to have any huge consequences” [here.]

A triple conditional. How reassuring.

RBC’s not tightening its lending:

Mr. Westlake suggested RBC is not making any significant changes to its conditions for handing out loans to consumers and businesses.

OK, maybe they are tightening. But just a little. Barely counts!

And the mighty Royal is sailing majestically through the choppy seas of the credit crunch:

The margins that banks earn on products based on the prime interest rate are being squeezed somewhat, Mr. Westlake said, noting “it’s still a good market.”

OK, maybe not.

Canadian banks are paying higher interest on the money they borrow to lend out, but not yet passing on the increase to consumers — a nice situation for us, but not one that can last indefinitely. Squeezed margins lead, eventually, to lower bank profits — and with bank stocks held by every widow, orphan, and pension plan, that’s something that touches everyone somewhere along the line.

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From my spam mail (where else?):

Academic Qualifications available from prestigious NON-ACCREDITED universities.

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Pretty cool, even if they are controlling it a bit:

Parks Canada caches are located in publicly accessible areas and are accessible from trails and/or roads. Instead of containing trade items, caches contain messages that reveal interesting often unknown aspects of the area where they are located. Parks Canada aims to encourage geocachers to share their enthusiasm for a particular park, site or marine conservation area by recounting a tale, a personal experience, knowledge or an anecdote for other participants to find.

(Également disponible en français, naturellement.)

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- Am I the only person who is baffled by the parity protests? What is it that makes Joe 2-4 think that Canadian prices should be identical to those in another country, with a different size, different transportation costs, and different labour laws? And why is Flaherty grandstanding on this issue, pressuring retailers, who have little pricing power, to lower prices, again, for no apparent reason? Could it be he’d like to keep the angry white male distracted until the anniversary date of the random, harmful, badly-thought-out income trust decision passes next Wednesday? As Jim Stanford points out in the morning’s Globe,

[Flaherty's] exhortations have nothing to do with effecting change, and everything to do with making sure his government doesn’t suffer any of the public anger resulting from these and other economic outrages.

Strong Leadership at work.

- And the award for weakest argument against Toronto’s Land Transfer Tax goes to… Ward 10 councillor Mike Feldman, who argued that the up-to-2% tax could kill the housing market:

“There is a bubble,” Mr. Feldman said. “And that bubble is very fragile. … It could be burst by a transfer tax.”

There’s a bubble? Here’s someone who’s not reading from the Toronto Real Estate Board’s songsheet. I’ve blown bubbles before; they all burst eventually. In the case of an asset bubble that leads to an ephemeral sense of wealth, the sooner the better. Is there really a bubble? The average resale house price increased 9% between September and October. You decide.

- The more shrill and hyperbolic the anti-Dion rhetoric becomes, the more convinced I am that Backback Boy will surprise us all in the end. Think of the pundits as contrarian indicators. I’ve certainly been wrong before, but so have they.

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As Toronto has grown, the share of Toronto-born-and-bred residents of the city is ever smaller. As part of that diminishing minority, I’ve noticed that many people who move to the city later in life are blissfully ignorant of the significance of being from one part of the city or another. Overall, this is a good thing, although it does mean that the history (not to mention geography) of neighbourhoods is extremely flexible, with many neighbourhoods seeming to lack anyone with more than 5 years’ of institutional memory (”Yes, the Annex used to have a large number of Hungarian businesses”/”Actually, the streets of Riverdale have not always been lined with Maclaren strollers and large dogs”).

Whether non-native Torontonians notice or not, however, in many aspects of Toronto life, the same power group still presides. They own all the cottages within a reasonable driving distance of the city, they hire each other’s children in the financial industry, their children go to private schools, Lawrence Park, or Humberside, and, as John Barber points out in a brilliant column in Saturday’s Globe (Globe Insider sub. required), they really, really, don’t like new taxes:

You can hear the tom-toms from the sidewalks next to Sporting Life. The ancestral heart of the powerful tribe of white folk, North Toronto, seethes with resentment at the latest perceived attack on the white clan’s diminishing authority.

Barber points out that the land transfer tax is actually potentially most beneficial to higher-valuation householders, who currently bear a large share of the city’s property tax burden. But all the explanations have fallen on deaf ears:

For it is written in the sacred beige runes of North Toronto that taxes are taboo, and believers refuse furiously to permit rational analysis of this fundamental belief.

(Ever come across anyone like this? Thought so.)

Misguided faith, as is often the case, comes with a potentially catastrophic price:

The old alliance that once empowered North Toronto blonds at City Hall is broken. the white folk are outsiders, prisoners of identity, blind even to their own economic self-interest — seemingly incapable of assimilation into the mainstream.

But, though its empire may be shrinking, the blond brigade is not yet down for the count. Salvation may be on the horizon, according to John Lorinc’s profile in the same section, in the form of Ward 16 councillor Karen Stintz, who “could make a plausible run for Mr. Miller’s job in 2010.”

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Prime Minister Moves to Grant Honourary Canadian Citizenship to Leader of Democracy Movement in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi

Interesting move. I approve (since I’m sure Stephen Harper’s decision-making hinges on my approval…).

Note the language, too: in news articles and press releases including this one, I’ve noticed an almost total switch from “Myanmar (also known as Burma)” to plain-jane “Burma” over the past six months or so. Nobody seems to care about humoring the generals anymore.

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It’s amazing what Strong Leadership can do. For example, it can apparently extend the number of days in a year in a previously unheard-of fashion:

“During the last session our crime bills were held up by Opposition-controlled House committees or the Liberal majority in the Senate for a total of 976 days,” Prime Minister Harper said.

When was the march to victory election again? Oh, that’s right. Last year. How many days have passed since January 23, 2006? About 633 by my calendar. 2006 did seem a little endless, in retrospect.

Up next: hard to say. Will it be turning water into wine, or renaming the days of the week after Laureen and the kids? Stay tuned.

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Still not sure what the Harperites are calling themselves since they decided that, with a fresh session of parliament, it was time to drop the “new”. Given this photo, though, I’m confident my own personal name for them is correct. Here they all are, having a good laugh at Stephane Dion, his slightly less tortured English, and the Liberal amendment to the Throne Speech.

Do Canadians like smug leaders?

I don’t think so.

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Headline in my RSS this morning:

Canada’s New Government Increases it’s Commitment to Enhancing Girl’s Education in Afghanistan

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