If you think tax rates are too high, now is your chance to share your views with the government as it prepares its 2025 fall federal budget. This week, Minister of Finance and National Revenue, François-Philippe Champagne, launched the government’s annual pre-budget consultations, giving Canadians until Aug. 28 to share their thoughts on a variety of key issues directly with the government online, via email or through written submissions.
In a media release, the government noted that part of the consultations will focus on bringing down costs for Canadians, building on its recent “middle-class tax cut,” which saw the lowest federal tax bracket drop to 14.5 per cent (from 15 per cent) as of July 1, with a further cut to 14 per cent scheduled for Jan. 1, 2026.
While Canadians of all income levels will benefit from the rate cut to the lowest bracket, such a cut further magnifies the extreme progressivity inherent in our tax rate structure. Let’s take a closer look at tax progressivity and what steps the government might consider to reduce the impact of such progressivity on certain taxpayers.
As a refresher, we have five federal tax brackets in 2025: zero to $57,375 of income (14.5 per cent); above $57,375 to $114,750 (20.5 per cent); above $114,750 to $177,882 (26 per cent); above $177,882 to $253,414 (29 per cent), with anything above that taxed at 33 per cent. Each province and territory also has its own set of provincial tax brackets and rates.
For example, an Ontario taxpayer currently pays a zero rate of tax on any income up to the basic exemption of $16,129. For income above that, the combined federal and Ontario marginal rate rises through over a dozen successive income brackets (including two levels of Ontario provincial surtax) until it reaches a top marginal rate of 53.53 per cent with income over $253,414. If we go back 15 years, Ontario’s top marginal tax rate was a mere 46.41 per cent, meaning both the degree of progressivity as well as the top marginal rates have since increased sharply. And, this is not just an Ontario problem, as eight out of 10 provinces now have top marginal tax rates over 50 per cent.
The other problem with our top rate is that it kicks in way too soon at $253,414. Contrast that with the top federal rate in the United States of 37 per cent, which was just made permanent (rather than reverting back to the 39.6 per cent rate for 2026) by the recent passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), and only starts to apply with income over US$626,350 — equivalent to about $860,000 in Canadian dollars.
While there are many arguments for progressivity in the tax system, such as the more you make, the greater your ability to pay, having a tax rate so high can be a disincentive to earn more money since in most of Canada, you can’t even keep half of it for yourself. And, while there’s a common misperception in Canada that top income earners do not pay their share of taxes, a new report out this week by the Fraser Institute entitled Measuring progressivity in Canada’s tax system, 2025, finds that high-income families already pay a disproportionately large share of all Canadian taxes, with the top 20 per cent of income earning families paying nearly two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of the country’s personal income taxes.
While it seems unlikely our current government will proactively lower the top bracket any time soon, perhaps the government could instead focus on a couple of targeted measures in the area of tax policy that would help reduce the sting of this sharp progressivity. A recent article by Geoffrey Turner, a law professor and tax lawyer with Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP in Toronto, entitled Mitigating the inequities of high progressivity: Income averaging and spousal unit taxation, puts forth those two ideas for consideration.
Turner maintains that tax reform should focus on alleviating the unfairly high tax burdens that our current progressive rate structure imposes on two specific categories of taxpayers: individuals whose income is irregular over time and families in which spouses or partners earn dissimilar incomes and therefore fall into different tax brackets.
Of course, these ideas are not new as they were originally contained in the 1966 Carter Royal Commission Report on Taxation which recognized these inequities and proposed solutions, which were never permanently adopted. But, given the progressivity inherent in today’s rates, Turner argues that the time has come to introduce these measures into our tax system.
Let’s start with income averaging. Under our personal income tax system we measure income annually and report it based on the calendar year. As a result of this “convenient but arbitrary time frame,” taxable income is measured discretely each year, without reference to taxable income in prior or subsequent years. This means taxpayers with “lumpy” income, who experience high income in one year but low income the following year, end up paying unfair amounts of tax in those high-income years relative to their actual ability, over time, to pay. The Carter commission recommended addressing this problem by allowing income averaging, which we did have in some form or other in Canada until 1988.
The other recommendation proposed by Turner was to change the taxing unit from the individual to the couple. The Carter commission concluded that a better measure of ability to pay is the consolidated income of families because they constitute the basic economic grouping in Canadian society. Although the family unit was never adopted as part of the 1972 tax reform, family income is used today to income-test various social programs and credits, including the Canada child benefit, the Canada workers benefit, and the GST/HST credit.
But notwithstanding this, the individual, rather than the family, remains the basic taxing unit in Canada, despite the fact that family income may better gauge one’s ability to pay.
Our current system is particularly unfair for families in which one spouse earns most of the income, as that family’s tax burden is significantly higher under our progressive rate structure than if that income were evenly divided between each individual in a couple. Rather than force couples to be taxed together, however, Turner is in favour of allowing couples to elect to be taxed as a spousal unit. This would be similar to the elective “married filing jointly” option available to couples in the U.S.
As an added bonus, it would also “help simplify the complex income-splitting rules, which might be rendered redundant by such a measure,” writes Turner.