Sam Cooper- Fool Me Once: The Cost of Carney–Trudeau Tax Games
What about those Canadians who heeded the government’s signals? Consider the family that sold a cherished vacation property, or the entrepreneur who offloaded company shares pre-emptively to avoid a looming tax hike. Now, they find that the increase was never actually enforced. Incoming Liberal leader (and Prime Minister before the campaign writ was dropped) Mark Carney confirmed in early 2025 that the capital gains changes would not move forward at all.
Meanwhile, Ottawa has already happily counted the extra tax revenue generated from their asset sell-offs. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that these Canadians were sacrificial pawns in a larger power play.
This bait and switch should have been more than sufficient to convince voters that the Liberals are not to be trusted. But in the current mass formation, all that seems to have been forgotten. As Mencken once said, “Voters deserve to get what they want…good and hard”.
Sad. But all Kanadians care about is how much free stuff will they get.
Andrew Coyne says all youze knuckle draggers is stupid:
https://x.com/acoyne/status/1903494456491360586
Now, I was once skipper of a knuckle dragger, working the knuckle banks off Port Hawkesbury, but I ran a very smart vessel!
Or, don’t sell and hold on to those assets if one is still in a long term investment window. The plan would be to hold until a SANE regime was elected and dropped it again to 50% applicable.
Short term sellers would have been affected, obviously. And some people just have to sell for other reasons.
Yes, Liberals are pond scum and never to be trusted. The fact half this country doesn’t care is scary, but then, this is the same team that wanted to lock us down, put us in camps, not allow us to the grocery store, etc. Eff Every Last One of Them!
Couldn’t agree more, but want to add more fuel to the dumpster fire that is the Liberal/NDP coalition. What gets little attention is that the increase in capital gains tax was presented as a done deal we were given the deadline date. Anyone facing a sizeable gain would’ve been advised to crystallize the gain and declare it. No tax advisor would have recommended anything else.
The resulting tax consequence was huge. In any other context this manipulation would have initiated massive retaliatory legal action. Was it intentional?
Probably.
Is there recourse?
Only at the polling booth.
The exodus is only going to pick up steam now.
I’m more inclined to think it’s not part of some power play and we’re just run by incompetent idiots. A power play would lead one to believe there was planning and foresight, and these people are just too stupid for that.
This is more my reading of it. They didn’t expect the -massive- blowback they got when it was announced. Lost their nerve and backed off.
At the core of it, I expect that some day we will find that foreigners with the ear of Cabinet wanted Canadians dumping hard assets at bargain basement prices, so they could be snapped up. That’s what all this looks like when viewed from afar. “We’re going to tax the ever-loving S- out of you rich old Boomers, so you better dump it now if you want to stay in the -nice- nursing home later in your retirement.”
Shock and surprise, investment money has all left Canada for the USA. Who could have seen that coming?
Its always about fire sale asset buys. “Crisis capitalism”
If one were cynical, one might think that one of the beneficiaries of the selloff was Brookfield, because they could snap up stocks for cheaper than normal.
You might get even more cynical, when you figure out that one of the beneficiaries of the cancellation, was also Brookfield, since many of their products are set up as Trusts.
How cynical are you that Carney wasn’t advising Trudeau on this?