From the Fraser Institute

By Milagros Palacios, Jake Fuss and Nathaniel Li

This Sunday, June 8, Canadians will celebrate Tax Freedom Day, the day in the year when they start working for themselves and not government, finds a new study published by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

“If Canadians paid all their taxes up front, they would work the first 158 days of this year before bringing any money home for themselves and their families,” said Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute.

Tax Freedom Day measures the total annual tax burden imposed on Canadian families by federal, provincial, and municipal governments.

In 2025, the average Canadian family (with two or more people) will pay $68,266 in total taxes. That’s 43.1 per cent of its annual income ($158,533) going to income taxes, payrolltaxes (including the Canada Pension Plan), health taxes, sales taxes (like the GST), property taxes, fuel taxes, “sin” taxes and more.

Represented as days on the calendar, the total tax burden comprises more than five months of income—from January 1 to June 7. On June 8th—Tax Freedom Day—Canadians finally start working for themselves, and not government.

But Canadians should also be worried about the nearly $90 billion in deficits the federal and provincial governments are forecasting this year, because they will have substantial tax implications in future years.

To better illustrate this point, the study also calculates a Balanced Budget Tax Freedom Day—the day of the year when the average Canadian finally would finally start working for themselves if governments paid for all of this year’s spending with taxes collected this year.

In 2025, the Balanced Budget Tax Freedom Day won’t arrive until June 21. “Tax Freedom Day helps put the total tax burden in perspective, and helps Canadians understand just how much of their money they pay in taxes every year,” Fuss said. “Canadians need to decide for themselves whether they are getting their money’s worth when it comes to how governments are spending their tax dollars.”

Tax Freedom Day for each province varies according to the extent of the provincially and  locally levied tax burden.

2025 Provincial Tax Freedom Days

Manitoba                                    May 17
Saskatchewan                            May 31
British Columbia                       May 31
Alberta                                         May 31
Prince Edward Island               June 2
New Brunswick                          June 4
Ontario                                        June 7
Nova Scotia                                June 10
Newfoundland & Labrador     June 19
Quebec                                        June 21

CANADA                                    June 8

Canadians Celebrate Tax Freedom Day on June 8, 2025

• In 2025, the average Canadian family will earn $158,533 in income and pay an estimated $68,266 in total taxes (43.1%).
• If the average Canadian family had to pay its taxes up front, it would have worked until June 7 to pay the total tax bill imposed on it by all three levels of government (federal, provincial, and local).
• This means that Tax Freedom Day, the day in the year when the average Canadian family has earned enough money to pay the taxes imposed on it, falls on June 8.
• Tax Freedom Day in 2025 comes one day earlier than in 2024, when it fell on June 9. This change is due to the expectation that the total tax revenues forecasted by Canadian governments will increase slower than the incomes of Canadians.
• Tax Freedom Day for each province varies according to the extent of the provincially levied tax burden. The earliest provincial Tax Freedom Day falls on May 17 in Manitoba, while the latest falls on June 21 in Quebec.
• Canadians are right to be thinking about the tax implications of the $89.4 billion in projected federal and provincial government deficits in 2025. For this reason, we calculated a Balanced Budget Tax Freedom Day, the day on which average Canadians would start working for themselves if governments were obliged to cover current expenditures with current taxation. In 2025, the Balanced Budget Tax Freedom Day arrives on June 21.

  

  Milagros Palacios

  Director, Addington Centre for Measurement, Fraser Institute

  

  Jake Fuss

  Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute

  

  Nathaniel Li

  Senior Economist, Fraser Institute

 By Gwyn Morgan

Gwyn Morgan argues that Mark Carney, despite his polished image and rhetorical shift on energy, remains ideologically aligned with the Trudeau-era net-zero agenda that stifled Canada’s energy sector and economic growth. Morgan contends that without removing emissions caps and embracing real infrastructure investment, Canada’s recovery will remain a mirage — not a reality.

Pete Townshend’s famous lyrics, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss,” aptly describe Canada’s new prime minister. Touted as a fresh start after the Justin Trudeau years, Mark Carney has promised to turn Canada into a “clean and conventional energy superpower.” But despite the lovey-dovey atmosphere at Carney’s recent meeting with Canada’s premiers, Canadians should not be fooled. His sudden apparent openness to new energy pipelines masks a deeper continuity, in my opinion: Carney remains just as ideologically committed to net-zero emissions.

Carney’s carefully choreographed scrapping of the consumer carbon tax before April’s election helped reduce gasoline prices and burnished his centrist image. In fact, he simply moved Canada’s carbon taxes “upstream”, onto manufacturers and producers, where they can’t be seen by voters. Those taxes will, of course, be largely passed back onto consumers in the form of higher prices for virtually everything. Many consumers will blame “greedy” businesses rather than the real villain, even as more and more Canadian companies and projects are rendered uncompetitive, leading to further reductions in capital investment, closing of beleaguered factories and facilities, and lost jobs.

This sleight-of-hand is hardly surprising. Carney spent years abroad in a career combining finance and eco-zealotry, co-founding the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and serving as the UN’s Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. Both roles centred on pressuring institutions to stop investing in carbon-intensive industries – foremost among them oil and natural gas. Now, he speaks vaguely of boosting energy production while pledging to maintain Trudeau’s oil and natural gas emissions cap – a contradiction that renders new pipeline capacity moot.

Canada doesn’t need a rhetorical energy superpower. It needs real growth. Our economy has just endured a lost decade of sluggish overall growth sustained mainly by a surging population, declining per-capita GDP and a doubling of the national debt. A genuine recovery requires the kind of private-sector capital investment and energy infrastructure that Trudeau suppressed. That means lifting the emissions cap, clearing regulatory bottlenecks and building pipelines that connect our resources to global markets.

We can’t afford not to do this. The oil and natural gas industry’s “extraction” activities contribute $70 billion annually to Canada’s GDP; surrounding value-added activities add tens of billions more. The industry generates $35 billion in annual royalties and supports 900,000 direct and indirect jobs. Oil and natural gas also form the backbone of Canada’s export economy, representing nearly $140 billion per year, or about 20 percent of our balance of trade.

Yet Quebec still imports oil from Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria because Ottawa won’t push for a pipeline connecting western Canada’s producing fields to Quebec and the Maritimes. Reviving the cancelled Energy East pipeline would overcome this absurdity and give Canadian crude access to European consuming markets.

Carney has hinted at supporting such a project but refuses to address the elephant in the room: without scrapping the emissions cap, there won’t be enough production growth to justify new infrastructure. So pipeline CEOs shouldn’t start ordering steel pipe or lining up construction crews just yet.

I continue to believe that Carney remains beholden to the same global green orthodoxy that inspired Trudeau’s decade of economic sabotage. While the United States shifts course on climate policy, pulling out of the Paris Accord, abandoning EV mandates and even investigating GFANZ itself, Canada is led by a man at the centre of those systems. Carney’s internationalist career and personal life – complete with multiple citizenships and a spouse known for environmental activism – underscore how far removed he is from ordinary Canadians.

Carney’s version of “clean energy” also reveals his bias. Despite the fact that 82 percent of Canada’s electricity already comes from non-greenhouse-gas-emitting sources like hydro and nuclear, Carney seems fixated on wind and solar-generated power. These options are less reliable and more expensive – though more ideologically fashionable. To climate zealots, not all zero-emission energy is created equal.

Even now, after all the damage that’s been done, Canada has the potential to resume a path to prosperity. We are blessed with vast natural resources and skilled workers. But no economy can thrive under perpetual policy uncertainty, regulatory obstruction and ideological hostility to its core industries. Energy projects worth an estimated $500 billion were blocked during the Trudeau years. That capital won’t return unless there is clarity and confidence in the government’s direction.

Some optimists argue that Carney is ultimately a political opportunist who may shift pragmatically to boost the economy. But those of us who have seen this movie before are sceptical. During my time as a CEO in the oil and natural gas sector, I witnessed Justin’s father Pierre Trudeau try to dismantle our industry under the guise of progress. Carney, despite or perhaps because of his polish, may be the most dangerous of the three.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.