VANCOUVER – The Fraser Institute has released its annual ‘Tax Freedom Day’ report, an estimate of the tax burden of the average Canadian which this year adds up to a whopping five trillion dollars per taxpayer.

“In 2018, the average Canadian family earned an income of $88,865 and paid total taxes equaling $4,988,921,656,429.12, approximately 5600000000% of their income,” the study says. “Individuals in Canada are not only paying more taxes than individuals in any other country, they are each paying more taxes than the entire population of any other country.”

Despite some questioning the methodology of the study, which not only includes the taxes paid by individual Canadians but also those paid by corporations, adds in the GDP of Liechtenstein, Paraguay, and Madagascar, then multiplies that by 67 before dividing the result by the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin, most Canadian news services are satisfied enough with the conservative think-tank’s conclusion to report it as fact.

While the OECD report for the same year claims that taxes as a share of the economy are lower in Canada than the vast majority of developed countries and in fact dropping, according to the Fraser Institute, “just twenty Canadians pay as much in taxes as the yearly economic output of the entire human race.”

The study concludes that this tax burden is harming economic growth, stating that “Canadian families could, if they weren’t paying so much in taxes, afford to spend quadrillions more each year on housing, food, clothing, entertainment, and multiple private trips to the moon.”

The tax study comes on the heels of the Fraser Institute’s recent ‘Renewable Energy Is Bad And Stupid’ report, and will be followed by their highly anticipated annual healthcare analysis, ‘Waiting Any Length Of Time For Single Payer Healthcare Is Much Much Worse Than Dying.’