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Self-employed persons such as doctors have been mistreated too. Dividends out of their personal holding companies were taxed ten years ago at 30 per cent and this year leapt by 12.8 per cent from 40.13 per cent to 45.3 per cent tax rates.

This year’s gouging is not only destructive economics, but represents broken promises. People work decades to earn a pension, or to build up investments in holding companies to dividend out for themselves.

This is nation-busting stuff, the kind of disincentive that underlies Canada’s brain drain of doctors, nurses, tech workers, and entrepreneurs to the United States and elsewhere. Just watch the enormous economic damage done when Congress extends its permission for snowbirds by two months – to eight months a year – to stay in the U.S. without becoming taxable.

At the same time, the feds have done nothing to stop money laundering and anonymous companies that have propelled housing prices in Toronto and Vancouver beyond the reach of the middle class.

The snowbird phenomenon is about tax avoidance, and in large measure why Canadians own 500,000 residences in Florida alone and are the single biggest real estate investors in the U.S. This will increase.

With tax rates approaching Sweden’s level, Canada will end up with an economy and high tech sector just as booming as Sweden’s which, needless to say, not exactly booming.

The inability for Canada’s political class to abide by tax-and-spend ceilings, zero-based budgeting, or apply common sense fiscal discipline is hollowing out the country. Canada remains America’s “farm team” and as long as taxes outpace growth this will continue. Here are some facts: