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A week after last year’s budget, Mr. Morneau announced a review of the “tax expenditures in the code … (to make) sure they are all consistent with our approach to tax fairness.”

This year’s budget may contain the further elimination of a variety of tax credits that are costly, narrowly-targeted, and don’t have a meaningful impact on the taxpayers for whom they were designed.

Employee stock options

The 2015 Liberal election platform contained a proposal to limit the benefits of the 50 per cent employee stock option deduction by placing a cap of $100,000 on annual eligible stock option gains. This idea was abandoned by Mr. Morneau after intense lobbying by start-ups in the high-tech and resource industries, worried that such a measure would hamper their ability to attract talent as these companies rely heavily on non-cash, stock option compensation to pay their workers.

Capital gains inclusion rates

As I’ve stated in an earlier column, the government has never publicly campaigned on nor stated that it was studying an increase to the capital gains inclusion rate, currently set at 50 per cent. Yet an increase in the rate, to 66 2/3 per cent, which we had in 1988 or to 75 per cent, which lasted for a decade from 1990 to 2000, is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Private health & dental plans

On a positive note, it appears that your employer-provided group health and dental plans will remain tax-free. While previous reports suggested that the government may start taxing Canadians who receive these benefits through work as a taxable employment benefit, on Wednesday during question period, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he won’t be following through on this rumoured change. “We are committed to protecting the middle class from increased taxes and that is why we will not be raising (those) taxes,” he said.