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Since being elected, the Trudeau government has repeated over and over again that it wants to help families “who are working hard to join the middle class.” Which raises an important question — has the government actually lived up to this rhetoric on personal income taxes, a key policy area where it has been particularly active?

Over the last two years, the Trudeau government has made a number of changes to federal personal income taxes, including changing tax rates and eliminating several tax credits. And what have been the overall effect of those tax changes? Higher income taxes for many families who can least afford to pay.

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Consider taxpaying families with children in the bottom 20 per cent of income earners (defined as a family income below $66,448).

These families benefited little from the Trudeau government’s signature tax policy that reduced the second lowest federal tax rate from 22 to 20.5 per cent. Why? Because this rate reduction only applies to individual incomes between $45,916 and $91,831, so few families in the bottom 20 per cent received a meaningful tax cut. In fact, in many cases, these families do not have members with income high enough to benefit from the tax rate cut at all.