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The Fraser Institute’s Canadian Tax Simulator 2017 looked at Canadian households with income ranging from zero to $80,843, representing the bottom 40 per cent of households by income, and found they paid 4.6 per cent of all the personal tax paid. That seems like a low number, but it still isn’t zero.

How does 4.6 per cent become zero? It happens when the tax that is paid is then given back (and more) by the federal and provincial governments.

As it turns out, quite a few benefits are paid out to Canadians with household income in the lower 40 per cent — particularly those with children. The CRA even has a wonderful online calculator that will quantify just how large those benefits might be.

To better illustrate this zero-per-cent tax bill, I ran three different scenarios through the calculator. All three scenarios were made up of a family with two working parents and three children (aged one, four and six) living in Northern Ontario, paying $15,000 a year in rent.

In the first scenario, each parent made $22,650 for a household income of $45,300. Based on the Ernst & Young personal tax calculator, the household should pay a total of $4,564 in federal and provincial income tax.

This income level lines up at the 20th percentile mark outlined by the Fraser Institute — or exactly in the middle of the bottom 40 per cent in terms of household income.

But this household actually receives $14,758 from government. Although the Ernst & Young calculator suggests it should pay $4,564 in tax, and the Fraser Institute says it pays a small amount of taxes, it actually gets tax-free benefits of $19,321.96.