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The taxes are pretty straightforward, but the other “fiscal benefits” are a more complicated matter, because governments have a lot of programs that are targeted to benefit low-income Canadians, which means that benefits are reduced as an individual or family increases their income.

But because all these targeted benefits for poor Canadians bunch together, losing them can add hefty costs.

“In some cases, the lower-earning parent in a dual-earner family with three children might lose more than 70 cents of an extra dollar of earnings, and an unemployed parent more than 65 per cent of a prospective salary for taking on a job,” Laurin writes.

The specifics are fairly complicated, because the analysis is different in each province, and it also makes a difference how many children a family has, how much money each adult makes, and whether both of them are working.

But for the sake of simplicity, consider a hypothetical family of four in Alberta, where each parent makes $30,000. All together that family will pay $9,912 in federal and provincial taxes, but they’ll get $9,386 from the Canada Child Benefit, plus another $1,245 in provincial benefits.

Now, if one of the parents decides to take on a bit of overtime to earn an extra $500, they’ll be paying an extra $150 in taxes, plus losing $88 in benefits, for a total cost of $238, which means that the family is losing 48 per cent of the additional income.

The effect on low-income Canadians can be even more dramatic when one parent is working and one parent is staying home. If the mother of the family has a job that earns $48,000, and the father is staying home with the children, but he’s looking at taking a job that pays $20,000, on average the family will effectively be taxed at a rate of 52 per cent.