One Comment About Taxation – Canadians Need to Treat Their Tax Affairs and Financial Literacy Better

 

Guy Lafleur, who passed in 2022, was my childhood hero. Watching the Flower fly down the wing for the Montreal Canadiens – that mane of blond hair, the goals that made you leap off the couch – was as close to magic as a kid in Alberta could get. Rest easy, Number 10. He was also a chain-smoker who liked his Molson and was famously indifferent to summer training. His coach, Scotty Bowman, said he smoked between periods. None of it seemed to matter.

 

You could not get away with that today. Connor McDavid does not show up to training camp to “get into shape”. He shows up to demonstrate he is in shape. Camp is a checkpoint, not a starting line. The veteran who treats September the way Lafleur treated September gets cut or gets exposed by a youngster who spent his summer with a skating coach. The game changed.

 

Most Canadians, when it comes to their tax affairs and financial literacy, did not get the memo.

 

Personal tax season just ended, and for the first time in four years it ended without much drama. No Underused Housing Tax mess, bare trust debacle or capital gains inclusion rate reversal mid-season. Canada Revenue Agency call wait times were merely terrible instead of historically awful. Practitioners did not need group therapy. By recent standards, this was a quiet April.

 

Quiet should not be confused with healthy. The last three tax seasons were chaos because of politically driven tax policy. The structural problems beneath it are too few qualified practitioners chasing an impossibly complex Income Tax Act. In addition, anyone can hang a shingle and call themselves an “accountant” in Canada which leaves the public confused as to who is genuinely qualified to help them. The UK, Ireland, and Australia all have a chartered tax adviser designation. Canada does not, despite numerous efforts over the decades that went nowhere. The supply side is not getting fixed quickly.

 

Combine that with a public that does not meaningfully engage in its tax affairs until late April, and we are exactly where we were a year ago – even without the political chaos. We just got a year off from political stupidity. That is not progress.

 

But the demand side is what Canadians can do something about today.

 

Most Canadians treat April 30 the way old-time hockey players treated training camp. They show up out of shape, dump an actual or virtual shoebox of receipts on an accountant’s desk, and hope for the best. Their measure of success is the refund cheque. If a number comes back, the year was a win. If they owe, it was a loss.

 

Frankly, that is terrible financial planning and literacy. A refund means you gave the government an interest-free loan for up to sixteen months. It is not a gift. It is your money, returned late. The size of your refund tells you nothing about whether you optimized your tax position – only how badly your withholdings or installments were calibrated.

 

What does year-round tax thinking actually look like?

 

For the salaried employee, it is more straightforward than most realize. It means contributing to your RRSP and TFSA on a deliberate schedule rather than in a February panic. It means understanding which workplace benefits are taxable. It means keeping receipts for medical expenses, charitable donations, and employment expenses as the year unfolds, not reconstructing them in April from credit-card statements. It means asking, before accepting a raise that pushes you into a new bracket, whether a pension contribution or spousal RRSP makes sense. None of this requires expertise. It requires attention.

 

For the business owner, the stakes are higher and so is the work. It means deciding in June whether to lease or buy that new piece of equipment, because the answer affects your tax bill. It means asking your advisors, before you sign the paperwork, how to hold your operating company shares (personally or through other options) because the wrong choice can cost you the lifetime capital gains exemption when you sell. It means understanding that paying your teenager a dividend without thinking about Tax on Split Income rules will likely have her taxed at the highest marginal rate. It means knowing what the tax issues are on your death, so your estate is not left in a mess to your heirs.

 

The principle is the same in both cases: tax is a year-round discipline, not an April emergency. Find a practitioner who treats it the same way. Good advice is a great investment.

 

Tax has a greater material impact on your net worth and retirement than anything else you’ll encounter. Yet most do not understand how their own paycheque is calculated, nor whether new policies are sound or simply marketed well. That ignorance has a personal financial cost but also a political one.

 

A financially illiterate electorate makes emotional, propaganda-driven decisions at the ballot box. It rewards governments that hand out narrow, temporary baubles – a GST holiday here, a one-time cheque there – and punishes those who attempt anything structural. It cannot tell the difference between a tax cut and a gimmick, between fiscal discipline and a coupon book. Canada will not get real and much needed tax reform until enough Canadians are financially literate enough to demand it. We get the government our financial literacy deserves.

 

The Flower could play the way he played because of the era he played. The game changed. The Income Tax Act has changed too – and not in a good way.  It is much more complex than eras past.

 

Your tax season started January 1, 2026. It didn’t end on April 30, 2026. May 1, 2026 forward may be the off-season, but the off-season is when the real work happens. Although The Flower played in an era where he could get away with his cigarettes and his Molson, you can’t.

 

Get at it – you’ve got some serious tax and financial literacy training to do.

 

One Comment About Leadership – Are You Trustworthy?

 

Good leaders understand that momentum and trust are fragile.

 

Teams can work through difficult markets, bad news and even failure, but they struggle when leadership lacks transparency, authenticity and consistency.

 

In my experience, people will follow leaders through almost any challenge if they genuinely trust that the person standing in front of them is honest, clear and real.

 

Leaders, are you trustworthy? If not, it’s time to work on your transparency, authenticity and consistency.

 

One Comment About Economics / Politics  – The Mirage of “Second-Fastest Growing G7 Economy”

 

There is an old magician’s trick: draw the audience’s attention to the flourish in one hand while the other hand does the real work. The Carney government has been performing a version of this with Canada’s economy. The headline – Canada is the second-fastest growing G7 economy in 2026 – is technically defensible and politically useful. What it conceals is the more important story.

 

GDP measures the total size of the economy. Instead, it should be divided by population to get something closer to how Canadians actually live. On that measure, the picture is not second-fastest anything. Canada’s real GDP per capita fell from 83% of the American level in 2014 to roughly 71% in 2024. In 2024, Canada fell below the OECD average in per-capita GDP for the first time in recorded history. The OECD’s long-range projection is more uncomfortable still: Canada is forecast to rank dead last among advanced economies in per-capita growth through 2030 — and again dead last through 2060. A country can grow its headline GDP simply by growing its population, and Canada has been doing exactly that. Adding people to the denominator does not make Canadians richer.

 

The underlying culprit is investment – or more precisely, the sustained collapse of it. Since 2015, Canadian business investment per worker has fallen so far that Canadian workers receive roughly 55 cents of new capital investment for every dollar their American counterparts receive. Capital per worker is what gives people better tools, better technology, and ultimately better wages. Without it, productivity stagnates. Jack Mintz, whose diagnosis of this crisis has been consistent and largely ignored by successive governments, put it plainly in a recent C.D. Howe analysis: “big bang” structural reform – not targeted nation-building projects – is the only credible path to injecting real growth into the Canadian economy. Picking sectoral winners through government-directed investment funds does not solve the underlying problem; it decorates it.

 

So what would actually move the needle? Three things have real evidence behind them. First, comprehensive tax reform – flatter, simpler, with fewer distortions to investment decisions. Canada’s marginal effective tax rates on new investment remain among the highest in the OECD. Second, meaningful regulatory reform – not the 30-day consultation paper on one-year review timelines just announced, but structural changes that reduce the cost and uncertainty of deploying capital in Canada. Third, honest accounting of what “growth” means: a government serious about prosperity would report real per-capita GDP alongside headline GDP in every fiscal document, the same way a business reports earnings per share, not just total revenue.

 

The Carney government faces a genuine external trade shock. But the productivity crisis it now presides over did not arrive from nowhere. Mark Carney served as an economic advisor to the Trudeau government during the very years this decline accelerated. The case that he “inherited” a problem he had no hand in shaping is thin. What Canadians deserve is a government that levels with them about the depth of the hole – not one that counts population growth as an economic achievement and calls it second-fastest.

 

Bonus Comment – From Brian Tracy – Motivational Speaker and Self-Help Author – About the Importance of Trust

 

“The glue that holds all relationships together – including the relationship between the leader and the led – is trust, and trust is based on integrity.”

 

Totally agree.  Leaders, how’s your integrity doing these days?

 

I hope today’s newsletter has been thought-provoking for you.

 

As many of you know, I’m passionate about helping people make better decisions – whether in tax, leadership, or business. If you’d like to go deeper on those topics, my recently released book, Making Life Less Taxing (Version 2), is now available and expands on many of the practical ideas I’ve written about over the years.

 

I’m also putting the finishing touches on my next book, Leadership Compounds: How Small Decisions Build Culture, Credibility, and Legacy. It explores a simple but powerful idea: leadership isn’t about grand gestures – it’s about the small, consistent decisions that compound over time.

 

For those interested in a more hands-on approach, I’ll soon be announcing a bespoke consulting initiative – The Acorn Growth Program – designed to help leaders and organizations grow intentionally, one small (but important) decision at a time. Feel free to reach out to me directly for more information.

 

And if you’re not already on my mailing list, feel free to sign up for my In the Mood Network newsletters to receive more content. No fluff – just practical insights on tax, leadership, and economic policy.

 

Thanks for reading. As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

 

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