One Comment About Remembrance Day  – Lest We Forget

Today is November 11. At 11 a.m., Canadians across the country will stop what they’re doing and stand in silence. I hope you will too.

 

Since Confederation, more than 118,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders have given their lives serving in uniform, from the First and Second World Wars to Korea and Afghanistan. Each name was someone’s son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother, brother or sister. Many were young men and women with their whole lives ahead of them. They left farms, offices and classrooms, and they didn’t come home.

 

In late May 2024, about a week before the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I stood on Juno Beach in Normandy. On June 6, 1944, 14,000 Canadians stormed that beach. 359 of them were killed that day.

 

On Juno Beach, Late May 2024

 

Today it’s a quiet stretch of sand lined with apartments and beach huts. It was truly a moment of reflection and reality. Young Canadians crossed that same sand under fire so that, 80 years later, I could stand there in peace.

 

In 1915, the day after his close friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed and buried in a makeshift grave near Ypres, Belgium, Canadian doctor and soldier John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields. It ends with a charge to those of us who remain:

 

“If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.”

 

Keeping faith is more than wearing a poppy, though please wear one. It’s remembering what they gave and why. It’s caring for the veterans who are still with us and the families who carry the loss. And it’s respecting the men and women who wear the uniform today.

 

Every week in this newsletter, I comment about taxes, governments and leadership. I can do that freely, in print, because others paid for that freedom with their lives. I don’t take that lightly.

 

To all who served, and to all who never came home: thank you. We will remember them.

One Comment About Taxation – Budget 2026: Not As Advertised

A friend of mine shares my weakness for charity auctions. At a recent fundraiser, he had the winning bid for a two-week getaway to Central America, donated to the cause. The pictures were stunning: sweeping views, spacious rooms, a place to truly relax.

 

The reality was different. The property was run-down, the rooms were cramped and there was no hot water. At least the money went to a good cause. But what my friend bought was not as advertised.

 

Neither is Budget 2026.

 

Last Thursday’s budget arrived with glossy promises of discipline, simplification and growth but it’s clear it’s a document designed less to inform Canadians than to manage them.

 

Start with tax. Economists, tax practitioners, business groups and think tanks have spent years calling for comprehensive tax reform: a simpler, more competitive system with fewer carve-outs. The budget instead offers what it calls “the most ambitious tax simplification effort in decades” (a bit of an oversell), then concedes that “deeper reforms will take time and sustained effort.” Huh? What does that mean? It promises more simplification next spring. Simplification is not reform.

 

Some of the tax simplification measures are welcome. The deadline to file a notice of objection becomes at least one year. The T1135 foreign reporting threshold doubles to $200,000. Instalment thresholds rise for the first time since 2008. Part VI.1 tax disappears for dividends paid by Canadian-controlled private corporations. The government will consult on merging RRSPs and RRIFs, ending the forced conversion at 71. None of this makes headlines, but less complexity is real value.

 

The problem is that much of the rest of the budget adds tax complexity, which is exactly what reform should remove. Take the new Canada Growth Incentive, a capital gains exemption of up to $15 million. Read the fine print. It applies only to newly issued shares, so existing business owners get nothing on what they have already built. Shares must be held directly, so the same investment made through a holding company or trust doesn’t qualify. Professionals, finance, real estate, farming, mining, hospitality, arts and franchises, among others, are excluded, with technology the obvious target. The alternative minimum tax can apply when the exemption is claimed, which could significantly erode the “nearly 96 per cent” after-tax retention the government advertises. There is no draft legislation, and the anti-avoidance rules will come “at a later date.”

 

Advisers will spend the next decade restructuring companies to fit these rules. Like the Productivity Mega Deduction, which favours capital-intensive businesses, the incentive picks winners, chiefly technology. Real reform would lower the cost of capital for everyone.

 

Then there’s the Canada Creative Credit. The Prime Minister posted that Canadian artists “won’t pay tax on up to $45,000 of income derived from your creative work.” Not as advertised, again. The budget only promises consultation. The proposed credit is federal and non-refundable, the $45,000 includes the $16,452 basic personal amount every Canadian already gets, and only self-employment income from “original and creative artistic works” counts. I replied to the post that I’m now a taxation artist. The joke wrote itself.

 

Add more tinkering with the section 44.1 rollover, which Finance’s own data shows only 600 to 800 people claim each year, and the pattern is clear: create a targeted incentive with complex accompanying eligibility rules that are constantly amended. That is the opposite of reform.

 

The fiscal pages share the same flaw: the brochure doesn’t match the property. In late April, almost a month after the 2025-26 fiscal year had ended, the government’s spring economic update pegged that year’s deficit at $66.9 billion. Last week’s budget revised it to $39.3 billion, a $27.6 billion miss on a year that was already over.

 

Worse, this budget landed on November 5, almost five months before the April 1, 2027 start of the fiscal year it is meant to plan. In 1985, the federal government studied this and concluded that a fall budget forecast “is likely to be less reliable for the simple reason that it is prepared too many months in advance of the fiscal year to which it applies.” If the government can’t get last year right, why trust a forecast for a year that hasn’t started?

 

Then there’s the messaging. The budget opens by telling us “Canadians know that when they balance their household budgets, they are in control. In the same way, Canada’s fiscal strength reinforces our sovereignty.” No household borrowing $62 billion a year would describe that as strength. Its claim of a balanced “day-to-day operating budget” by 2027-28 relies on treating tax revenue given up through the Productivity Mega Deduction as “capital.” Strip that out, and 2027-28 shows a $5.6 billion operating deficit. That is simple deception.

 

Compared with the spring forecast, projected revenues over six years rose about $134 billion. The government committed roughly $152 billion to new measures, more than the entire windfall.

 

The reality: the deficit jumps from $39.3 billion last year to $62.3 billion this year and stays above $52 billion through 2030-31, with no date for balance. Interest on the debt is $60.2 billion this year, already more than the $57.4 billion Canada Health Transfer to the provinces. By 2030-31, it reaches $85.5 billion. No wonder the C.D. Howe Institute gave the budget a “D.”

 

This government believes it can spend its way to growth while directing the economy itself. Eventually, spending must be curtailed and debt repaid.

 

My friend can laugh about it now. The trip is over, and the money still did some good. Canadians won’t be laughing. They’re paying for a trip they never agreed to take, financed with money they haven’t earned yet, and the payments will keep coming long after the pictures fade.

 

At a charity auction, all sales are final. Budgets don’t have to be. Canadians should send this one back and insist on the real thing: genuine tax reform and a credible plan to balance the books.

 

One Comment About Leadership – Sell the Job You Actually Have

 

Most leaders know how to sell. In a recruiting interview, a client pitch or a town hall announcing a change, the instinct is to show the best photos: the growth path, the supportive culture, the exciting new structure.

 

The trouble starts on day one. A new hire who was promised mentorship and instead gets a stack of files and an empty calendar doesn’t just feel disappointed. He concludes that what leadership says and what leadership means are two different things. From then on, he discounts everything you tell him. So does everyone he talks to.

 

The gap is rarely a lie. It’s usually optimism: describing the organization you intend to build rather than the one you run today. But the people living in it can’t tell the difference, and they don’t much care.

 

The fix is unglamorous. Describe the job, the change or the plan as it is, including the parts that aren’t finished. Tell a recruit, “Our training is thin right now, and here’s what we’re doing about it.” Tell a team, “This reorganization solves two of our problems, not all five.” Then deliver a little more than you promised.

 

People will forgive a modest pitch. They won’t forgive a misleading one.

 

Credibility compounds, and so does its loss.

 

One Comment About Economics / Politics  – Spending Restraint, by Assumption

 

The cover letter to Budget 2026, signed by the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister, says the budget “reduces the growth of spending from over 8% per year during the last decade to less than 2% since Canada’s new government took office.”

 

Read the fiscal chapter, and the claim narrows. There, the “less than 2%” is growth in direct program expenses “over the Budget 2026 horizon (2026-27 to 2030-31).” That is a forecast, not a record. And the window opens right after the jump. Direct program expenses rise from $246.0 billion in 2025-26 to $272.4 billion in 2026-27, almost 11 per cent in a single year. Measure from 2025-26, this government’s first full fiscal year, and average annual growth through 2030-31 is about 3.3 per cent.

 

Then look at how the slower growth is achieved. Deep in Annex 1, the budget “reduces projected direct program expenses by about 4.5% or approximately $12.4 billion per year over the forecast horizon, before new measures.” It calls this “an aggregate forecasting adjustment” that “is not attributed to particular departments, programs, or policy decisions, and it does not change approved funding.”

 

In plain English: nothing was cut. Ottawa simply assumes it will spend about $12.4 billion a year less than it has approved, because departments have lately been slow to get money out the door. Over five years, that is roughly $62 billion, about the size of this year’s entire $62.3 billion deficit.

 

Maybe the assumption holds. Forecasting that some approved money won’t be spent is reasonable. Calling it restraint isn’t. If the guess is wrong, the deficits are bigger than shown.

 

Restraint is a decision about what not to fund. This is a guess.

 

Bonus Comment – From Richard Feynman – American Physicist – About Reality

 

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

 

Agree. Feynman wrote that about the Challenger disaster. Swap “technology” for “budget” and it still holds.

 

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 Two 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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