One Comment About Taxation – Canada’s Tax System Needs Structural Reform Not Surface Level “Repairs”

A few years ago, a contractor looked at my deck and found rotting boards underneath. His fix: sand it down, apply filler, add a coat of paint. Cheap and fast, so I agreed. Recently, a second contractor pulled back the paint and showed me decay that had spread well past cosmetic repair – the whole structure was now at risk. I was frustrated and embarrassed with myself. I had the chance to do it right the first time but instead paid for something that wasn’t.

 

That story keeps coming to mind, because it describes how Canada tends to approach tax policy.

 

The Department of Finance has run a string of stakeholder meetings and consultations over the summer ahead of Budget 2026, with a public portal for submissions open until September 8. The government’s own language frames the coming budget around growth, trade diversification, investment, competition and what it calls economic sovereignty. Read between the lines: Finance wants big ideas, and it wants them to sound bold.

 

My concern is what “bold” ends up meaning. There’s a real difference between genuine, structural tax reform and a grab bag of politically appealing measures dressed up in reform language. The former requires confronting the whole system at once. The latter photographs well.

 

One approach I’d hate to see imported is populist, blunt, high-optics tax measures. For example, California’s billionaire tax initiative – a one-time 5% levy on residents worth over $1 billion – is now officially certified for the November 3 ballot after signature verification cleared the required threshold.

 

Other U.S. states also have populist tax amendments in various stages.

 

Washington’s capital gains tax – the one that reportedly helped push Bezos to Florida a few years ago – already carries a 2.9% surtax on gains over $1 million (9.9% combined). Now the state has gone further: in March 2026, it signed into law a new 9.9% tax on all income over $1 million – effective for 2028 – notable given Washington had no broad-based income tax at all before this year.

 

Maryland has already layered on new top brackets and a 2 per cent capital gains surtax on income over $350,000, while Illinois, Virginia and Minnesota have further copycat proposals stalled at various legislative stages, from committee hearings to bills awaiting a floor vote.New York City’s mayor pushed for a millionaire’s income tax surcharge but the governor rejected it outright, settling instead for a narrower tax on luxury second homes in the city. The instinct behind all of these proposals is a sand-and-paint tax policy: satisfying in the moment, rot and hollow underneath.

 

Even the jurisdiction that pushed furthest is now retreating. Since the Dutch parliament’s lower house passed a 36% tax on unrealized gains on certain property, a newly formed coalition government has moved to scrap that component entirely and revert to taxing gains only when realized, before the measure even takes effect though the governing parties remain divided on the timeline.  That tells you something about the durability of the idea.

 

For Canada, I doubt Carney has the appetite to import revenue raising measures like the above – the political risk of a straightforward revenue grab is obvious even to a government sitting on real capital and a population struggling with affordability issues. The more likely temptation runs the other way: not a new tax, but new tax expenditures – flashy, populist narrowly targeted tax relief measures aimed at a sympathetic constituency – perhaps teachers, union workers, take your pick – that generates “we’re doing something for you” applause. Again, it’s the same populist instinct, just run in reverse. Every “elbows up” jab at the United States earns Carney applause from a constituency that responds more to tone than substance, and that’s exactly the kind of political capital a targeted giveaway is built to spend.

 

If Canada wants genuine wins instead of populist giveaways, there’s plenty of ideas. An easy first idea is personal tax rate reduction (although, yes, it would need to be combined with other measures to offset the revenue loss). Canada’s top federal tax bracket hits at roughly $258,000 of income versus over $640,000 in the U.S., and even Alberta, our most competitive province, lands near 48 per cent combined at the top. With most provinces at top end combined rates exceeding 50 per cent, that needs attention.

 

Deferring tax on reinvested income or gains would give entrepreneurs a genuine reason to keep capital working here. On the corporate side, economist Jack Mintz has already done the heavy lifting. His “big bang” proposal lays out two revenue-neutral paths: a 10 per cent Irish-style rate paired with a broader base, or a 13 per cent tax on distributed profits that defers taxation on reinvested earnings entirely. If provinces followed with modest rate cuts of their own, Mintz estimates the combined federal-provincial rate could land near a genuinely competitive 20 per cent.

 

Ireland is the proof: its 12.5 per cent rate, paired with a broad base, turned one of Europe’s poorer economies into one of its wealthiest per capita. Rate and base moved together – the part Canadian politicians tend to skip.

 

The distinction worth noting is that real tax reform needs to be combined with simplicity measures, base broadening and real spending discipline. Revenue-neutral means little if the government hides deficits behind its operating-versus-capital split, a gimmick, not governance. Quick wins can spark growth, but they’re a down payment, not the full job. Calling the down payment “reform” just delays the real bill – the same mistake I made with my deck.

 

I know how that story ends, because I lived it. Three years of looking fine, then a much bigger bill and a structure at risk. Ottawa has real capital and a shelf of good ideas. The question for Budget 2026 is whether it hires the contractor who wants it to look good by November or if it does the unglamorous work underneath.

 

I know which contractor I’d hire.

 

One Comment About Leadership – Leaders, Earn The Room You’re In

 

I was watching an old Anthony Bourdain episode recently – a man from Texas, originally from India, said something that stuck with me: “India is my motherland, but Texas is my home.”

 

Motherland is assigned. You don’t choose where you’re born or what shaped you early. Home is different – it’s built, and it has to be rebuilt continuously. You earn it through repetition: showing up, contributing, absorbing the inconvenient parts, staying when staying is harder than leaving.

 

Leaders get this backwards constantly, and tenured professors are the purest version of the mistake. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom – that’s a legitimate purpose. But in practice, it too often becomes permission to stop earning the room. The research goes stale, the lectures don’t change, the willingness to be challenged disappears – all while the title and the office stay exactly the same. The credential that was earned once gets treated as a lifetime deed to relevance.

 

The same failure shows up outside academia constantly. The founder still running the company like it’s year one. The executive coasting on a reputation built a decade ago. The leader who stopped updating their thinking the day they got the corner office. In every case, the mistake is the same: mistaking a past achievement for a permanent claim on present authority.

 

Belonging – real belonging, the kind that earns trust and followership – isn’t inherited from your résumé. It’s re-earned every day through the accumulation of small decisions: the ones I wrote about in Leadership Compounds: How Small Decisions Build Culture, Credibility, and Legacy. Culture and credibility don’t get built by a single grand gesture or an old credential – they compound, day after day, out of the ordinary choices leaders make about who they show up for.

 

Bourdain’s guest didn’t renounce India. He just stopped confusing reverence for it with a claim on where he actually lived. Good leaders do the same: honour what got you here, but lead from where you actually stand today.

 

One Comment About Economics / Politics  – Canada Lost 42,000 Jobs in August 2026?

 

A couple of weeks ago, Statistics Canada reported that real GDP grew 3.3% annualized in the second quarter of 2026 – the fastest pace since early 2023, ahead of the Bank of Canada’s own 2.5% forecast. The Prime Minister and his caucus were crowing hard about this. Carney posted on his X account that the number proves his plan – “build our strength at home and diversify our trade partnerships abroad” – “is working.” Plan??  Hardly. Frankly, there IS no plan. That line is spin dressed up as an economic statement, and it’s aimed at exactly two audiences: people who won’t read past a headline, and the partisan flag-wavers who’ll cheer any number with Carney’s name stapled to it. It doesn’t survive five minutes with StatCan’s own breakdown. I wrote about this in the September 2, 2026 edition of this Newsletter.

 

And last week, the crowing caucus and the PM were nowhere to be heard when Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s unemployment rate remains at 6.4% as the economy saw broad-based declines including the shedding of 42,000 jobs in August.

 

Look closer and “unchanged” flatters the number. The unemployment rate held steady only because the labour force shrank – fewer people were out looking for work, not more people finding it. Wage growth cooled to 2% annualized in August, the slowest pace since November 2017, and the public sector shed jobs for a third straight month. None of that made it into anyone’s talking points either.

 

The pattern is always familiar: trumpet the headline, go quiet on the internals, and count on nobody reading past the first paragraph. The unglamorous StatCan detail is where the real story lives – and two weeks running, it wasn’t nearly as flattering as the press release.

 

Sure can’t wait for a real plan to show up.

 

Bonus Comment – From Andrew Grove – Intel Co-Founder – About Continuously Earning The Room You’re In

 

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

 

Yes – leaders who are paranoid about detail, moving towards the vision and making lots of consistent small decisions survive and thrive. Be that leader.

 

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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