Why Canada must simplify the tax code + MORE Feb 24th

With the March 1 RRSP deadline and the April tax deadlines approaching, many investors need to know the answers to these questions.

Outspoken political commentator Ezra Levant arrives at the Law Society of Alberta in Calgary, Alta., Wednesday, March 2, 2016. (Jeff McIntosh/CP)
Planning for retirement can be tricky. There are the evergreen-for-the-greying questions: “How much money will I need?” “When can I afford to retire?” “Should I sell my home to realize the gains now, or stay in place and take the chance that house prices will fall?” “Do I have to start going to Florida? Is that a law? Do those happy couples that walk up and down the beach around Panama City wearing matching tracksuits know each other before they get to the beach, or do they just get onto the beach each day and find the person they match with and just start walking together?”
And now, thanks to Ezra Levant, it turns out another question must be answered: “Should I hand my life savings over to a B-list Canadian media personality with the Midas touch, if King Midas were a mythological Greek figure who had wished for everything he touched to end in a desperate public relations campaign to disassociate himself from anti-Semites, without alienating too many anti-Semites?” This past December, Rebel Media, helmed by Levant, established the “Rebel Freedom Fund,” an RRSP-eligible retirement savings fund for fans of his Youtube channel and media site…

For years now, investor portfolios in Canada have been taking an undue amount of punishment from the oil and gas sector. So much so, that you’d figure it would grow tired of inflicting all that damage and start being nice again in 2018. Guess again. Canada’s stock market is being a real dog again this year and energy stocks are leading the way down.
In the last 10 years, the energy subindex on the S&P/TSX Composite has dropped by more than a third, acting as a major headwind on the broader market. The TSX has gained only 14% in that same period, compared to an advance of 101% for the S&P 500 in the U.S.
Think about it; if you were unlucky enough to buy into the stock market at the peak in 2008, just before the financial crisis hit full force, your gains (excluding dividends) wouldn’t buy you much more than two loaves of price-fixed bread at Loblaws and a bag of President’s Choice sour grapes. If that was your nest egg and you need to start pulling the money out today to fund your retirement, that has got to hurt…

A “worry-free retirement” may be a thing of the past, according to a new Sun Life Financial survey, which finds that a quarter of retired Canadians are in debt in their golden years.

Aaron Wudrick is the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.
Are you paying all the tax you’re legally required to pay—and if not, is that okay?
That’s the question at the heart of the controversy over offshore tax havens, whereby mostly wealthy individuals structure their financial affairs to minimize their tax burdens. It’s a different question than issues around tax evasion—a black-and-white issue where the laws prohibiting it should be properly enforced, meaning the authorities should pursue violators and prosecute them as appropriate. By contrast, tax avoidance—where people use legal means to reduce the amount of tax they have to pay—is a much trickier subject. It primarily raises a moral question: is it wrong for people to try to legally minimize their tax burdens?
Large data leaks known as the Panama Papers in 2016 and Paradise Papers in 2017 have shed light on just how widespread the phenomenon of this aggressive tax planning is. These larger revelations may make the moral question appear easy to answer, but consider that every Canadian who makes a charitable donation or contributes to a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) is also technically engaging in tax avoidance, albeit on a much smaller scale…