Finance committee  It is important to understand that, because of an aging population, the provinces will feel pressure on their health care spending in the coming decades. Spending will outpace economic growth. With that in mind, we can strive for health care innovation to get the best value for o

Finance committee  As I was saying, there are rules. In Sweden and Switzerland, the rules apply to an entire business cycle. You still need parameters. Quebec's balanced budget legislation says that you can have a deficit as long as, if you have a surplus, you put it in the bank virtually. The next

Finance committee  It is sending clear messages. Second, we have to look at the consequences of not complying with a rule like that. In Quebec, the only consequence is moral authority based on what editorialists say and so on, but the minister will not go to jail. In some other provinces, however,

Finance committee  I'm going to start, Mr. Chair?

Finance committee  First of all, I would like to thank you for this invitation. In the most recent throne speech, the government announced its intent to develop a framework for the budgetary process through balanced budget legislation. I am going to address the aspects of such legislation that are

Finance committee  Indeed, it's very unfortunate that we don't have the documents. Everyone was looking at me questioningly. I think it was a bit of a waste of time to go through this exercise without the documents. Implicit tax measures something specific. For example, if someone earns $100 more,

Finance committee  These people lose tax benefits, and that's what is important to underline here. That's why we have some areas with rates of 80% among single-parent families in Quebec and Ontario.

Finance committee  In the other countries, these benefit programs are universal. The tax benefits don't diminish as people earn more. In Canada, you may recall that there were family allowances up until the early 1990s. Everyone received $20 and that amount was not reduced. A decision was made to d

Finance committee  In this case, that's right. I will give you two unsatisfactory solutions that are to be avoided. We should not try to deal with the implicit tax problem by eliminating tax benefits. People would be poorer but there wouldn't be this problem of implicit tax. That is not the soluti

Finance committee  Thank you very much for this invitation. I would like to quickly go over the results of a study on implicit tax rates that will be published tomorrow. I am the author of this study with Michaël Robert-Angers, and we will be publishing it tomorrow. Implicit taxes do not represen

Finance committee  It was sent at the same time as the French version.

Finance committee  May I continue?

Finance committee  As you will see, the problems we identified are much more obvious for single-parent families. When children are part of the equation, the problem of implicit taxes becomes much more serious. Basically, what we did was base our calculations on half of the average income up to thre