2024 Tax Resources

The 2024 Federal Budget, tabled on April 16, 2024, provides a mix of expected measures and a few surprises. In line with the announcements leading up to Budget Day, Budget 2024 outlines a multitude of measures targeted at housing affordability and the cost of living. The big question was how the government was going to pay for those measures. Budget 2024 delivers the answer with an increase to capital gains inclusion rates.

Succession planning is vital to ensuring the orderly transition of a family business from one generation to the next. Yet family business owners tend to avoid this complex and emotional exercise for many reasons: their identity is too closely tied to the business, they are too busy with day-to-day operations, or they worry that the next generation is ill-prepared to run the business at this time.

Canadians have access to a plethora of tax-preferred vehicles for saving and investing, each of which provides unique planning opportunities and trade-offs, as well as their own rules and conditions that must be followed. With so many options, determining the best use for each type of account as part of a comprehensive wealth plan can be challenging. The attached table summarizes the key features of the most common registered plans and links to articles with more detailed information.

Most Canadians are familiar with CPP, which provides retirement, disability, survivor, and death benefits for individuals that have been employed in Canada.1 CPP is funded by mandatory annual contributions by employees, employers and self-employed individuals based on their CPP pensionable earnings, which typically include salary, wages or other remuneration, commissions, bonuses, most taxable benefits, and tips/gratuities.

Many Canadian shareholder investors (“investor”) own foreign securities. Occasionally a foreign corporation (“original corporation”) will spin-off a subsidiary or business line to its shareholders, so the subsidiary becomes a separate, publicly traded corporation (“spin-off corporation”). In this situation, the investor now owns two separate foreign securities.