Policy Forum: Piecemeal Tax Reform Ideas for Canada--Lessons from Principles and Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The basic structure of the Canadian personal and corporate tax system is informed by principles that were prevalent at the time of the Carter report. These principles include taxation based on the ability to pay, which supports comprehensive income taxation as the ideal base, accompanied by a corporate tax designed to withhold shareholders' income at source to prevent unlimited sheltering within corporations. Various piecemeal reforms have occurred since then, many of which move the base toward personal consumption. Yet, vestiges of the comprehensive income approach remain, such as a single-rate structure and a corporate tax base that is meant to reflect shareholder income. Ideas about optimal tax design and economic circumstances have evolved considerably since the Carter report. Initially, comprehensive income as an ideal base was challenged by progressive consumption taxation. This was later supplanted by an approach that emphasized individual well-being or welfarism. This in turn has recently been challenged by equality-of-opportunity ideas, which emphasize the opportunities that taxpayers enjoy, rather than the outcomes that they achieve. Additionally, the corporate tax has increasingly come to be seen as a device for taxing corporate rents, rather than for withholding shareholders' income at source. The author recounts the literature that has informed these changes and some of the practices that have emerged in other countries. Key elements of the literature include recent tax reform commissions in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, each of which has relevance for Canada. Innovative practices include the dual income tax systems introduced in the Nordic countries and rent tax systems, such as the allowance for corporate equity and the resource rent tax. The author draws on these ideas and practices to offer some recommendations for tax reform in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".