Québec’s 2026-2027 Budget: Continuity heading into the October elections
By Antoine Genest-Gregoire, Assistant Professor at the University of Sherbrooke’s Department of Taxation. He is also a member of the Canadian Tax Observatory’s advisory committee.
Finance Minister Eric Girard presented his eighth budget on March 18th, 2026. This is the last budget that will be tabled before Quebecers go to the polls on October 5th. This is also the last budget of outgoing Premier François Legault who announced recently that he was stepping down as party leader. His replacement as leader of Coalition Avenir Québec will be elected on April 12th. Communication about this year’s budget was heavily focused on continuity and “leaving the house in order”, as Girard has often described the financial challenge he himself inherited 8 years ago.
Québec’s balanced budget law has forced the government to focus on bringing back surpluses. Girard presented his five-year plan to do so in the previous budget. It included plans to reduce the growth of public spending, plans for crown corporations to bring in more revenue, changes to tax expenditures and a renewed plea for increased transfers from the federal government. Thanks to greater-than-expected revenue from taxes, the situation in this year’s budget is a little better than in the previous one, as shown in Figure 1.
The budget includes a limited number of new tax and spending measures totaling approximately 2B$ in 2026-2027. These include the yearly cost of a 3 per cent cap on the growth of the property school tax, subsidies for 5000 previously private childcare spots and funding to build 1000 affordable homes. The government also announced an automatic tax filing program similar to the one introduced by the federal government in its 2025-2026 budget last fall. The aims are the same: automatically filing taxes for individuals who may have not filed recently, so that they can be eligible for tax-provided income support. Revenu Québec, the province’s tax collection agency, has not yet specified the eligibility criteria or the delays of application for the new program. Pending changes to tax legislation, it will be in effect for tax year 2026.
Québec also has a law that forces it to devote some of its budget to a sovereign wealth fund called the Generations Fund. The Fund’s objective is to reduce intergenerational inequality stemming from the province’s quickly aging population. That law dictates that the government’s net debt, including the assets of the Generations Fund, reaches a level of 35.5 per cent of GDP by 2032-2033 and 32.5 per cent in 2037-2038.
The government is still on track to reach these targets, if its plan to bring the budget back to balance succeeds. Figure 1 shows Québec’s budget balance according to the same definition used by other provinces and the federal government. However, the additional funding required for contributions to the Generations Fund means that the government needs to target an accounting surplus rather than simply a balanced budget, meaning that the funding gap is larger, as shown in Figure 3.
The biggest issue with Québec’s plan to bring its budget back to surpluses is that the government refuses to identify the necessary steps to reach the target in the last part of its five-year window. The plan presented last year contained “gaps to be bridged” worth up to 2.5B$ in years 27-28 to 29-30. These gaps have shrunk a bit in this year’s budget thanks to a higher baseline in 2025-2026 but the government still does not want to identify the added revenue or reduced spending that could bridge those gaps. The minister mentioned that the gaps might close on their own if the Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement is renewed and investment resumes thanks to the added certainty in the business climate.
Adding to the government’s challenge is the ongoing cost of existing programs. The expenditure budget, also presented on March 18th, highlights a funding gap of at least 0.23 percent of GDP in 2027-2028. This gap sits on top of the government’s current fiscal trajectory. That is, the government assumes that program spending will be below the costs of continuation for years after 2026-2027 and still has to find up to 0.33 percent of GDP in funding or cuts. This amounts to a 3.8B$ shortfall in 2028-2029. None of these issues are new. Since 2014, finance ministers have not explicitly committed funding that covers the costs of program continuation beyond the next financial year. They have frequently met that threshold, but they have never committed to doing so in advance.
These issues matter because the province is going into an election in a few months even as the global economic climate is still very unstable. Because the new premier will be sworn in after the budget, Girard has stated that the budget contains contingencies worth at least 250M$ a year for future spending plans, likely to be unveiled over the summer. After that, electoral politics will ramp up in earnest. Parties will compete with their tax and spending proposals for 2026 to 2030. And they will do so on top of an incomplete plan to bring the budget into balance after 3 years of deficits and expected cuts to the public service coming into force during the next premier’s first year. Winning next fall’s election may not be the victory every party savours!
Tax filing was supposed to be getting easier. That’s still a work in progress.
By Heather Scoffield | Originally published in The Toronto Star, March 7, 2026
It’s tax-filing season again, with all the headaches that brings for Canadians tearing apart their houses and their laptops to find the right paperwork before the deadline.
In theory, at least for low-income Canadians and the most vulnerable among us, the annual scramble should be getting easier. The federal government is starting to implement some changes announced in the last budget meant to automate filing for simple tax situations.
“It’s all about having access to the My CRA account, and using it,” says Elizabeth Mulholland, CEO of Prosper Canada, a charity dedicated to financial empowerment that helps low-income people across the country file their taxes.
But those changes are only inching along — even as the list of benefits, supports and financial information attached to proper tax filing is growing longer and longer.
More precious than T-4 forms or access to automatic filing, however, is what comes at the end of the dance with the Canada Revenue Agency: the notice of assessment — the document that summarizes your income and confirms how much you owe or are getting back in taxes.
It’s like a Golden Ticket — the key to unlocking federal and often provincial income support as well as trustworthy financial information about every taxpayer.
Without their notice of assessment, taxpayers rich and poor alike, will find it difficult, if not impossible, to access GST credits, caregiver credits, seniors’ benefits, help for groceries, space in your RRSP, your TFSA and your FHSA.
Acronyms aside, you’ll need your notice of assessment to get child benefits, dental benefits, workers benefits and disability benefits. In Ontario, you’ll need it to access social assistance.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
More and more, the notice of assessment is a linchpin to social service delivery at all levels, making it a crucial link in Canada’s social safety net.
But for those who need it most, it’s sometimes hard to get and easy to lose.
“It’s all about having access to the My CRA account, and using it,” says Elizabeth Mulholland, CEO of Prosper Canada, a charity dedicated to financial empowerment that helps low-income people across the country file their taxes.
No one should assume that such access is at everyone’s fingertips, especially if they are living in precarious circumstances. First, you need computer access, with Wi-Fi, and preferably with a secure connection. If you’re setting up an account, you also need identification, previous tax returns, and a steady address.
And let’s hope you don’t get locked out of your account. Getting back in can take several documents, and a password that may need to be sent by mail.
CRA and experts figure about 400,000 people are missing out on their benefits year after year because they’re not filing taxes.
That was the reason why last November, in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget, the government announced a new initiative for automatic filing for low-income people with simple tax situations.
It has potential, but it’s rolling out gradually, and with some hiccups.
There are three different ways the CRA wants to make tax filing more automatic, but only one is ramping up right now, opening up on March 9 for this tax season: SimpleFile, an interactive digital or phone questionnaire which will be available to about 3 million people.
The system has been around for a while, but by invitation-only in the past, and uptake has been low. It’s more accessible this year.
This coming fall, CRA will launch a small pilot project to do “deemed filing” for low-income Canadians who haven’t filed their taxes at all, but should have.
And next March, CRA will start pre-filling tax returns for 1 million people, giving them a chance to approve the information before sending it in. The goal is to reach 5.5 million people by 2029.
The government is purposely moving cautiously so that it can understand the needs of vulnerable populations and consult along the way, says John Fragos, press secretary for the Office of the Minister of Finance and National Revenue.
In the meantime, low-income filers will lean heavily on community tax clinics staffed by trained volunteers, including about 700 chartered accountants in Ontario, and organized by charities like Prosper Canada. Same as it ever was.
“The word ‘automatic’ seems very misused,” says Lisa Rae, Prosper’s director of systems change.
Her frustration is that the federal government has been tossing around the automatic filing concept for years. But she’s hopeful that this time will be different.
Prosper Canada, along with the Maytree and Momentum organizations, are taking CRA’s offer to consult seriously and have designed ways to make the government plan more workable.
They argue that with more efficient use of the financial information the government already has, more formal exchanges of data with provincial governments, and a deeper understanding of the needs and financial flows of low-income people, CRA could catch up to other countries and develop a truly automatic system that would ensure almost $2 billion in unclaimed supports and benefits get into the hands of those who qualify.
Let’s hope the government is listening, and is on the way to making it truly easier for taxpayers of all kinds to find and keep that most-precious of all documents, the notice of assessment.
What history tells us about tax, trouble and the top one per cent
By Shirley Tillotson, Professor of history at Dalhousie University; expert advisor at the Canadian Tax Observatory | A version of this piece was originally published in the Halifax Examiner, February 25, 2026
Mark Carney wasn’t the only one making a splash in Davos. So were some 400 of the world’s millionaires and billionaires.
They were out in full force asking for governments to tax them more.
They know that governments everywhere need more revenue. Especially here in Canada where the turning-away-from-the-U.S. project set out by Prime Minister Carney will require billions in government spending on defence, infrastructure, and social supports.
Perhaps a tax on billionaire wealth (a simple one-off?) would be a good source of some of that money.
But the best tool at our disposal to raise this much-needed revenue is one we are set up already to use: income tax.
“But the income tax is a mess!” you say. Too complex and yet too ineffective at reaching high incomes. Worse, it scarcely touches wealth.
Yes. And yet. Let’s revisit the origins of the federal income taxes in North America. It’s a thought-provoking story of how an old tax, one crippled by many years of evasion, led to a fairer tax system.
The old tax was the municipal property tax. In many North American cities, including Toronto, Ottawa, and others in Ontario, property tax had become hopelessly corrupted.
Individual assessors took bribes, but worse, the municipalities attempted and increasingly failed to tax “personalty” – movable assets like jewellery, carriages, boats, and “intangible” assets, such as stocks and bonds.
The full scope of taxable personalty just wasn’t visible with the assessment tools of the day. So municipalities depended on the more easily “seen” homes and goods of the non-investing classes.
Federally, too, the poor, the farmer, and the modest earner paid a disproportionate share of their incomes on customs and excise taxation, the main source of national revenue.
From the 1880s onward, tax protesters clamoured and revolts brewed.
National and international grassroots movements called for taxation of inheritances and of land. Wealth, that is.
Worse, from most millionaires’ perspective, actual socialism was gaining electoral ground.
Public ownership! Confiscation! These were real possibilities.
In Canada, fabulously wealthy financier Isaak Walton Killam deplored how slow the feds were to adopt a war income tax. Finally, the one adopted in 1917 was modeled on the 1904 Ontario municipal income tax.
In this context, a well-ordered, mildly progressive-rate tax on upper incomes was, comparatively speaking, not a terrible threat.
By the 1910s, income tax on a national scale was looking like an easy way to spike the socialists’ guns, appease the fretful farmers, and soothe the tariff-oppressed consumer.
Its advocates, both rich and poor, could point to just such a tax that was working well in Ontario. A municipal income tax, on the books since 1866, was resuscitated in 1904, slightly revised, and used to correct for the inequity of the old property tax.
Income tax became a popular proposal for national tax reform, even among the very rich. The leading advocate, economist E.R.A. Seligman, came from a family of millionaire New York bankers.
In Canada, fabulously wealthy financier Isaak Walton Killam deplored how slow the feds were to adopt a war income tax. Finally, the one adopted in 1917 was modeled on the 1904 Ontario municipal income tax.
In the postwar debate, Killam was among those who insisted that the war income tax be continued.
Looking ahead to years of interest payments on the huge war debt, parliament agreed. They decided not to impose wealth taxes (a capital levy or a land value tax), but to keep the war income tax.
As MP William Foster Cockshutt, a millionaire industrialist, said in the House in 1919, he was willing, as all Canadians must be, “to submit to heavy taxation for some years to come.”
Like Seligman, both Cockshutt and Killam knew that, without direct taxation of substantial incomes, the nation’s tax structure was discredited, as the municipalities’ had been.
In 1919, with the recent revolution in Russia and labour revolts in Winnipeg and around the world, a nod to fairness, however modest, was in the interest of security of wealth.
It was not time to reform the polarizing, unreliable tariff. It was the time to do something that had proved feasible in Ontario: tax upper incomes.
Similarly, it is not time now to thoroughly reform our income tax system. It’s time to use familiar tools to do a few straightforward things, things that are widely seen as fair.
Raise the taxable percentage of capital gains. (Yes, try again.) Eliminate tax provisions that disproportionately benefit the top 1%. (Yes, try again.)
Do something. Or wait for the equivalent of 1919.
Rethinking Canada’s Tax System: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Next
Heather Scoffield | The Canadian Club of Toronto | February 24, 2026
The Canadian Club of Toronto hosted a panel on rethinking Canada’s tax system (what works, what doesn’t, what’s next), featuring the Canadian Tax Observatory’s Heather Scoffield, Deloitte’s Fatima Laher and the University of Calgary’s Jack Mintz. Moderated by Patrick Brethour of the Globe and Mail. Here’s a recording.
Heather Scoffield talks the U.S. Federal Reserve on TVO's The Rundown
Heather Scoffield | TVO's The Rundown | February 2, 2026
What happens to Canada’s approach to monetary policy when the world’s most powerful central bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve, is in turbulent times? Heather Scoffield breaks it down here for The Rundown on TVO.
Three things Canadians should know about Carney’s new GST credit
By Heather Scoffield | Originally written for the Toronto Star on January 28, 2026
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new multibillion-dollar top-up to the GST credit to help low-income Canadians afford food and essentials is definitely progress.
By using the existing system to target the sector of the population that needs the most help in making ends meet, the measure is more efficient and fairer than other tax measures that tend to show upon the menu.
But let’s get a few things clear.
First, a technical clarification. The prime minister has framed the enhanced and rebranded GST credit as a way to alleviate the costly grocery bill many households struggle with continually.
In fact, there is no GST on most groceries except snacks. Recipients can spend their new-found money on whatever they want, as the PM himself noted. But since so many of the recipients find that food gobbles up disproportionately large portions of their income, the new credit can help. It’s not nearly as generous as anti-poverty advocates had hoped, but it’s not nothing. It’s $11.7-billion over six years, reaching 12 million people.
Second, the credit is not going to do anything to drive food prices down. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is right about that. Food prices are high in most developed countries these days, but especially high in Canada — for many reasons, including weather, currency and supply chain glitches.
Rather, there’s a separate collection of new funds for the “root causes” — money to address supply chain disruptions, encourage the construction of new greenhouses, produce food close to home and help the Competition Bureau ensure there’s less bad behaviour.
And third, it’s dripping with politics, as you’d expect in a minority government. While the new benefit can be spent on anything at all, the Conservatives and the NDP alike have hammered the Liberals non-stop on food prices. And so that’s the framing — putting the opposition on the spot.
But it is progress all the same, mainly because it’s a concrete acknowledgment of the bread-and-butter hardships that a growing percentage of the Canadian population is feeling — a policy-oriented recognition that was scarce in the federal budget and what has been hard to hear in Carney’s response to the chaos that is U.S. President Donald Trump.
To be clear, there’s no expectation that Carney be warm and fuzzy. The closest he got to public emoting was the hug he gave to the Bonhomme Carnaval last week in Quebec City. He is a charts-and-graphs fan who writes his own literary references into his speeches.
(Indeed, at his news conference on Monday, he spontaneously used his hands to make a graph to explain that the total cost of the tax rebate measure was the delta between the change in overall inflation and the change in food inflation since the end of the pandemic.)
But the charts and graphs from pollsters have continually shown that Canadians are just as concerned about job security, economic stability and making ends meet as they are about Trump.
They’re related, of course. But Carney has not really connected the dots very well until now. His focus has been institutional investors, big business, and foreign leaders.
“The world is knocking at our door, and momentum is building. But as the Minister of Finance just said, the biggest payoffs will take time,” Carney said on Monday with Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne at his side. “And many Canadians are feeling the pressures right now of everyday expenses. Canadians need a boost today and a bridge to tomorrow.”
Central in the Carney government’s first budget in November was a plan to use federal tools and its balance sheet to drive $1 trillion in capital investment in Canadian infrastructure over the course of five years.
He has been aggressive on committing to defence spending, and aggressive on diversifying Canadian trade away from the United States.
And as we all know, he has won praise around the world for vowing to build networks of middle powers — a “third way” to navigate through the antagonism that the United States and China bring to international relations.
With the enhanced GST credit, now branded the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, the Carney government signals it knows it can’t get from here to there without ensuring Canadians at all levels of wealth and income are in solid shape.
“The world is knocking at our door, and momentum is building. But as the Minister of Finance just said, the biggest payoffs will take time,” Carney said on Monday with Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne at his side. “And many Canadians are feeling the pressures right now of everyday expenses. Canadians need a boost today and a bridge to tomorrow.”
Yes, they do. Statistics Canada reports that poverty has been creeping up, the ability to make ends meet has declined and wealth inequality was on the rise last year. Those are not the ingredients Canada needs to attract growth and investment, let alone maintain a decent quality of life.
To lock in the benefits of the new measures, Canadians and government both need to build on the progressive measure taken this week.
Canadians need to make sure they file their taxes — even if they haven’t done so in the past, and even if they aren’t paying any tax on a regular basis. This will ensure they’re in the system to receive the federal payouts.
And governments need to figure out the next step in taking on poverty, inequality and paycheques that don’t cover the bills.
As Carney well knows, the tax equivalent of a warm, fuzzy hug with Bonhomme only goes so far.
The Canadian Tax Observatory applauds new tax measures to make life more affordable
The Canadian Tax Observatory welcomes today’s announcement from Prime Minister Mark Carney and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne to substantially increase the GST credit, now called the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit.
In boosting support for low-income Canadians through the tax system, they are ensuring funds reach the hands of those who need it most — quickly, and also over the longer term.
“The prime minister’s recognition that his investment-oriented budget won’t deliver immediate returns for struggling Canadians is important,” says Heather Scoffield, the Observatory’s CEO. “A key element of Canada standing on its own in today’s turbulent economy is ensuring regular people are able to make ends meet.”
About the Canadian Tax Observatory
Established in 2025, the Canadian Tax Observatory is an independent non-profit devoted to helping people and policymakers understand the tax system. Through research, public education and collaboration, its goal is to advance a tax system that promotes economic growth, shared prosperity and tax fairness. It aims to drive an informed public dialogue in pursuit of practical taxation that benefits all Canadians. Through solid, independent research and non-partisan public engagement, we encourage fresh thinking that leads to practical solutions on tax policy. The founding CEO is Heather Scoffield, whose expertise lies in informing and driving national conversations on economic policy.
For more information, please contact:
Heather Scoffield
CEO
heather@canadiantaxobservatory.ca
613-314-1198
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Global minimum tax, and America’s message to the world: Trust us — as if
By Heather Scoffield | Originally written for the Toronto Star on January 17, 2026
From a distance, it looks like a dirty trick.
The United States leads the world into a negotiation for a global minimum tax. Eventually, painfully, everyone agrees to a complicated, finely-balanced pact that would ensure big multinational corporations all pay at least 15 per cent in taxes.
The goal is a global level playing field and an end to the tax-slashing race to the bottom to attract business.
At the last moment, the U.S. demands and is granted exemptions for its own — the biggest, most powerful companies in the world. And 147 other countries are left wondering whether the pact they’re signing is worth the paper it’s written on.
But sign, they do — mainly to salvage what they can from years of arcane wordsmithing in the hopes of preserving their own tax bases and sidelining global tax havens.
It’s come to this.
In a Donald Trump world where the U.S. routinely bails from international agreements, ignores longstanding rules of engagement and storms ahead in its own interests oblivious of the consequences, convincing Canada and other supporters of the global minimum tax to allow an America-friendly side-agreement seems almost quaint.
But it’s serious business that implicates Canada’s scope to preserve its tax base, compete and share the proceeds.
The global minimum tax talks actually started out on a note of optimism and American leadership.
While many countries had long decried multinational companies’ crafty use of the low- or no-tax rates in some jurisdictions, the campaign to end tax avoidance took a major leap forward in 2021 when then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen threw her considerable influence behind gritty discussions at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Canada’s then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland was a close ally, agreeing wholeheartedly with Yellen that a worldwide floor for corporate tax would stymie a global race to the bottom, allow Canada to maintain its corporate tax base and benefit workers with a fairer tax system.
But Canada also hedged its bets, just in case the complex OECD talks didn’t work out. Freeland announced a parallel Digital Services Tax to target large, multinational digital companies active in Canada. As the global talks stumbled, Canada enacted the DST in 2024, making it retroactive to 2022.
As we know, that plan never materialized — going toe-to-toe with Trump’s agenda and losing. And it’s that altercation which can explain the compromises that led to today’s arrangement.
The key moment was last June, just as the DST was about to take effect.
Trump showed up at the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., armed with the dreaded Section 899 of the One Beautiful Bill Act — also known as the “revenge tax.” Countries that embraced the global minimum tax agreement, and especially those who adopted their own DSTs, would face retaliatory high tax rates on individuals making money in the United States.
Under intense pressure from their business communities, the G7 stood down, Canada nixed its DST, and the G7 instead offered up a special arrangement for American companies. Trump removed the revenge tax provision, and the U.S. returned to the global minimum tax table.
And here we are, telling ourselves we’re lucky that the U.S. agreed to anything at all.
The so-called side-by-side agreement announced this month is designed to recognize U.S. arguments that its corporate tax system is fine as it is since it already mirrors what everyone else has signed on to in the main agreement. It doesn’t recognize the U.S. by name, but they’re the only ones who qualify.
The so-called side-by-side agreement announced this month is designed to recognize U.S. arguments that its corporate tax system is fine as it is since it already mirrors what everyone else has signed on to in the main agreement. It doesn’t recognize the U.S. by name, but they’re the only ones who qualify.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hailed it as “a historic victory in preserving U.S. sovereignty and protecting American workers and businesses from extraterritorial overreach.”
It may be a side quest for the U.S., but there are significant implications for the rest of the world — especially since the severe disruption in the global economy means Canada and many other countries are parched for investment and are actively redesigning their investment incentives to be more aggressive.
To be sure, the new package gives Canada some stability as it goes about the hunt for private-sector dollars. And perhaps, if the overall agreement works as intended, tax haven countries will rein in their competitive tax-slashing.
But the side deal gives leeway to the U.S. to decide for itself, at least in some instances, what counts and what doesn’t in the calculation of tax. And it leaves Big Tech and other American corporations alone to continue as they have been, booking up to half their foreign profits in tax havens, according to the EU Tax Observatory.
Meanwhile, the overall deal that Canada is signing on to means tax is no longer much of a tool to attract investment. We do have other, more effective tools — subsidies, predictability, rule of law, and industrial policy writ large. It could be a lot worse.
But it’s not clear the Americans will constrain themselves accordingly. The understood message from America is: trust us.
As if.
The Canadian Tax Observatory welcomes powerhouse advisory committee of experts
Today, the Canadian Tax Observatory announced the nine prominent tax thinkers who will form its founding expert advisory committee.
“I’m looking forward to working with this impressive group to guide the Observatory’s ambitious strategy and research agenda to advance fair taxation in Canada,” says CEO Heather Scoffield. “Taxation issues are complex and multilayered. This team reflects that, with deep expertise across academia, policymaking, tax law, accounting, economics and investment.”
The committee will meet twice a year and provide frequent consultation to guide the Observatory’s expert analysis and public engagement. Drawing on their diverse perspectives and experience, they will inform a rigorous and sophisticated approach to understanding the real-world implications of tax policy on Canadians’ economic lives.
L’Observatoire canadien de la fiscalité a dévoilé aujourd’hui les noms des neuf éminents spécialistes de la fiscalité qui composeront son nouveau comité d’experts.
« Je me réjouis à la perspective de travailler avec un groupe d’une telle envergure, qui accompagnera l’Observatoire dans ses ambitions et contribuera à orienter sa stratégie et ses travaux de recherche en faveur de l’équité fiscale au Canada », indique la cheffe de la direction, Heather Scoffield. « Les enjeux liés à la fiscalité sont complexes et pluridimensionnels. La composition de cette équipe en est l’illustration, puisqu’elle rassemble de grands spécialistes issus du monde universitaire et des domaines des politiques publiques, du droit fiscal, de la comptabilité, de l’économie et des placements. »
Le comité se réunira deux fois par an et conseillera fréquemment l’Observatoire dans ses analyses spécialisées et ses interventions auprès du public. La diversité des points de vue et des expériences de ses membres nourrira une réflexion rigoureuse et éclairée sur l’impact de la politique fiscale sur la vie économique des Canadiens.
Advisory Committee Members
David Duff
Professor of Law and Director of the Tax LLM program at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.
Antoine Genest-Gregoire
Assistant Professor of the Department of Taxation at the University of Sherbrooke and a researcher under its Research Chair in Taxation and Public Finance
Anish Makim
Partner at ExCap Advisors and a senior business advisor in Canada’s telecommunications sector
Kevin Milligan
Professor and Director of the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research
Carman McNary
Tax and corporate lawyer at Dentons Canada LLP, providing strategic advice to companies and their boards, First Nations and FN business groups, non-profit and charitable organizations
Elena Patel
Co-Director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the Pozen Director’s Chair, and a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution
Sandra Rosier
Tax advisor and, lawyer; and Founder and principal at Rosier Tax Advisory, which provides tax counsel to pension funds, global asset managers and financial institutions
Charles St-Arnaud
Chief Economist at Servus Credit Union
Shirley Tillotson
Professor of History at Dalhousie University and author of award-winning Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy
For more information, contact:
Heather Scoffield, CEO
The Canadian Tax Observatory
heather@canadiantaxobservatory.ca
Cell: 613-314-1198
Shirley Tillotson
CTO
Dr. Shirley Tillotson is Professor of History at Dalhousie University. She was the 2019 recipient of the Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research for her book, Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy. This, and her other work on Canadian tax history, are part of her general research interest as a historian in the tissue of connections between the institutions of government and the relationships of daily life and civil society. In addition to continuing scholarly research, she has, since her retirement from the classroom, brought a Canadian historical perspective to journalism and social media conversations.