The Liberals legislation cutting the GST-HST on some food items and some children’s clothes and toys for 2 months starting December 15, is completely inadequate to meet the needs of working people who are victims of massive corporate profiteering, exorbitant interest rates, and deep cuts to real wages. Price fixing and gouging by Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, and Walmart has made food unaffordable and bled dry food banks across the country. The banks and corporate landlords for whom evictions and foreclosures are business as usual, have created tent cities across the country, guaranteeing more deaths from freezing cold this winter and lethal heat next summer. The oil and gas companies who make huge profits by driving up gas prices and threatening cut-offs to people who can’t pay their heating bills, are also the main obstacle to stopping climate change in Canada.
The government and the majority in Parliament is facilitating this massive transfer of wealth from the pockets of working people to the biggest corporations.
This legislation is crumbs in the water – a “we care” message that actually exposes the government and Parliament’s lack of care – or concern – for working people whose wages fell by 3.5% in 2021-22, while profits rose 53% to an astronomical $577 billion, ($200 billion more than 2019). This is the largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the corporations and the rich ever seen in Canada and it shows who the government and the Parliamentary majority really care for.
Likewise the legislation still to be tabled, to send $250 rebate cheques to 18.7 million Canadians who worked and earned $150,000 or less in 2023, is another “we care” message that aims for votes while doing nothing to address hunger, homelessness and growing unemployment.
We demand that the government and Parliament act now to address this accelerating crisis with these tax measures:
- Eliminate the GST / HST altogether
- Eliminate income tax on incomes of $50,000 or less
- Double the corporate tax rate
- Collect $111.2 billion in unpaid corporate taxes accrued between 2014 and 2018
- Collect the $6.4 billion to $17.2 billion hidden in corporate tax havens
- Re-instate the capital tax
- Raise the capital gains tax so that it applies to 100% of the gain, realized and unrealized
- Introduce wealth and inheritance taxes on the wealthy
We further demand that the government and Parliament act now to protect working people with these economic and social measures:
- Roll back and freeze prices on food, fuel, and housing now
- Roll back and freeze interest rates
- Raise wages and incomes
- Introduce a Guaranteed Annual Livable Income to replace below subsistence-level provincial welfare and disability programs
- Expand EI to cover all the unemployed for the full duration of unemployment at 90% of previous earnings
- Fund and support universal social programs and stop and reverse privatization
- Build 1.5 million units of affordable social housing now
- Create jobs
- Deliver needs based funding or wealth taxing powers to municipalities
- Cut the arms budget by 75% and get out of NATO. People’s needs – not war and corporate greed!
These are measures that need to be implemented now to raise living standards and meet the urgent needs of millions of working people in Canada.
We call on the government and Parliament to act now on these measures.
Measures worth voting for.
Measures worth fighting for.
Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada