Professor Lisa Philipps notes one string attached to Harper's family tax cut plan

Income-splitting for families with dependent children under 18 is a huge policy initiative for Stephen Harper’s majority-hungry Conservative party, wrote the Financial Post March 28, in a story outlining the details of the plan. So huge, you wonder why it wasn’t the centrepiece of last week’s dead-on-arrival federal budget. But the Family Tax Cut plan […]

Osgoode Professor Lisa Philipps: Fiscal favours are eroding Canada's tax system

With Tuesday’s budget, the federal government continued its love affair with tax expenditures, those special breaks that target tax relief to select causes or groups, wrote Lisa Philipps, professor in York’s Osgoode Hall Law School, in the Toronto Star March 23: Like many Liberal budgets before them, every one of the Conservative budgets since 2006 […]

Osgoode Professor Neil Brooks launches The Trouble with Billionaires with Linda McQuaig

In their new book, The Trouble with Billionaires, York Professor Neil Brooks, a tax law expert at Osgoode Hall Law School, and Canadian author Linda McQuaig make the case that the massive fortunes of the ultra-rich – widely considered benign or even beneficial to society – are actually detrimental to everyone else. The glittering lives of […]

Prof Peter Victor says growth shouldn't drive the economy, and has numbers to prove it

Peter Victor, an ecological economist who teaches at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, rejects the idea that economic growth is essential to progress, wrote BC’s Grand Forks Gazette May 19 in an article about replacing the growth economy with a more sustainable model: To prove his point he created a computer model that duplicated […]

Worried about tax season? Take a better look at that tax form

“Canadians know very little about taxes. And they don’t know that they don’t know,” says Daniel Collison, who teaches personal finance in the MBA program at the Schulich School of Business at York University, in the Toronto Star Jan. 28. “Some people have basic concepts, but they don’t know the true tax system,” he says. […]