MAKING LIFE MORE AFFORDABLE
Investing In Families Is The Right Thing To Do
Canada’s economy is strong and growing. Over the past four years, Canadians have created more than 1,100,000 jobs. Here at home, we’ve seen more than 15,000 jobs added in just the past year, but the rising cost of living is making it harder for everyone to share in that success. For too many families, it’s still tough to make ends meet. We will move forward with a real plan to make life more affordable for Canadians – especially the middle class and people who are working hard to join it.
More Money, Tax Free
We will help Canadians keep more of what they earn.
Four years ago, we gave Canadians the tax break they deserve – putting hundreds of dollars back into the pockets of the middle class by cutting their taxes and asking the wealthiest one per cent of Canadians to pay a little more.
We invested in Canadians over these past four years, and in turn they invested in their communities – creating more than a million new jobs, and driving Canada’s unemployment and poverty rates to record lows.
To move forward with more help for the middle class and people working hard to join it, we will make sure that people don’t pay federal taxes on the first $15,000 they earn. This will save the average family nearly $600 a year. It will also mean that about 700,000 more Canadians, including seniors and young people starting their careers, will pay no federal tax at all, lifting nearly 40,000 more people out of poverty.
While Andrew Scheer’s tax plan would give more to wealthy Canadians, our plan lowers taxes the most for people who make less, helps the middle class, and ensures that the wealthy don’t get an extra hand up. Our tax cut would also help lift twice as many Canadians out of poverty than the Conservative plan would.
A Place to Call Home
We will make it easier for more people to buy their first home.
For many young people starting their careers, saving up enough to make a down payment on a home is a far-off dream – and for ten years, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did nothing to address this growing problem.
To help more people buy their first home, we will move forward with the new First-Time Home Buyer Incentive, which gives people up to 10 per cent off the purchase price of their first home. We will also increase the qualifying value to nearly $800,000 in the places where houses cost more – like the greater Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria regions.
As market dynamics change in different regions, the program will be adjusted to reflect those realities. To limit the housing speculation that can drive up home prices, we will also put in place a consistent national tax on vacant residential properties owned by non-Canadians who don’t live in Canada. And we will work with interested provinces, territories and communities to establish a national approach to beneficial ownership so that law enforcement and tax authorities have the tools necessary to crack down on financial crime in the real estate sector, while respecting Canadian privacy rights.
More Help for Families
We will give families more time and money to help raise their kids.
For parents, nothing is more important than spending time with their kids. But raising a family can be expensive – especially in the early years when many moms and dads are earning less, but baby gear and child care costs more.
Building on the successful Canada Child Benefit (CCB) – which gives more money every month to nine out of 10 families and helped lift 300,000 children out of poverty – we will move forward with the next steps in helping families make ends meet. We will:
give up to $1,000 more to families to help when the costs of raising kids are highest, by boosting the CCB by 15 per cent for children under the age of one;
make sure families get more money right away, by making maternity and parental benefits taxfree; and
make paid leave fairer for families, by introducing a 15-week leave for adoptive parents – including LGBTQ2 families – so they get the same benefits to help care for their kids as everyone else.
With these changes, a family of two earning $90,000, who are just about to have a child and already qualify for Employment Insurance benefits, can expect to receive about $2,300 more tax-free, to help to make sure their child gets the best possible start in life.
We will also move forward with Guaranteed Paid Family Leave – an ambitious program that will make sure that parents who don’t qualify for paid leave through Employment Insurance, or who don’t get enough because they’re between jobs, earn little, or haven’t worked enough hours, will receive a guaranteed income during the first year of their child’s life.
This will be especially helpful for women, who typically carry more family responsibilities, and will mean that every single Canadian parent will be able to afford to spend the first year at home with their child, when it matters most.
More Accessible and Affordable Child Care
We will make before and after school child care more accessible and affordable for families.
Parents work hard to support their families and give their kids a good start in life, but as working parents know, the need for good, affordable child care doesn’t stop when a child goes to school. For many families, before and after school are can be difficult to find and expensive to use. This is especially true for parents who work irregular hours due to things like overtime, late shifts, or multiple jobs.
Andrew Scheer’s idea of helping families is to give tax cuts to those who attend private schools. Canadian families need high quality, affordable child care solutions, not tax breaks for the wealthy at everyone else’s expense.
We’ve already created tens of thousands of new pre-school child care spaces, and will move forward with creating up to 250,000 more before and after school spaces for kids under 10, with at least 10 per cent of these new spaces set aside for care during extended hours.
To help families with the high cost of care, we will also lower child care fees for before and after school programs by 10 per cent across the board. More than a million families will benefit from these lower fees. For an Ontario family of four with two kids, it will mean about $800 back in their pockets, every year.
We will also move forward with more support for our early childhood educators, to ensure that across the country, they are better paid and trained to take care of our kids. This means lower tuition costs for people getting their early childhood educator degree, and extra help to cover the costs for early childhood educators seeking further training.
And to ensure that every parent – no matter where they live – has access to quality, affordable child care, we will work with provinces and territories to create a national secretariat that will lay the groundwork for a pan-Canadian child care system.
An Affordable Education
We will continue to help students afford college and university.
These days, getting a degree or diploma isn’t a luxury – it’s a must-have for many good, well paying jobs. Because post-secondary education was unaffordable for many, we took action – increasing Canada Student Grants, reducing interest costs on Canada Student Loans, improving the repayment assistance program, and giving more help to adult students and people receiving EI.
Still, the costs of rent, books, and groceries – along with cuts to student aid by provincial Conservative governments – are putting an immense amount of financial pressure and stress on students. To help more students prepare for good jobs while taking on less debt, we will move forward with more generous Canada Student Grants and more affordable and flexible student loans.
We will give full- and part-time students up to $1,200 more per year, through increased Canada Student Grants, and will give students two years after graduation to get started in their career before they need to begin paying off their student loans, interest-free. We will also change the rules so that graduates won’t have to start repaying their loans until they make at least $35,000, and if their income ever falls below this level, their payments will be put on hold.
To make it easier for parents to focus on their families rather than their debt, we will allow new parents to pause their student loan repayments, interest-free, until their youngest child reaches the age of five. New parents who have graduated but haven’t yet finished paying off their student loans will also get to hit pause until their child turns five. Additional compensation will be offered to provinces and territories that do not participate in the Canada Student Loan Program.
Cell Phone Bills
We will help cut the cost of cell and wireless services by 25 per cent.
As Canadians, we pay some of the highest prices in the world for cell phone services, while Canadian telecom companies are among the most profitable in the developed world. To help lower monthly cell phone bills and bring costs in line with what people pay in other countries, we will move forward with cutting the cost of these services by 25 per cent in the next two years by using the government’s regulatory powers, saving an average middle class family of four nearly $1,000 per year.
Travel for Northerners
We will make life more affordable for people living in Canada’s North.
Whether for school, medical appointments, or to visit with family, people who call Canada’s North home need to travel – but the high cost of airfare can make it unaffordable for many. The current Northern Residents Deduction only allows people who already receive travel benefits through work to deduct travel costs, with no help for people whose work doesn’t help cover those costs.
To make travel more affordable for everyone in the North, we will move forward with improvements to the Northern Resident Deduction, giving people living in the Northern Zone at least $1,200 in deductible travel costs, with $600 in deductible travel costs for people in the Intermediate Zone. To make sure that these savings are not simply passed on to airlines and other transportation companies, we will direct the Competition Bureau to oversee the pricing of transportation in the North, and will review the communities covered by these zones to ensure that Northerners in all parts of the country get the help they need to make life affordable.