Middle-income families face higher federal income taxes: report

Middle-income Canadians will pay an average $840 more in federal income taxes this year under the Trudeau government.

According to a report by the Fraser Institute, more than 80 per cent of middle-income families fall into that category.

Report co-author Charles Lammam said this applies to families with children, whose incomes fall between $77,089 and $107,624 a year.

“Twenty per cent of all the families with children in Canada, there’s about four million of them,” he said.

Lammam said all of the tax changes made by the government need to be taken into consideration, instead of looking at them in isolation.

“The federal government did reduce the second-lowest personal income tax rate from 22 to 20.5 per cent,” he began. “But it also scrapped a series of tax credits that were used by the same families to reduce their tax burden.”

That includes the children’s fitness, education, textbook and public transit tax credits.

The government also did away with income splitting, and this doesn’t account for other changes on the horizon.

“The government has announced payroll tax increases that will take effect starting in 2019,” said Lammam. “It also doesn’t include the higher taxes that we’ll be paying to heat our homes and fill up our cars through a higher carbon tax that’s also been enacted by the federal government starting next year.”