Red Ink on the Prairies

A day after Quebec’s Finance Minister Eric Girard brought down a Budget featuring a $6.3 Billion deficit, Saskatchewan’s Finance Minister Jim Reiter tabled his government’s budget on March 19. Next up was Finance Minister Adrian Salas, who tabled the Manitoba Budget on March 24. The common thread: there’s lots of red ink on the Prairies. But that’s where the budget documents differ between Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Here’s the latest tax news and why it matters to the advice you give your clients.

Introducing the Knowledge Bureau News Network – a new financial education environment everyone can engage in and in the case of professional tax and financial advisors, to start earning CE/CPD Credits, too. Check out the three networks to choose from. There are absolutely no pre-requisites; just a desire to master the news and what it means to the decisions you need to make about your finances, your business and your influential role in your community. Here’s how it works:

Missed Today’s RWM™ & Virtual Campus Orientation? The Recording is Now Available! Continue the conversation. Revisit the insights. Take the next step in your professional journey.

Consider how common out of pocket medical expenses are and how many millions of people miss claiming them. We overview a few of those “dark horses” below.

Can Canadians build wealth in the current economic environment? Over the longer term?  After taxes?  These are important questions anytime but particularly at election time.  The traditional way to build wealth for Canadians families has been to buy a home, pay it off and even leverage the equity to borrow money to invest in the financial markets.  These wealth building exercises occur over a lifetime.  But today, new generations are building wealth differently.

Provincial budgets have now been tabled from every province but one: Ontario.  This includes those recently delivered by Newfoundland & Labrador on April 9 and PEI on April 10. Neither province introduced tax hikes, but both placed emphasis on helping businesses in their province. Check out the details:

According to a Statistics Canada report on March 31 labor market trends, job losses are starting to occur in Canada, for the first time in 26 months, with the unemployment rate ticking up to 6.7%.  Some of this can be attributed to tariff uncertainty.  But, amongst the 1.5 million unemployed people in Canada, 44% lost their jobs due to a layoff in the last 12 month and that means, doing a T1 return for 2024 will require specialized knowledge in reporting severance.  Here’s a primer on what to know: