Archive: July, 2020

Kelly McCauley, MP for Edmonton West, requested that the PBO report on costs incurred from the federal Government’s policy of allowing employees to use pay code 699 – paid leave for other reasons for leave related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This report presents the findings from 699 leave data provided by the Treasury Board Secretariat and supplementary data provided by the Canada Revenue Agency.

In May 2020 the Canada Development Investment Corporation (CDEV) published its Annual Report 2019, and in June 2020, published its First Quarter Report for 2020. PBO examined these documents as part of our ongoing monitoring of financial reporting on the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMP) and Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMEP).

The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) supports Parliament by providing economic and financial analysis for the purposes of raising the quality of parliamentary debate and promoting greater budget transparency and accountability.

This report identifies key issues arising from the Government’s Economic and Fiscal Snapshot published on 8 July 2020.

Peter Julian, MP for New Westminster—Burnaby, requested that the PBO use the recent publication of PBO’s refined family wealth model to estimate the revenues of an annual net wealth tax on Canadian resident economic families equal to 1 per cent of net wealth above $20 million. All asset and liabilities are included in the net wealth tax base, except wealth won in lotteries. The PBO estimates 13,800 Canadian economic families would pay the net wealth tax and that the total net revenue of this measure would be $5.6 billion in 2020-21. The time horizon for this costing is aligned to the PBO’s current Economic and Fiscal Scenario, although fiscal impacts can be expected in subsequent years.

This report responds to a request from Senator Yuen Pau Woo to estimate the post-COVID cost of aguaranteed basic income (GBI) program, using parameters set out in Ontario’s basic income pilotproject. PBO presents three estimates based on scenarios that phase-out the benefit by $0.50, $0.25 and $0.15 for each dollar of employment income for the last six months of 2020-21. Also, this reportconsiders the provincial breakdown of the GBI cost. The total estimated gross cost of the defined GBI would range between $47.5 billion and $98.1 billion based on the three scenarios for the six-monthperiod from October 2020 to March 2021.  In addition, the report provides an estimate of the federaland provincial programs for low-income individuals and families, including many non-refundable andrefundable tax credits that could be replaced by the GBI program. PBO estimates the potential offsetsfrom repealing these measures would be just over $15 billion for the same period.