Today, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Finance and National Revenue, introduced Bill C-15, Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1, an important first piece of legislation to advance key Budget 2025: Canada Strong priorities.
Amid all the change and disruption happening in the world, Bill C-15 and by extension Budget 2025 action the government's plan to build one Canadian economy and catalyse nation-building infrastructure, empower Canadians with lower costs and new opportunities, and protect our people, our communities, and our sovereignty. By spending less but investing more in Canada's future, we will create more for ourselves than can ever be taken away and build an economy that is strong, self-sufficient, and resilient to global shocks.
Measures proposed in Bill C-15 to build a stronger Canadian economy include:
- Investing in Build Canada Homes to help double the pace of affordable home building over the next decade.
- Delivering the Clean Electricity investment tax credit to accelerate the investments needed to expand our clean electricity grid and enhancing the suite of existing Clean Economy investment tax credits to further support investments in clean technologies, clean technology manufacturing, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage.
- Introducing a Productivity Super-Deduction - a set of enhanced tax incentives covering all new capital investment that allows businesses to write off a larger share of the cost of these investments right away.
- Accelerating the path to construction of Alto High-Speed Rail, Canada's first high-speed, 300 km/hour railway from Toronto to Québec City, to speed up travel within Canada's most populated corridor.
- Supercharging investment in research and development by enhancing the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program, improving its process, and increasing the annual expenditure limit.
Measures proposed in Bill C-15 to make Canada's tax system fairer and more efficient, include:
- Exempting the Canada Disability Benefit from income and proceeding with expanding the Disability Supports Deduction to help protect the financial stability of persons with disabilities.
- Introducing a temporary Personal Support Workers (PSW) Tax Credit to provide support of up to $1,100 per year to eligible PSWs.
- Increasing the Lifetime Capital Gains Exemption to apply to up to $1.25 million of eligible capital gains, as announced in Budget 2024.
- Eliminating the Underused Housing Tax to simplify Canada's tax system and reduce administrative costs for the government and compliance costs for homeowners.
Measures proposed in Bill C-15 to strengthen and protect Canada's financial sector and make it work better for Canadians include:
- Combatting financial fraud by requiring banks to have policies and procedures to detect and prevent consumer-targeted fraud, and to mitigate its impacts, collect and report data on fraud to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, and allow consumers to disable certain account features, and adjust maximum transaction amounts.
- Enhancing access to funds deposited by cheque to give Canadians quicker access to their own money and reduce reliance on short-term credit like payday loans or overdraft protection, especially for low-income Canadians and seniors.
- Helping credit unions grow and compete by making it easier for them to enter the federal framework and expand so they can continue to serve more Canadians.
- Completing the consumer-driven banking legislative framework to allow Canadians and businesses to securely share their financial data with third-party providers and give consumers clearer choices and better tools to manage their finances.
- Creating a regulated space for stablecoins to further support innovation and help build trust in digital payments.
Measures proposed in Bill C-15 to create a more efficient government include:
- Helping renew the public service workforce by offering an Early Retirement Incentive Program through the Public Service Pension Plan to help attrition drive workforce reductions.
