Our Work
Over the past thirty years, most of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the wealthy. We want to help fix that by supporting ideas and policies that create more opportunities for working people to build wealth and own assets.
For policy solutions to the Trump administration’s economic and geopolitical threats, visit: Always Canada. Never 51.
The Ownership Solution
This special series features policy solutions that help more workers and communities profit from the value they create. We can redesign how our economy is owned so more Canadians benefit.
Budget 2025 did not extend the $10M capital-gains exemption for sales through EOTs
We share the disappointment felt across Canada’s business and advisory community that Budget 2025 did not make the $10 million capital gains exemption for sales through Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) a permanent feature of Canada’s tax system. The current incentive, passed only in 2024 with an expiry set for December 2026, means that the business community has not had adequate time to act on this opportunity or build adequate momentum for this promising succession model. In this statement, Employee Ownership Canada responds to the Budget and reaffirms its strong commitment to working with government and partners to make the capital gains exemption permanent, ensuring employee ownership trusts remain a viable, long-term option for Canadian businesses.
FAQs on Budget 2025 and the future of Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) in Canada
There is some confusion out there about Budget 2025 and employee ownership trusts (EOTs). To confirm, the federal government did not extend the $10M capital-gains exemption for sales through EOTs, in the budget released on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. Because the sale of a business to an EOT is a process that often takes more than a year, certainty on the rules is essential for owners, advisors and employees planning succession. In this FAQ, Employee Ownership Canada answers key questions about what’s enacted now, why the incentive matters for uptake and how the sector, businesses and the organization are moving forward from the Budget news.
Could increased employee ownership restore confidence in Canada’s economy? | The Hub
As companies consolidate under ever larger pools of private capital, there’s growing unease around who’s actually benefiting from corporate growth. Falice Chin writes in The Hub that it’s no coincidence, then, that voices across the political spectrum are now revisiting models of employee ownership as a potential antidote to widening wealth inequality, fading community ties and a growing distrust in capitalism itself. This deep-dive looks at how employee ownership trusts, or EOTs, could be an elegant policy remedy to a crisis of confidence in the modern economy.
Budget 2025 should bolster employee ownership to strengthen Canada’s economy | Canadian Dimension
Budget 2025 offers Canada a chance to make employee ownership permanent by extending tax incentives for employee ownership trusts (EOTs) and worker co-ops. In Canadian Dimension, Simon Pek, Lorin Busaan and Alex Hemingway write that doing so would boost productivity, reduce inequality and secure business succession, while keeping jobs and decision-making local. A modest investment promises significant economic and social dividends.
The Latest
Reflections on Budget 2025: Economic growth alone won’t save us
Budget 2025 includes hopeful initiatives that will deliver real benefits to working Canadians at this time. In this reflection, SCP CEO Matthew Mendelsohn explains that, strategically, we really like the Budget’s focus on industrial strategy, some tentative steps on making more capital available to a wider diversity of Canadians and commitments to loosen the grip that our oligopolistic sectors have over our economy. However, we are concerned by the lack of a strategic approach to providing more working people and young people a path to wealth, ownership and economic security. While the Budget responds to the wish list that corporate Canada has articulated for several years, there are no guarantees that they will indeed step up to invest—or that those investments will produce growth that benefits working people and communities.
Elbows up: A practical program for Canadian sovereignty | Report
Canada can’t become a sovereign country by doing the same old things, explains a new compendium of essays co-sponsored by the CCPA, the Centre for Future Work and several national civil society organizations. Elbows Up: A Practical Program for Canadian Sovereignty is a response to corporate rallying cries responding to Donald Trump with a familiar playbook: deregulation, austerity, tax cuts and fossil fuel expansion. The collection includes contributions from 20 progressive economists and policy experts, including SCP CEO Matthew Mendelsohn and others who participated in the Elbows Up Economic Summit held in September 2025 in Ottawa.
Pipelines and algorithms aren’t going to save us | The Hill Times
Smart investments in natural resources and AI alone will not get us through this moment of geopolitical rupture. As Matthew Mendelsohn writes in an op-ed for The Hill Times, SMEs contribute just over half of Canada’s GDP and employ 64 per cent of our people. We have to make more low-cost capital available to the smaller businesses, locally owned enterprises, not-for-profits and social enterprises who crucially employ and reinvest locally, act as important local economic infrastructure and provide services that are crucial for well-being. They are automatic stabilizers in the face of tariff threats outside our control.
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