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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.
What being an employee-owned company means to me
For what it’s like to be on the inside of an employee-owned company, we spoke to a few of the 750 employees who recently became 100-per cent owners of Taproot Community Support Services, a social services provider across B.C., Alberta and Ontario. Rewards the employees highlighted include company morale and spirit, for sure. They also include financial rewards paid out annually to each employee as dividends. Last year, each employee would have received about $1000 to $1500 on top of their salaries—and as the company succeeds over time, the employees will share financially in Taproot’s success.
Wealth inequality in Canada is far worse than StatsCan reports
Our government’s best available data on Canada’s wealth gap excludes, by design, the wealthiest families in the country. As SCP Director of Policy Dan Skilleter writes, if we didn’t have the Parliamentary Budget Officer fact-checking Statistics Canada’s work, their numbers would tell us the top one per cent own only 2.5 per cent of all wealth – not nearly 25 per cent of all wealth in Canada, as the PBO reports. We like to think of Canada as a beacon of egalitarianism compared to our southern neighbours, but when you add in data from "rich lists" published by Forbes and Maclean's, our wealth concentration looks quite similar to the U.S.