Canada Growth Summit 2025: Unleashing Canada’s potential in turbulent times

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.

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.

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.