Canada's Liberal party will face down Trump. But will it address inequality? | Truthout

Canada entered the 2025 federal election with a Liberal minority government and it emerged from the 2025 federal election with a Liberal minority government. The outcome is shocking, given that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had been riding the top of the polls since the end of 2023.

Liberal leader Mark Carney now has a monumental task to lead Canadians through the turmoil of a second Donald Trump term, while also addressing various crises: affordability, housing, toxic drugs and health care, to name a few.

While these crises loomed over the election, one fundamental cause was never clearly identified: concentrated corporate power.

Polls showed that Canadians were concerned about finances, the economy and the cost of living just as, or more than, than Canada-U.S. relations.

And yet, each of the parties talked more about the need to help corporations rather than limit their reach. Now, Canada’s prime minister is a man who has been the top banker at not one, but two central banks, and the chairman of one of Canada’s largest asset management companies, Brookfield Asset Management.

“During crises, corporations have the power to just raise profits at everyone else’s expense,” explains Silas Xuereb, research and policy analyst with the nonprofit group Canadians for Tax Fairness. Xuereb points to the fact that during the first years of the pandemic, corporations raised their prices with very little pushback from the Liberal government. The result was profiteering the likes of which Canada has never seen before.

Trudeau’s Liberals didn’t try to reign in corporate profiteering, instead actually backtracking on the one measure that they had promised to implement — lowering the amount of profits that are sheltered from tax when a person or a business makes a large sale, called the capital gains inclusion rate.

As a result, corporate profits in 2022 were higher than in any other year in the history of Canada, at $685 billion — Canadians had never before witnessed profits as high. While profits dipped slightly in the following years — by 3 percent in 2023 — they still remained record-high.

In 2023, real estate and education, health and social assistance services had the largest profit margins, surpassing 25 percent, and oil and gas made the largest jump to reach nearly 20 percent from -11 percent. Real estate represents 40 percent of Canada’s GDP, higher than any other G7 nation. Real estate is big business for investors, which drives Canada’s housing affordability crisis.

Xuereb points to the fact that Canada’s tax laws allow corporations to reinvest their profits without being subject to tax. That means that what is left over is all that is taxed, and therefore, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of stockholders and doesn’t go toward creating jobs. “When we cut corporate taxes, corporations end up with more profits left over to give back to their wealthy shareholders,” he says.

The flip side of these profits is record-high and growing income inequality. One analysis from 2024 calculated that where the richest 20 percent of Canadians owned 67.7 percent of total wealth in 2023, the poorest 40 percent of Canadians owned just 2.7 percent of Canada’s total wealth. In monetary terms, where the wealthiest households hold $3.3 million, on average, lower income households hold just $67,038 on average.

Skyrocketing corporate wealth barely registered as an issue to debate during the election campaign. Instead, the parties all promised various tax measures that targeted personal income taxes rather than corporate profits.

The Conservatives’ campaign focused on eliminating several tax measures, which gave the Liberals a lot of space to promise a more balanced approach to taxation. Instead, they vowed to cut taxes as well. It was Carney’s first promise, something that the Liberals said would “keep more of what they earn and build a stronger Canada in the face of President Trump’s tariffs.” The proposed income tax cut would save the average middle and upper income household $300, and cost the state $22 billion over four years.

The Liberals also promised corporations the ability to shelter even more of their profits from taxes, both by maintaining the capital gains inclusion rate and by lowering corporate income tax rates if corporations reinvest profits either in Canada or abroad.

Despite the fact that Canadians said they were worried about the affordability crisis, ultimately, they did not vote for the two parties that did make very modest promises to tax wealthy Canadians more: both left-leaning parties, the Greens and the New Democratic Party, were decimated, and the latter didn’t elect enough people to hold party status. The Liberals increased their percentage of the popular vote by 10.9 percent, and the Conservatives increased theirs by 7.6 percent.

Under Carney, Xuereb warns that Canadians should expect more of the same.

“I don’t think there will be any huge changes to corporate taxation or really the taxation system in general,” Xuereb told Truthout. “I’m sure he will implement some tax breaks around the edges for corporations, which will just allow corporations to send more money to their wealthy shareholders. A status quo policy in this area is continuing a status quo that is already benefiting the wealthy and allowing billionaires to accumulate billions of wealth on the backs of working people.”

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This article originally appeared in Truthout. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license.