This is Globe Advisor’s weekly newsletter for professional financial advisors, published every Friday. If someone has forwarded this newsletter to you via e-mail, or you’re reading this on the web, you canFor years, a change to the capital gains inclusion rate was a popular bogeyman in pre-budget speculation, but this year the Liberal government surprised almost everyone by actually raising it.
It’s important to note that the government estimates that corporations will pay more than half of this additional tax. That includes tax paid by private companies owned by individuals, but I don’t think that burden on individuals is captured in that 0.13 per cent personal tax statistic. We don’t have any detail on this point. But from my discussion with Department of Finance officials at the budget lockup, I don’t think the intention is to integrate this additional corporate tax on capital gains with the personal tax applying to dividend distributions. In other words, there seems to be the potential for there to be effectively a tax cost attributable to generating capital gains on investment property within a private company that won’t be recognized at the personal level.