No help for ‘average taxpayer’
Measures boost ‘big business’ more than family coping with mortgage and child-care bills
Tuesday’s budget won’t make much difference to Pearl Almeida’s household budget, as the Harper government shifted its focus to balancing the books and trumpeting its track record since coming to office.
“There’s not much in here for them,” Bruce Ball, a spokesman for the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada, said after looking at the family’s finances.
In a measure aimed at encouraging Canadians to save more for retirement, the budget doubled the maxi- mum amount Canadians can contribute to their tax free savings accounts (TFSAs) to $10,000 a year from the current $5,500.
But with a mortgage, two young children and child-care expenses, Almeida and her husband, Chris Senchak, are unable to set aside even the current maximum TFSA savings.
“No average person has $10,000 sitting around every year to put into a savings account,” Senchak said.
“It’s great for big businesses and CEOs and people who already have money. For the average person, the average taxpayer, this is not helping us at all.”
Even though they didn’t expect any big wins from this year’s budget, they still felt disappointed. “I thought they would at least have thrown a couple of tidbits out there for the average person,” Senchak said.
On paper, the family’s combined income meets the definition of “middle class.” Statistics Canada defined the median family income — the spot where half earned more, half earned less — at $74,890 in Ontario in 2012.
But the family doesn’t feel like they lead a middle-class life.
“In spite of making decent comfortable wages — which the both of us put together are — we are still struggling and we are still doing it paycheque to paycheque,” Almeida said.
They will benefit from incomesplitting announced last fall — Almeida earns twice what her husband does — but she fears the extra $650 “will just come out in the wash.” With files from Olivia Carville