C-4 – the Making Life More Affordable for Canadians Act – introduces some affordability measures and makes it easier for political parties to do what they want with your personal information.
Part 1 – Lowering income taxes
Part 1 of C-4 is nice and straightforward. It lowers the tax rate for the lowest tax bracket (up to $57,375 of income) from 15% to 14.5% for 2025 and 14% after that.
Quick note on the math here, if you make at least $57,375 the government estimates you’ll save $420/ year, with people who make less than that saving less. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates this will cost the government about $5.6 billion a year.
Edit: Due to a horrible typo I had accidentally marked it as $42/year, not $420. Sorry about that!
Part 2 – First-Time Home Buyer Rebate
Part 2 creates a new rebate for first-time home buyers. The rebate effectively removes the GST on first-time home buyers buying a home worth up to $1 million, and reduces it for homes between $1 million and $1.5 million. Note that this includes buying a new home from a builder, hiring someone to build a home, or buying shares in a housing co-op.
To qualify for this rebate you need to be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident at least 18 years old, and you cannot have lived in a house you or your spouse/common-law partner owned within the last 4 years. This includes homes outside of Canada. Note that if a group of people are buying a home as long as one of them qualifies for the rebate they’re allowed to apply for it, as long as they’re the first one to occupy the new home.
Home that qualify for this rebate must have construction or substantial renovations start before 2031 and must be completed before 2036.
Part 3 – Cancelling the Consumer Carbon Tax
There’s a decent bit here but the results are pretty simple: The Carbon Tax no longer applies to fuels and combustible waste. You won’t notice much here as the tax on these was dropped to 0% back in April, this is just the legislation that officially removes it. It also ends all rebates and programs related to this tax.
Part 4 – Loosening privacy laws for political parties
And now for something completely different! You didn’t really think we’d get through a multi-part piece of legislation without something unrelated being crammed in there did you?
So first up C-4 repeals the part of the Canada Elections Act that requires political parties to hand over their privacy policy to the Chief Electoral Officer. The CEO will no longer be responsible for making sure parties are following their privacy policies. Instead, each party will choose a privacy officer to oversee protection of your personal information and how the party’s using it. Each party will also be expected to make their privacy policies public, and include contact information for their privacy officer in it.
Under Part 4 anyone endorsing a member of a political party will be able to carry out any activities involving personal information. That includes collecting, using, disclosing, retaining, and disposing of personal information, unless the party’s policy says otherwise. They will still need to follow federal regulations on the use of personal information, but explicitly do not have to follow provincial rules.
Something that definitely raises a lot of questions to me is that this part of C-4 will be retroactive to May 31, 2000. So any privacy breaches or misuse of personal information that might have occurred since then will be handled under this new legislation. I’m not entirely sure why they need this to be retroactive, and I haven’t found any explanations for it nor have I found any for why this needs to be in an affordability Bill in the first place.
To be clear, this use of personal information will still be limited to political campaigns but that should still be deeply concerning. People are pointing at the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how this would legalize what happened there. For those who aren’t aware, Cambridge Analytica had created a Facebook app that was a basic survey. However taking the survey gave them access to your full Facebook profile. They then harvested this information and sold it to politicians, where it was used to create custom advertising with a lot of misinformation to promote Brexit and in support of Trump in 2016. Nobody agreed to having their information used this way, and this part of C-4 would simply allow all political parties to pull stunts like this.
Progress of C-4
C-4 went up for its Second Reading vote and passed with everyone voting in favour of it. It’s currently before the Standing Committee on Finance.
If you’ve got opinions on this, contact your MP and let them know!
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