Ontario economic outlook report includes proposals to phase out small business tax rate and gas tax

Toronto – The Ontario government has released a progress report outlining specific measures aimed at growing the economy, addressing the province’s labour shortage and helping families and businesses keep costs down. These include a proposal to extend the phase-out of the small business tax rate, a proposal to extend the cuts to the gas tax and fuel tax rates and new funding for the Skills Development Fund.

The 2022 Ontario Economic Outlook and Fiscal Review highlights targeted measures, including the following:

• launching a voluntary clean energy credit registry to boost competitiveness, attract jobs and provide businesses with more choice in how they pursue their environmental and sustainability goals, as enabled by proposed legislation
• providing Ontario’s small businesses with $185 million in income tax relief over the next three years, benefiting about 5,500 small businesses through the proposed extension of the phase-out of the small business tax rate
• automatically matching property tax reductions for small businesses within all municipalities that adopt the small business property subclass
• making changes that would allow a person with a disability on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) to keep more of the money they earn by increasing the monthly earnings exemption from $200 to $1,000 per month, allowing the approximately 25,000 individuals currently in the workforce to keep more of their earnings and could encourage as many as 25,000 more to participate in the workforce
• providing an additional $40 million in 2022–23, for a total of $145 million for the latest round of funding in the Skills Development Fund
• providing an additional $4.8 million over two years, beginning in 2023–24, to expand the Dual Credit program, encouraging more secondary school students to enter a career in the skilled trades
• proposing to extend the cuts to the gas tax and fuel tax rates so that the rate of tax on gasoline and fuel (diesel) would remain at nine cents per litre until Dec. 31, 2023

In this report the government also announced funding and hiring measures for projects, including the following:

• a commitment of close to $1 billion to support critical legacy infrastructure such as all-season roads to the Ring of Fire as part of a Critical Minerals Strategy
• continued support the skilled trades, with Ontario seeing over 71,700 new registrations in apprenticeship programs, more than 25,000 Certificates of Apprenticeship and 5,600 Certificates of Qualification between 2018 and 2020.
• the addition of more than 11,700 health-care workers as well as over 800 internationally educated nurses who have become licensed nurses in Ontario through government-funded programming
• approximately $25.1 billion in highway expansion and rehabilitation over the next 10 years, including building Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass, and expanding Highway 40

Learn more at the province’s website.