Budget 2024: Fairness for Every Generation

The Voice of Canada:

Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, released Budget 2024: Fairness for Every Generation.

It is a plan to build a Canada that works better for every generation, where younger generations can get ahead, where their hard work pays off, and where they can buy or rent their own home—where everyone has a fair chance at a good middle class life.

First, Budget 2024 takes bold action to build more homes. Because the best way to make home prices and rents more affordable is to increase supply—and quickly. Budget 2024 lays out a strategy to unlock 3.87 million new homes by 2031. Key measures include launching a new Public Lands for Homes Plan and a new Canada Rental Protection Fund, enhancing the Canadian Mortgage Charter, and creating a new Canadian Renters’ Bill of Rights.

Second, Budget 2024 will help make life cost less. Building on the government’s transformative expansion of Canada’s social safety net—from $10-a-day child care, to dental care for uninsured Canadians, to the first phase of national universal pharmacare—Budget 2024 advances the government’s work to lower everyday costs for Canadians. This includes helping to stabilize the cost of groceries, cracking down on junk fees to make prices fairer, and lowering the costs of banking. Budget 2024 makes transformative new investments, including the launch of a new National School Food Program and the new Canada Disability Benefit.

Third, Budget 2024 will grow the economy in a way that’s shared by all. It is a plan that will attract and increase investment, enhance productivity, and encourage the kind of game-changing innovation that will create good-paying and meaningful jobs and keep Canada at the economic forefront. It will also deliver new support to empower more of our best entrepreneurs and innovators to put their ideas to work here in Canada.This includes attracting more investment in the net-zero economy by expanding and delivering the major economic investment tax credits, securing Canada’s advantage as a leader in artificial intelligence, and investing in enhanced research grants that will provide younger generations with good jobs and new opportunities. And it means ensuring Indigenous Peoples share in this growth in a way that works for them.

Budget 2024 will make Canada’s tax system more fair by asking the very wealthiest to pay their fair share—so that we can make investments in prosperity for every generation, and because it would be irresponsible and unfair to pass on more debt to the next generations by ignoring our fiscal anchor. Budget 2024 is a responsible economic plan that upholds the fiscal objectives outlined in the 2023 Fall Economic Statement, and sees Canada maintain the lowest deficit- and net debt-to-GDP ratios in the G7.

Quotes

“Our government first came to office with a vow to strengthen and expand the middle class. We delivered on that pledge by reducing poverty, especially for children and seniors, and creating millions of good jobs for Canadians. Our work isn’t done. Budget 2024 renews our focus on unlocking the door to the middle class for millions of younger Canadians. We’ll build more housing and help make life cost less. We will drive our economy toward growth that lifts everyone up. That is fairness for every generation.”-The Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance