Helpful Calculators from the Federal Government

The Canada Revenue Agency has a number of extremely useful calculators available online:

Payroll Deductions Calculator: calculates deductions of federal and provincial income taxes, EI premiums and CPP contribution to determine basic net income.

Child Benefits Calculator: calculates the Canada Child Tax Credit, National Child Benefit Supplement, and similar provincial benefits like the BC Family Bonus.

GST/HST Credit Calculator: calculates the tax credit for the Goods and Services Tax or Harmonized Sales Tax, and similar provincial benefits like the BC HST Credit.

Service Canada, the government agency that provides services on behalf of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, has a useful calculator of its own:

Canadian Retirement Income Calculator: a bit complicated but will calculate Canada Pension Plan benefits and Old Age Security payments.

The Department of Justice offers the:

Child Support Online Lookup: a simple calculator to determine child support.

CRA to Change Sharing of Child Benefits

Effective 1 July 2011, the Canada Revenue Agency will be changing its method for allocating the Canada Child Tax Benefit between separated parents who share their children's time equally or near-equally.

At present, when the CRA learns that separated parents have shared custody it rotates the child-related benefits and credits between the parties, such as the CCTB, the National Child Benefit Supplement, and the Universal Child Care Benefit, on a six-month on/six-month off basis. That's fair where both parents have about the same income, however, since the CCTB and the NCBS are indexed to income, it can be unfair where one parent would parent would get a lot of money out of the benefits and the other would get nothing.

Under the new rule, when when parents have shared custody the CRA will pay to each parent one-half of the benefits that parent would be entitled to receive if that parent were the only person entitled to the benefits. This will end the six month rotation of eligibility and will index the amount paid to only the income of the recipient.

The new rules will apply to:

• the CCTB and, I assume, the NCBS
  
• the UCCB
• the child-portion of the quarterly HST credit
  
• the BC Family Bonus

For more information, see the Child and Family Benefits page of the CRA's website, or call 800-387-1193.

Alberta Minister Pronounces upon the Proper Raising of Children

The CBC has reported that Alberta's Finance Minister, Iris Evans, has pronounced upon the raising of children in a recent speech to the Economic Club of Canada. According to the CBC, Minister Evans said that good parenting means that "when you're raising children, you don't both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise."

Of course, while we all wish we could stay at home to raise our kids, that's not always possible. Frankly, these days it seems that it's an almost universal economic necessity for both parents to bring home an income! One solution would be to raise the Canada Child Tax Benefit and the National Child Benefit Supplement to a level that would enable families to leave a parent in the home, but I'm not sure that such a suggestion would have much appeal to a conservative finance minister.