Trudeau will cut the sales tax and send election checks to millions of Canadians

Halifax: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government on Thursday announced the temporary removal of federal sales tax on a number of items, sending checks to millions of Canadians who are dealing with rising costs and a federal election coming up.
The cost of living crisis has left voters unhappy with Trudeau and the move comes ahead of an election that could come anytime between this fall and next October.
“Our government can’t set prices at the checkout, but we can put more money in people’s pockets,” Trudeau told a news conference in Toronto.
Under the plan, Canadians who worked in 2023 and earned up to 150,000 Canadian dollars ($107,440) would receive a check of 250 Canadian dollars. Trudeau noted that even people earning at the top of that amount are struggling to get by.
An estimated 18.7 million Canadians will receive a one-time cheque.
The Federal Goods and Services Tax break will begin on December 14 and end on February 15.
The government said the tax break would apply to a number of items, including children’s clothes and shoes, toys, diapers, restaurant food, beer and wine. It also applies to Christmas trees, a variety of snack foods and beverages, and video game consoles.
Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called the announcement a “two-month temporary tax gimmick” that would not increase the carbon tax.
Trudeau has said he will lead his Liberal Party into the next election, which could come anytime up to next October. No Canadian prime minister has won four consecutive terms in more than a century.
Trudeau channeled his father’s star power in 2015 when he reclaimed the country’s liberal identity in 2015 after nearly 10 years of Conservative rule. But the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s son is now in trouble. Canadians have been frustrated by the cost of living coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The latest Nanos poll has the Liberals trailing the opposition Conservatives 39% to 26%. The poll of 1,047 respondents has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
“Politically, it’s probably too late and it looks like a desperate move on the part of an unpopular government,” said Daniel Béland, a professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal. “It’s also bad public policy, at least from a financial standpoint.”