Reshared from Canadians for Tax Fairness (C4TF) website here.

Canadians had at least $682B stashed in tax havens in 2024, a 165% increase since 2014.The use of tax havens has accelerated because Canada has continued to sign tax agreements that incentivize corporations to shift profits to tax havens. We estimate that the signing of five tax information exchange agreements with tax havens in the early 2010s led to $47.1B being shifted to tax havens over the next five years.

Due to a lack of financial transparency, the cost of tax havens to the public purse is difficult to estimate, but it is likely at least $15B annually. The members of the S&P/TSX 60, an index of many of Canada’s largest publicly-traded corporations, alone avoided $7B in taxes due to lower corporate tax rates in foreign jurisdictions in 2024. All these taxes were avoided by corporations that have subsidiaries in tax havens, of which there are at least 46.

While negotiations at the OECD and G20 over the last ten years have taken some meaningful steps, these bodies have ultimately failed to develop a global framework to prevent the use of tax havens by multinational corporations looking to avoid paying taxes in the countries where they make their profit.

In order to ensure Canada has the revenue to fund public services and infrastructure, Canada must immediately end tax agreements with known tax havens, require corporations to have a genuine business reason to set up subsidiaries in tax havens, and support the UN’s push for a global tax convention that puts a stop to tax avoidance by the ultra-wealthy.

Read the full report here.