Canada’s largest corporations are pushing the Mark Carney government for faster and more radical changes in their favour, weeks after a federal budget that was seen by critics as already capitulating to many big business demands.
CEOs from two of the country’s largest business lobby groups, the Business Council of Canada and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, published an op-ed in the Toronto Star on December 4 calling the budget’s measures “baby steps” and asking for deeper tax cuts and fewer regulations.
“If Mark Carney wants to hit his $1 trillion investment goal for Canada, baby steps won’t do,” the article’s headline stated. The CEOs called for Canada to “distinguish itself in a big way on the tax front” from the United States.
“Given the level of uncertainty, it is unclear how sensitive business investment is to marginal tax changes,” they wrote.
It also celebrated an agreement Carney’s government made with Alberta, offering political support for a new pipeline. The CEOs said the agreement represented “a long-overdue recognition that Canada’s energy sector is central to developing a strong, independent and resilient economy.”
Economists from major labour organizations, however, say the business lobby’s requests are “utter nonsense” that will only increase the power of big corporations and make the rich even richer.
“We have been promised for decades that handouts to business are going to get us more and better jobs,” said D.T. Cochrane, a senior economist at the Canadian Labour Congress. “When are we going to stop falling for this lie? It’s a lie.”
Powerful Corporations Represented By Lobby
The Business Council’s board of directors includes Loblaw billionaire Galen Weston, oil and gas industry executives like François Poirier of TC Energy, and executives from some of the world’s largest asset management firms and their subsidiaries, including Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. That company is owned by Prime Minister Carney’s own former employer, Brookfield Asset Management.
The Chamber of Commerce’s board similarly includes executives from oil infrastructure company Enbridge, consulting firm Ernst & Young, and big banks.
“Broadly speaking, they represent the interests of this insatiable corporate or capitalist class,” said Zoë Abernethy, senior economist at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
Major companies may be Canadian, she said, but their interests are inseparable from the interests of American corporations because publicly traded Canadian companies are ultimately owned by investors. Those investors are sometimes American or partly American mega-firms like Blackrock and Brookfield.
“It’s impossible to separate what we consider Canadian businesses from American capital and American corporate interests,” she said.
Asked for specifics about what the Chamber of Commerce wants from the government, a spokesperson pointed The Maple to public documents that list its other demands.
During consultations for the 2026 federal budget, the chamber requested that Canada lower business taxes across the board, remove a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector, and complained that employers were facing increased costs for worker pensions.
A spokesperson for the Business Council said its president wasn’t available for an interview, but offered a written statement.
“The Business Council of Canada is urging the federal government to stay focused on a stable, predictable economic environment that encourages investment, protects Canadian jobs and strengthens North American competitiveness,” president Goldy Hyder wrote.
In September, the Business Council published a policy paper that made a number of complaints, including that rules requiring 10 paid sick days for workers in federally regulated industries are too rigid, and that a plastics registry is “one of the most onerous plastics regulations anywhere.”
The council has also suggested that Canada could use artificial intelligence to review its regulations and that “work can also be done to issue environmental permits after” an infrastructure project has already been approved.
Some industry requests were already taken care of in Carney’s first budget and other legislation.
For example, the Chamber of Commerce requested in August that greenwashing provisions in the Competition Act, which required companies to substantiate environmental claims about their operations against international standards, be repealed. Carney’s budget announced plans to remove the requirement that companies meet international standards.
“It’s hard to overstate the extent to which the Carney government has been rolling over to appease these corporate lobbyists,” Abernethy said. “It’s still not enough for them, and it never will be.”
She pointed out that the Carney government has also moved to give itself the power to exempt corporations from legislation except the Criminal Code for up to three years, skirted its duty to consult Indigenous Peoples on infrastructure projects, provided massive tax incentives to businesses and hired former corporate executives into government roles.
Cochrane said Carney has made other big giveaways to the wealthy, like cancelling a planned increase to the capital gains tax inclusion rate.
According to CUPE, capital gains from selling stocks, bonds or secondary properties are taxed at a much lower rate than employment income.
“That was in the benefit of the ultra wealthy,” said Cochrane. “That is who they’re listening to, and it costs the government billions of dollars in revenue.”
Carney’s cancellation of the digital services tax, which will save Amazon and Google billions of dollars, was another giveaway to industry, both Cochrane and Abernethy said.
Alternative: Direct Investment
The business lobby’s recent requests are informed by the same ideology that has driven governments to cut spending and lower taxes for decades, said Cochrane.
“We need the government to directly invest in what the economy needs,” he said.
During the Second World War, Canada’s aircraft industry grew from building around 40 airplanes per year to producing more than 16,000 planes in a few years.
“That is an unbelievable accomplishment,” Cochrane said. “Did we do that by offering tax breaks to the private sector? No, the government made a plan and directly invested where we needed investment to happen.”
Canada could make similar direct investments today, Cochrane said, to build non-market housing, public transit in and between cities, and a decarbonized energy sector.
