Active Research
Projects

Fair and Accountable Canadian Taxation (FACT): The Fair Tax Initiative

FACT is a national partnership bringing together researchers at the University of Calgary, Carleton University, and the Université de Sherbrooke with two non-partisan policy organizations — Social Capital Partners and the Canadian Tax Observatory — to build durable research and knowledge-mobilization infrastructure on the fairness, accountability, and administration of Canada's tax and transfer system. The partnership responds to evidence that the system has become harder to navigate and, in places, less progressive, and that administrative barriers leave eligible benefits unclaimed — patterns that can weaken public trust in a cornerstone institution.

The work is organized around three connected themes: the tax mix and progressivity of Canada's tax system, led by Tedds; redistribution and public value, applying the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) framework to Canadian transfers and programs, led by Genest-Grégoire; and administrative equity and access, examining barriers to filing, benefit take-up, and compliance, led by Robson. Over three years FACT will convene policy roundtables, open-access tools, and national conferences, and train graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in applied public-finance research and knowledge mobilization.

Selected outputs

ProperTEA: Property Tax Equity Assessment

Property taxes are among the most consequential fiscal instruments affecting housing affordability in Canada, yet their distributional effects are poorly understood. ProperTEA examines horizontal and vertical (in)equities in Calgary's property tax assessment system — whether comparable properties are assessed consistently, and whether the tax burden falls proportionally across income groups and neighbourhoods. The project extends this analysis to assess property tax regressivity across Alberta more broadly, with direct policy implications for housing affordability reform.

Selected outputs

Microsimulation & Distributional Analysis

Aggregate policy outcomes hide more than they reveal. This research programme applies tax and transfer policy rules to representative individual-level data — using Statistics Canada's SPSD/M, the T1 Family File, the Longitudinal Administrative Databank, and the Canadian Tax and Credit Simulator — to reveal who gains, who loses, and by how much when policy changes. The approach generates granular distributional pictures of policy impact across income groups, family types, and regions before reforms are implemented, directly informing evidence-based policy design.

This work covers much of the same analytical ground as the Parliamentary Budget Office — costing tax and transfer reforms, modelling benefit interactions, and evaluating fiscal impacts of policy proposals — but with distributional analysis built in by default, not treated as optional. Where the PBO typically leads with aggregate fiscal cost, this research leads with who bears that cost and who receives those benefits, disaggregated by income, family type, region, and other axes of difference. The result is policy analysis that is both fiscally rigorous and equity-centred.

Selected outputs

Mapping the System of Income & Social Supports in Alberta, BC, and Nunavut

Canada's income and social support system is one of the most complex fiscal architectures in the country — layered across federal, provincial, and territorial jurisdictions, with hundreds of interacting programs governed by different eligibility rules, delivery mechanisms, and administrative regimes. Yet this system is poorly understood, even by the people who administer it.

This cross-jurisdictional research programme is building the most comprehensive publicly available maps of income and social support systems across three Canadian jurisdictions — documenting program complexity, adequacy gaps, cliff effects, and realistic reform pathways in partnership with governments and community organizations. The Alberta phase, supported by a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant in partnership with Vibrant Communities Calgary, extends and deepens prior mapping work completed for BC (190+ programs) and Nunavut (105 programs), building the evidence base needed to identify gaps, overlaps, and reform priorities in Alberta's social safety net — and making that evidence usable by policymakers, advocates, and researchers.

Related outputs

Material Deprivation Indicators and Social Policy Design in Canada

Official Canadian poverty measures focus almost entirely on income — but income is only one dimension of a household's material wellbeing. This research, led by Gertruda Notten (University of Ottawa) with Lindsay M. Tedds as co-applicant, demonstrates how material deprivation indicators — which measure adverse outcomes arising directly from a lack of money — can improve the design and evaluation of Canadian social policies. Material deprivation captures what income measures miss: a household's ability to afford necessities regardless of their financial situation, specific needs, or local costs.

The project evaluates three Canadian social policies using material deprivation as the poverty metric rather than income: the Canada Child Benefit (income-tested cash transfer), the Canada Dental Care Program (in-kind transfer whose poverty reduction effects are entirely invisible to income poverty measures), and the new Alberta Disability Assistance Program (ADAP) — the last of which is led by Tedds. Given the highly specific needs and circumstances of ADAP clients, material deprivation indicators provide a more reliable assessment of whether the program offers a genuine pathway out of poverty than income thresholds built for a reference household. The project uses Food Banks Canada survey data (2023–2026), microsimulation, and quasi-experimental methods.

Funding

GBA+ and Intersectional Policy Analysis

Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA+) is Canada's primary framework for assessing how policies affect diverse groups — yet its implementation has been uneven, contested, and subject to political reversal. This research examines the design, application, and limitations of GBA+ as a tool for embedding intersectionality into Canadian public policy, tracing the framework's evolution and the structural conditions that enable or undermine it. Current work focuses on documenting the erosion of GBA+ capacity in the federal government and developing a more robust intersectional framework for policy analysis and design.

Selected outputs