NDP looks to close offshore tax loopholes, with a focus on Brookfield’s Bermuda ties

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This article was published 04/04/2025 (559 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MONTREAL – NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is pledging to close loopholes that allow corporations to put money in offshore accounts, while taking aim at Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s work for Brookfield Asset Management. 

At a campaign stop in Montreal on Friday, Singh said an NDP government would make companies provide a “genuine business reason” for having offshore accounts. 

The party would also end tax agreements with countries like Bermuda, review the tax code to find and close loopholes on corporate taxes and have public, country-by-country financial reporting.

The NDP says Canada loses out on $39 billion annually in unpaid corporate taxes.

“We’ve got large corporations in Canada that purposely continue to avoid paying their fair share by using tax havens and other loopholes. It is wrong,” Singh said. “If you can make a profit in Canada, you should pay your taxes in Canada.”

Singh made the announcement in a Montreal riding where the NDP suffered a narrow loss in a byelection last year. New Democrats currently hold just one riding in Quebec, and polls suggest they’re unlikely to make gains in the province.

But the party is hoping that if Carney pulls the Liberals to the centre, that could open up more space on the left — especially in a progressive city like Montreal. 

During the news conference, Singh focused heavily on Carney’s work for Brookfield, the investment company he chaired until he entered the Liberal leadership race in January. 

Last week, Radio-Canada reported that the Liberal leader co-headed a pair of green investment funds worth a combined $25 billion that were headquartered in Bermuda — a country widely viewed as a global tax haven.

Singh said the company avoided $5.3 billion in Canadian taxes between 2021 and 2024, money he says could have gone into funding things like health care and public transit in Canada. 

“These are Canadians. They make their money in Canada. They make billions and billions of dollars, and they avoid paying their taxes by simply registering in other countries, even though all their profits are being made in Canada,” he said. 

“It is unjustifiable for a company as massive as Brookfield … to make that much money and to not want to contribute back into the society that allows them to make their money in the first place.”

Carney has said the funds are structured to avoid paying tax multiple times before ending up in the hands of the beneficiaries, which include Canadian pensioners. “It doesn’t avoid tax,” he told reporters last week.

Singh rejected that explanation as “Mark Carney banker speak.”

“Companies that make money in Canada should be taxed in Canada,” he said. “It’s very straightforward.”

Daniel Tsai, business and law professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, told The Canadian Press recently that funds are often set up to take advantage of bilateral treaties and tax credits between nations to avoid “double taxation” — which happens when income moving among a global company’s subsidiaries is taxed at multiple points before reaching its final destination.

The NDP was reduced to a single seat in Quebec in 2019, following the Orange Wave in 2011 that propelled the party to form official opposition. Poll aggregator 338Canada currently projects the party will only win that one seat, held by MP Alexandre Boulerice, as the Liberals surge in the province. 

But Singh said he believes progressive voters are increasingly concerned that a Liberal government under Carney will make cuts to services. 

“If you’re worried about those cuts, you’re worried about someone that’s not going to put an end to offshore tax havens, then you can vote for New Democrats,” he said.

Singh said the NDP has helped provide dental care to 500,000 Quebecers as part of the supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals. “Imagine what we could do if you sent more of us… to Ottawa,” he said. 

Boulerice told reporters he sees an opportunity for New Democrats as Carney moves the Liberals to the right. “For us, it’s clearer and clearer that the progressive vote has to go to the NDP because the new Liberal party is not progressive anymore,” he said. 

Craig Sauvé, the NDP’s candidate in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, a seat the NDP narrowly failed to capture in a close three-way race last year, said he’s hopeful he’ll be able to flip the riding this time around. 

“There’s nobody in the NDP because it’s easy,” he said. “We’re there because it’s the right thing to do.”

Meanwhile, British Columbia NDP Premier David Eby endorsed Singh in a video posted to social media on Thursday, calling on voters to “re-elect NDP MPs to make sure they’re out there advocating for Canadians every day.”

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

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The message comes after former New Democrat leader Tom Mulcair wrote in an op-ed for BNN Bloomberg last week that voters should avoid vote-splitting and cast their ballots strategically.

Mulcair said the threat presented by U.S. President Donald Trump has turned the federal election into a two-party race between the Liberals and the Conservatives, calling other parties “an afterthought.”

Singh is heading to Atlantic Canada this weekend, with stops planned in St. John’s, Nfld. and Halifax. 

— With files from Craig Lord in Ottawa and Chuck Chiang in Vancouver

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 4, 2025.