The rate at which I tax myself, though ...

Would you like to know an Interesting Fact? The highest personal income tax rate in Ontario (13.6% on income over $220K) is lower than the lowest personal income tax rate in Quebec (15% on income up to $42,705). (If you think we are not still living in Mike Harris's Ontario, the chart here will set you straight.) But that is not today's point; today's point is that Ontario's lowest personal tax rate (5.05% on income up to $42,960) is the lowest of any province or territory, and that this is a handy thing to know if anyone tries to tell you that the Ontario government should've cut taxes for the "working poor" or "working class" or whatever instead of raising the minimum wage at Tim Horton's. (It's a sign of how completely Tim Horton's has taken over Canadians' perceptions of the Canadian fast food market that it hardly even seems remarkable that it's Tim Horton's we're talking about and not McDonald's (or, for that matter, anything else, at all)--which, when I was a kid, if minimum wage went up 20%, is absolutely what we would've been talking about.) Given the "basic personal amount" of tax-free income of around $11K, by my back-of-napkin calculations, a full-time employee making minimum wage at the old rate and never taking time off would owe somewhere around $650 in Ontario income tax (assuming they've got no significant deductions to offset it, which, I suspect this is getting to be a pretty rare creature, but what do I know); that same employee gets a raise of nearly $5000/year from the minimum wage increase, minus a nominal increase of $250 in provincial and $750 in federal income taxes. A part-timer working 24 hours/week would owe about $175 in taxes, and gets an annual raise of nearly $3000, minus a nominal increase of $150 in provincial and $450 in federal income taxes. Even workers making $13.50/hour, at either 40 or 24 hours per week, get at least a couple hundred bucks more per 52 weeks from a pay raise to $14/hour than they would from cutting their provincial income tax rate to 0. (This, of course, ignores the reasons not to raise minimum wage, which are actually good (though not necessarily compelling) reasons given some widely shared assumptions, and to use other measures to raise net incomes at the low end. The point is just that thinking you can do much of anything by cutting the lowest personal income tax rate in Ontario is stupid.)

Currently at Havelock: -19.7. High today so far: -19.3. Looks like today is going to be the first day I'm aware of that it hasn't gotten above -20 at Bancroft. Yet another day where for some part of the morning it was colder at Bancroft than at Alert.