Opportunity: Canadian Dollar Stabilizes, Somewhat

Things have started to turn around for the Canadian dollar in the second quarter of 2025. It hit a 22 year low in January of 2025. Investors and property owners, who have been swooning at the high burn rate in their travel plans and property maintenance abroad, may wish to consider recent more positive trends and consider some risk mitigation opportunities now that the dollar is stabilizing somewhat.  

Consider how common out of pocket medical expenses are and how many millions of people miss claiming them. We overview a few of those “dark horses” below.

Can Canadians build wealth in the current economic environment? Over the longer term?  After taxes?  These are important questions anytime but particularly at election time.  The traditional way to build wealth for Canadians families has been to buy a home, pay it off and even leverage the equity to borrow money to invest in the financial markets.  These wealth building exercises occur over a lifetime.  But today, new generations are building wealth differently.

Provincial budgets have now been tabled from every province but one: Ontario.  This includes those recently delivered by Newfoundland & Labrador on April 9 and PEI on April 10. Neither province introduced tax hikes, but both placed emphasis on helping businesses in their province. Check out the details:

According to a Statistics Canada report on March 31 labor market trends, job losses are starting to occur in Canada, for the first time in 26 months, with the unemployment rate ticking up to 6.7%.  Some of this can be attributed to tariff uncertainty.  But, amongst the 1.5 million unemployed people in Canada, 44% lost their jobs due to a layoff in the last 12 month and that means, doing a T1 return for 2024 will require specialized knowledge in reporting severance.  Here’s a primer on what to know:

Did you know that total health care spending in Canada is estimated at over $9,000 per person and is estimated by Health Canada to be between 10.9% and 13.4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and that the average out-of-pocket health care cost was $1,189 per capital in 2022.  With a shrinking GDP on the horizon through a potentially recessionary period ahead, it’s important to know which of the numerous out-of-pocket expenses will qualify for the Medical Expense Tax Credit (METC) claimed on Line 33099 of the T1 General tax return.  Today, we discuss medical travel costs, moving for medical reasons and other medical deductions you don’t want to miss on your tax returns. Here’s an overview:

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