Accounting
Canada pressured to respond to Trump’s tax cut regime
Donald Trump’s planned tax cuts would wipe out Canada’s slim corporate tax advantage, likely driving more capital from the northern nation and deepening its productivity
Canada’s federal corporate income tax rate is
Trump has proposed
His election “turns the heat up” on Canadian policymakers, said
“We need to break the glass on our tax competitiveness problem,” he said.
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, and Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s finance minister.
Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland estimated earlier this year that the tax rate on new business investment would rise to 16.8% by 2028, more than eight points lower than a projected 24.9% in the US. Trump’s election upends that expectation. And her government’s decision to raise the capital gains inclusion rate in June to “make Canada’s tax system fairer” drew
Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, fiscal policy has been geared toward redistribution and has recently involved new spending on housing, daycare, dental and drug plans. That’s increasingly been funded by corporate taxes, which represented 21% of the federal government’s revenues in fiscal year 2022-23 — the highest in data going back to 1966.
“Directionally, it’s becoming more clear that the US is going in one direction and Canada’s going the other,” Oakey said.
Trump’s
When Trump began slashing business taxes in 2017, Trudeau’s government
A top priority should be keeping those breaks as part of a “major shift” in Canada’s tax system, said economist
Mintz suggested reducing the country’s top personal tax rates, which are above 50% in most jurisdictions and kick in at lower incomes than in other Group of Seven countries such as France and Japan. Lost revenue could be recouped as businesses expand production or new firms are created, he said.
The country’s parliamentary budget officer,
Brain drain
High taxes add fuel to concerns about Canada’s
That so-called brain drain has been a longstanding issue. Tech founders often point to Slack Technologies Inc., which originated in Vancouver but set up in San Francisco before being
An artificial intelligence chip startup called Tenstorrent founded in Toronto — valued this month at $2.7 billion — quietly re-domiciled to Santa Clara, California, at the end of 2023, according to tech publication The Logic.
Others may follow suit.
“Almost every day we’re talking about whether, for our own scale plans, it makes sense to stay in Canada or whether the move is to go to the United States in 2025,” said Herman Chandi, co-founder of UrbanLogiq, a Vancouver-based startup that sells data analytics to governments.
Chandi said he’s mulling factors such as Trump’s tax agenda, the increase to Canada’s capital gains inclusion rate, “Buy American” procurement policies, the cost of living in Vancouver and anemic economic growth in Canada. His company’s investors may also require UrbanLogiq to move to the US, “and so those conversations are ongoing.”
Tax advisors have also had conversations like these.
“Anecdotally, I’ve heard from lots of professionals who have packed up and left or have at least said they’re considering leaving,” Oakey said.
Kenneth Keung, a tax advisor with Moodys Tax in Calgary, said he’s also seeing a ramp up in wealthy clients, including manufacturers, asking for guidance on how they can move their businesses and assets to the U.S. since Trump’s election.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party holds a substantial polling lead over the incumbent Liberals, has pledged to cut taxes and regulations for businesses, though he’s not specified how low taxes would go.
“Rampant tax increases by the Trudeau NDP-Liberal government have pushed money out of our country,” Poilievre said in a
Big Four firm PwC announced new agentic AI capacities, including a model that proactively identifies areas of value leakage and acts inside the tools teams already use to fix them itself.
The new solution,
The software, which is supported by PwC’s recently released
The system connects directly into ERP environments, continuously monitors key metrics, and acts inside the tools teams already use. For example, a supply chain agent might detect rising shipping costs and automatically reroute deliveries to reduce spend. Finance agents can spot and correct billing errors before they reach the customer. Clients typically see measurable efficiency gains in the first quarter, with continued improvements over time as the system learns and adapts.
“Too many transformations still rely on one-off pilots and stale data, stretching the gap from insight to impact and suffocating ROI,” said Saurabh Sarbaliya, PwC’s principal for enterprise strategy and value. “Agent Powered Performance flips the economics by distilling PwC’s industry transformation playbooks into AI agents that turn static insights into compounding gains, without rebooting each time.”
Agent Powered Performance is platform-agnostic and built on an open architecture so it can work across different LLMs based on client preferences and task-specific needs. It works with major enterprise platforms including Oracle, SAP, Workday and Guidewire.
Agent OS Model Context Protocol
PwC also
By integrating this standard, agent systems registered as MCP servers can be used by any authorized AI agent. This reduces redundant integration work and the overhead of writing custom logic for each new use case. By standardizing how agents invoke tools and handle responses, MCP also simplifies the interface between agents and enterprise systems, which will serve to reduce development time, lower testing complexity, and cut deployment risk. Finally, any interaction between an agent and an MCP server is authenticated, authorized and logged, and access policies are enforced at the protocol level, which means that compliance and control are native to the system—not layered on after the fact.
This means that agents are no longer siloed. Instead, they can operate as part of a coordinated, governed system that can grow as needs evolve, as MCP support provides the interface to external tools and systems. This enables organizations to move beyond isolated pilots toward integrated systems where agents don’t just reason, but act inside real business workflows. It marks a shift from experimentation to adoption, from isolated tools to scalable, governed intelligence.
Research Composer
Finally, a PwC spokesperson said the firm has also launched a new internal tool for its professionals called Research Composer, a patent-pending AI research agent embedded in the firm’s ChatPwC suite, designed to accelerate insight generation by combining web data with PwC-uploaded content.
Professionals will use the Research Composer to produce in-depth, citation-backed reports for either the firm or its clients. The solution is intended to enhance the quality of client work by equipping teams with research and strategic analysis capabilities.
The AI agent prompts users through a step-by-step research workflow, allowing them to shape how reports are packaged—tailoring the output to meet strategic needs. For example, a manager in advisory services might use Research Composer to evaluate white space opportunities across industries or geographies, drawing from internal reports and up-to-date market data.
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025.
Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.”
“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added
In 2023, Eide Bailly added
Top 100 firm
“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”
While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.
The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process.
“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”
PwC AI agent acts proactively to preserve value
Eide Bailly merges in Traner Smith
BMSS announces investment, collaboration with Knuula
New 2023 K-1 instructions stir the CAMT pot for partnerships and corporations
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