Young and Frederick - ScotiaMcLeod Whitby

Source: Globe and Mail

The golden age of budget goodies is over.

Remember last year's Home Renovation Tax Credit, or the debut of the Tax Free Savings Account in 2008? There's nothing remotely like them in the latest federal budget.

Focused on making a transition from spending on economic growth to deficit reduction, the Conservative government has offered a few crumbs for single parents and families with disabled children, and focused on closing tax loopholes. Employees who collect stock options, that one's for you.

Still, if you view this budget in the context of a struggling global economy that has left Canada better off than most but hardly unscathed, then keeping the status quo on taxes, for the most part, is a kind of victory.

For the typical taxpayer, the key message in the budget could very well be this simple sentence: "The Government will not raise taxes and will not cut transfers to persons and other levels of government." The federal deficit is pegged at $53.8-billion for the current fiscal year, but the government does not see taxpayers as part of the solution. The GST remains untouched, and so do personal income taxes and provincial transfers that, if cut, would inevitably play out in tax increases or user fees at other levels of government.

The budget measures most widely relevant to your financial life could well be ones that highlight this government's continued interest in the way banks treat their customers. There's a proposal to limit the hold period on cheques to four days from the current seven, and to allow people access to the first $100 in 24 hours.

As well, there's a ban on the use of negative billing, a practice where a bank customer might, for example, have to specifically indicate a desire not to buy life insurance coverage to pay off the balance on a mortgage or credit card. If you've ever tried to break a mortgage to take advantage of lower interest rates, you'll appreciate a proposal to standardize the calculation and disclosure of mortgage prepayment penalties.

A measure that could improve your banking experience down the line is to make it easier for credit unions to operate as a national, rather than provincial, entity.

In theory, this could allow credit unions to become more formidable competitors to banks, in part by allowing access to Canada Deposit Insurance Corp.

For individual taxpayers, the government's loophole-plugging will primarily affect employees who receive stock options.

The first change will affect stock option benefits paid in cash, rather than in actual stock. The problem as far as Ottawa is concerned is that both employees and employers can claim tax breaks in this situation. The budget proposes changes that would make the stock option tax deduction available only in cases where employees use their stock options to buy shares of their employer.

Starting immediately, the government will also require that taxes be paid on stock options related to publicly traded companies in the year when they are exercised by employees. The option to defer taxes until the stock is sold is being eliminated.

Rules are also being toughened to exclude use of the medical expenses tax credit by people undergoing surgery strictly for cosmetic reasons - think Botox treatments or hair replacement - and to ensure that scholarship, bursaries and fellowships retain their tax-exempt status only when used for educational purposes.

Single parents with young kids and families using the registered disability savings plan (RDSP) will benefit from the few new measures in the budget that ease the tax burden on individuals. For single parents, the budget will remove an inequity that could potentially cause them to pay more in taxes on universal child care benefits than a single-earner two-parent family with a similar income.

The budget would allow single parents to have their benefits, which total $100 per month for kids under 6, taxed in the hands of dependent children. The net effect would be to eliminate tax on the benefit in most cases, which in turn would save a single parent with one child up to $168 in 2010.

In a tweak of the RDSP, introduced in the 2007 budget, the government will allow a deceased person's registered retirement savings plan or registered retirement income fund to be rolled over into the RDSP of a financially dependent child or grandchild on a tax-free basis. The rollover will be subject to a lifetime RDSP contribution limit of $200,000, and it won't be eligible to generate funds from the government through the Canada Disability Savings Grant.

One more RDSP change would allow people to carry ahead unused entitlements for the disability savings grant and the Canada Disability Savings Bond for 10 years.