Who is behind this, and what it would take.
One citizen, one proposal, every number open to checking. Who wrote it, how it was built, what it would need from Parliament, and what it asks for.
One citizen, working independently.
CSEEF was conceived and directed by David V. Rogers, a Canadian citizen working independently.
Educated at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University), he spent more than two decades in senior management in the corporate print sector, and founded and ran the first digital printing company in Canada. He sold the company in 2006.
The proposal is not affiliated with any government, political party, company, think tank or advocacy group. It has no outside funding. No one has paid for this work.
Disclosure: this is a complex subject, and to communicate it clearly, artificial intelligence tools were used in the preparation of this site and its graphics.
My decisions. Checkable numbers.
The concept and every decision about it are mine. The grunt work, assembling company filings, running the arithmetic and writing the code for this site, was done with AI tools, and is credited that way at the foot of every page.
What keeps that honest is the trail. Every figure on this site comes from one data file, built from primary sources: company annual reports, regulatory filings and Statistics Canada tables. The Evidence page traces each number to its source, and the build stamp at the foot of each page names the exact version of the data in use.
Errors have been found and corrected along the way, and the corrections are part of the record. If you find another, say so.
A tax reform. An act of Parliament.
CSEEF is a tax reform, and it requires legislation. No company would issue shares to a public fund voluntarily, and none would be asked to. Parliament would have to change the law.
In practice that means amending federal tax law so that every corporation whose assessed federal tax liability exceeds $100M in a year also issues new non-voting treasury shares to the fund, equal in value to 25% of that liability, priced at the year-end share price less 5%.
The arithmetic is deliberately simple. Disputes over how much profit a company earned are settled the way they are today, by the Canada Revenue Agency, before any tax is assessed. Once the liability is assessed, the share count follows from it: one line on the return, no new audit, no cash changing hands. A company that owes no federal tax in a year issues nothing.
The legislation would also have to settle questions this site does not pretend to have answered: the constitutional footing for a federal requirement to issue shares, including for companies incorporated under provincial law; how the requirement fits with corporate and securities law and with stock exchange rules on new share issues; and the governance of the fund itself, with the safeguards that keep its shares off the market permanently.
These are questions for constitutional, tax and securities lawyers. The proposal invites them.
Not adoption. A formal review.
A formal, independent federal review: a costing of the mechanism and a legal assessment of how it could be enacted. One route is a costing by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which any Member of Parliament can request.
If the idea fails that test, it should fail in public, on the record. If it passes, Canada will have looked seriously at a fund built from ownership rather than borrowing.
The most useful reply is a hostile one.
Economists, tax practitioners, lawyers and journalists who want to test the numbers or the mechanism can write directly to contact.cseef@gmail.com. The full workbook is available on request.