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It doesn't seem like there's as much incentive to misclassify employees as independent contractors in Canada. With government-provided health care and low/no payroll taxes, it isn't as lucrative to substitute contractors for full-time employees.

I've worked with plenty of contractors and few of them were 'independent' by any reasonable definition, but no one seems to care much. Every contractor I've worked with seemed to be in it to shift the risk/reward ratio in their favour, rather than because they couldn't find a full-time job.




CPP (Canadian Pension Plan) and EI (employment insurance) take around %12 of the first $50'000 annually (CPP maxes out after that) so it is pretty significant if you hire mostly median waged people.


IIRC self-employed people need to pay the employer part of those, so it's just a matter of changing who pays, not the total taxes.




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