What have four Conservative budgets done to personal income taxes?

Since the Conservatives won the federal election of 2006 and formed the government, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has delivered four budgets. While the constraints of a minority Government and a strategy of incremental politics have limited changes to tax policy, the accumulated weight of four budgets may still reveal interesting patterns and some sense of direction for Conservative tax policy. In this paper, I describe and analyze the personal income tax policy changes of the 2006 through 2009 budgets. The analysis starts by fitting the changes into a conceptual framework, and then proceeds to an empirical study of tax burdens by income group, as well as by marital status, the presence of children, and whether there are seniors present.