Who is more accurate about how much tax a family pays in Canada- the family, the Fraser institute or the OECD.
The OECD report is a simple representation of all tax against GDP. It makes no claims about expressing the situation for the average family, but is accurately captures the system in aggregate with an appropriate relationship between numerator and denominator.
The Fraser Institute (in this instance) is mixing pot of contentious assumptions and inconsistently applied rules plugged into an obtuse model to generate the highest number they can. What they do is grab the national aggregate of everything that could conceivably called a tax (an arguably inflated numerator) and apply it against the arithmetic mean of only reported personal cash income (an inarguably understated) numerator to create a complete misrepresentation of the "typical family" and their tax burden. They don't even attempt to defend it when questioned. It's outrage fuel for those that won't stop to scrutinize.
Their basic (accurate) premise is that all taxes are in some way borne by individuals- which is technically correct. Whether by price inflation, wage depression, or drag on shareholder returns- that tax money comes from somewhere. BUT they take that premise and twist it into the assumption that therefore the entire tax burden is proportionally shared by all Canadian individuals so that they can take the lazy approach and just divide the total of payroll taxes, corporate income tax, resource royalties, corporate HST etc among "typical Canadians" - which is categorically incorrect. A material proportion of the tax burden is borne by non-Canadian employees. A material proportion of the price inflation is happening on exports. A material proportion of the drag on investment return is borne by either non-Canadian investors, or Canadian investors whose net worth/ income disqualifies them from the grouping of "typical Canadians"
Does the typical Canadian bear some of these costs? Undeniably. But not nearly to the extent they report. The Fraser Institute's own research (from the more qualified contributors), cited in the report, finds that a 1% change in the Corporate income tax rate would translate into a 0.15%-0.24% drag on wages. A 1% increase to payroll tax only a 0.03-0.14% drag.
Then there's things like the CPP. If you want to call it a tax rather than contributions to a defined benefit pension plan, fine. I disagree, but fine. But if you do that without either accounting for the present value of the accrued future benefit, or maintaining internal consistency and treating the net CPP payment as an untaxed government transfer rather than income and tax- you're skewing the result.
Don't take this as an argument for taxes, or against ours being too high. Just calling a spade a spade, and the annual FI tax series is complete BS