Shelter vs. Tax Shelter

Stephen Tapp is the CEO and Chief Economist at CSLS. He previously served as Chief Economist and SVP of Research, Data and Analytics at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, where he launched and managed the Business Data Lab. Stephen is the President of the Canadian Association for Business Economics and a member of the Canadian Statistics Advisory Council.

He has 25 years of diverse experience at many of Canada’s top economic organizations, including Export Development Canada as the Deputy Chief Economist, the Bank of Canada, Parliamentary Budget Office, Finance Canada, academia, as well as think tanks, such as the Institute for Research on Public Policy and the C.D. Howe Institute.

Stephen’s research was awarded the Purvis prize for Canadian economic policy and has been published in academic journals, including the Canadian Journal of Economics and Canadian Public Policy. He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Queen’s University and an Honours B.A. in Economics with Distinction from Western University.

Heather Scoffield is the first CEO of the Canadian Tax Observatory and a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. She has devoted her career to writing and public engagement around economic policy. Over the course of her 30-year career in journalism, she covered monetary and fiscal policy, economics, trade, environment and energy. She was the Ottawa bureau chief and economics columnist for the Toronto Star, where her writing focused on political economy and its effect on people.

Heather was also the Ottawa bureau chief for The Canadian Press, leading an award-winning team of political journalists. Before joining CP in 2009, she spent 12 years at the Globe and Mail covering policy and economics.

More recently, she was senior vice-president of strategy at the Business Council of Canada, collaborating with business leaders and policymakers to find practical solutions to the economic challenges of our time. Heather has a master’s degree in journalism from Western University and a BA in international relations from York University.