Minister MacDonald will work with the finance minister to address succession planning
Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald was in the House of Commons on April 27 where he fielded a question from a Conservative MP.
Jacob Mantle, the MP for York—Durham, wanted to know if the Liberals will make farm transfer and succession planning easier for Canadian farm families.
“If a farm is passed to a child, it is tax-deferred. If a farm is passed to another family member, it is fully taxed. The result is that over 57,000 farms have been lost in the last 20 years,” Mantle said before asking if the minister of finance will address this issue.
The minister’s answer indicates work on this file is ongoing.
“It is something that, through the national policy framework with stakeholders across the country, has been brought up a couple of times. I will have further discussions with the minister of finance,” he said.
The Liberal government under Mark Carney has taken steps to make farm succession easier.
In March 2025, for example, Carney announced the cancellation of the proposed hike in the capital gains inclusion rate. And the government maintained the increase in the Lifetime Capital Gains Exemption limit to $1.25 million on the sale of small business shares and farming and fishing property.
Multiple resources are available for Canadian farm families in the succession planning stage.
This January, for example, the Canadian Centre for Agricultural Wellbeing, AgriRisk Managers, and Loft32, launched Groundworks.
The program supports farmers by addressing three areas where gaps exist in farm succession conversations.
Farms.com has also compiled this list of five succession planning books to consider reading.
Succession planning is now also a datapoint in the Census of Agriculture.
The 2021 ag census discovered 12 per cent of Canadian farms have some sort of plan. That number was up from 8.4 per cent in 2016.