The federal government is leaning too hard on individual taxpayers to fill its coffers, says a veteran economist known for his push to reform corporate taxes in the 1990s.

“Compared to all the G7 countries, we have a higher amount of taxes as a share of earnings. That’s remarkable,” Jack Mintz told an audience at a Canadian Club Toronto event held on Tuesday. “We’ve relied way too much on personal taxes.”

Mintz is a member of the Order of Canada, and also the president’s fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. Back in 1996, then-prime minister Paul Martin tapped him to lead his government’s Technical Committee on Business Taxation. The so-called “Mintz Committee” helped usher in a decade-long reduction in federal corporate income tax.

“We have the wrong mix of taxes,” Mintz said Wednesday. “There are a number of things that we could do to change that mix away from the personal income tax without necessarily reducing the amount of total taxes paid by Canadians.”

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, personal income tax as a percentage of total tax revenue in Canada is about 12 percentage points higher than the group’s average. Meanwhile, social insurance taxes, like mandatory payroll deductions for Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance, are about 10 percentage points lower.

“Not only do we rely too much on income taxation, personal and corporate, but we, compared to other countries, don’t rely enough on payroll and the goods and services tax,” Mintz said.

“We’ve been whittling away that base. The latest now is housing. We now have to take the GST off new housing,” he added. “We could actually have more payroll taxes, especially to fund healthcare, like a number of countries have done.”

Mintz is known for calling for sweeping change. His 2022 proposal for corporate tax reform in Canada called for a “big bang” to eliminate complexity and attract foreign investment.

At Wednesday’s event, Mintz was joined by Deloitte Canada deputy chair and board director Fatima Laher. She says while Canada’s tax system is antiquated, with its last formal review in the 1960s, the best way forward is evolution, rather than revolution.

“We need to talk and use words like ‘modernizing our system,’ because it’s less in-your-face,” Laher said. “The minute you say ‘reform,’ people basically go back into their shell, and think ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen?’”

Jeff Lagerquist is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow him on X @jefflagerquist.