It is a matter of timing. We're looking at a time when we're still under the employment that we had a couple of years ago. Our contention is that having a hiring credit that's less than 10% of the cost you're loading on businesses will be a job killer. We recommend and request that the government change that plan.
A second area I wanted to explore is the idea of the new non-refundable tax credits. I'm not sure if the minister is aware that the former tax credit, the child sport tax credit, is essentially $100 million going to families that earn, on average, 25% more than the Canadian average family earns, and probably 400% or 500% more than the very families that are excluded from that tax credit. Low-income people, people who are at the bottom of the inequality gap in Canada, are the ones being excluded.
We have called for the government to make these refundable tax credits, and yet we now have another series of programs like that—the family caregiver tax credit, the children's art tax credit, and the volunteer firefighter tax credit—doing exactly the same thing as the child support tax credit.
Minister, did you have your officials estimate the scope, the size of dollars that will be going to those tax credits and the incomes of the families receiving them compared with the incomes of those families not benefiting from that reduction in the treasury?