Finance committee  That's right, and in terms of personal taxation, interestingly. The personal tax rate for someone living in Ontario, for instance, is now about the same as it was in the 1930s. The downside of having this concentration of wealth at the top is that everybody doesn't participate in

Finance committee  It's a gradient. It gets worse as you get higher up. The top 0.1% or 1% is gaining a larger portion of the income than they did 10 or 20 years ago. So the cut-off point is probably around the top 30%. They have seen incomes increase over the past 30 years. Once you get below that

Finance committee  That would be in the top 10%, definitely. The cut-off for the top 10% of income earners is about $110,000.

Finance committee  Can you say that again?

Finance committee  An MP would definitely be in the top 10% of income earners in Canada, yes.

Finance committee  Thank you. In terms of looking at some of the overall costs that were not necessarily included in this bill, if we take a look at corporate income tax cuts worth about $15 billion a year, the departmental freezes worth about $2 billion by 2013, and the $4 billion proposed cuts i

Finance committee  I think the drop in the corporate income tax rate, which is primarily going to benefit those owning stock, which again is primarily upper-income Canadians, has been one of the biggest tax breaks on the corporate side certainly we've seen in some time. If we want to talk about the

Finance committee  I think on the corporate income tax side, those cuts have been dramatic. They've been extremely expensive, and the effects in terms of employment, particularly on low income, that connection is not at all clear. So I think that money could be better spent. That's certainly someth

Finance committee  I think certainly in terms of the OAS/GIS in the last budget, that was certainly a positive move that goes directly to low-income Canadians. My concern is a focus on tax credits in particular. Non-refundable tax credits are more likely to go to upper-income Canadians, as long as

Finance committee  I think our concern is that we are continuing to see rising inequality in Canada, with more income going to upper-income Canadians and less going to middle- and lower-income Canadians, which I think should be a concern to all members.

Finance committee  I have not done that analysis. I think that particularly in tax cuts, in the tax adjustment side most of that is going to go to the upper end, although in fairness the OAS/GIS changes would definitely go to the lower end.

Finance committee  Definitely. Certainly one of the proposals is to index the gas tax. I think I was proposing something much bigger, which is that particularly in the uncertain times in which we find ourselves, the Canadian government is uniquely placed because of its low debt load to be much more

Finance committee  I think one of my concerns with the decline in the general corporate tax rate is that it doesn't target tax cuts to actions. It doesn't matter whether a company invests in the economy or creates jobs, they get the corporate tax cut; it doesn't make any difference. If we target th

Finance committee  In answer to the previous question, unemployment has certainly increased since the crisis in 2008, which has left 1.5 million Canadians either unemployed or underemployed.

Finance committee  Right, but the number of people in the labour market now is larger than before the recession, as well, so--