Mr. Speaker, not only was it not a point of order. It was completely inaccurate. Our platform included a policy for a single rate of tax.
I will make clear what I was saying. People are confused by competing claims about whether taxes have been cut. They can be the arbiters. They have very simple documentary evidence to adjudicate the test. It is called their paystub.
I invite everyone listening to or watching the debate to look at their paystubs and compare them to the paystubs for the same week or month last year. They will see that the supposed Liberal tax cut for this year was actually a tax increase. It is bogus.
When we combine the impact of Bill C-2 regarding Canada pension plan payroll taxes, which was passed during this fiscal year by the previous parliament and is the largest tax increase in Canadian history, with the myriad of other tax increases imposed by the government and the snail's pace at which its modest tax cuts will apply, Canadians at most income levels will find they are paying more than they did the year before.
If they are not, it is because of the foresight of provincial governments. Provincial taxes in Ontario and Alberta have gone down, thanks to the leadership of people like Mike Harris and Ralph Klein, but federal taxes have stayed the same or gone up.
The finance minister and his parliamentary secretary claim the bill includes $100 billion of tax relief. A nice round figure like that is like pricing something at $9.99 in a department store. The finance minister was told by campaign officials to get the number up because he needed a nice, big round number to talk about in the election. They decided it would be $100 billion. It is nothing of the sort.
The government claims $100.5 billion of gross tax relief in the bill and $3.2 billion of that is an increase in spending. The government has taken the Canada child tax benefit, which is an entitlement program and a spending program, and booked it as a tax cut. Once again the paragons of clean accounting in the government opposite are misleading Canadians.
Then there is the $29.5 billion by which the government increased the Canada pension plan payroll tax. The government, after enormous pressure from this party, from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and from the Canadian people, finally decided to stop the insidious back door tax grab on inflation known as deindexation. Under deindexation people were bumped into higher tax brackets and paid more taxes. They did so because they were getting cost of living adjustments and not because of any real increase in income.
The Canadian Alliance objected to deindexation. Finally the government responded to our objection and stole our policy by agreeing to reindex the tax system, but not retroactively to 1986 when the Mulroney government deindexed the system.
Let me say parenthetically that the Liberal Party in the 1988 and 1993 elections ran against the Tory Party, and rightfully so, for having deindexed the tax system in 1986. However when it finally came to setting things right, did the Liberals give back the money that had been stripped out of people's wallets by taxes and inflation since 1986? No, sir. They reindexed. They did not give back the some $9 billion that people had lost to deindexation.
The Liberals say they will adjust tax brackets, exemptions and credits upward to account for the consumer price index so that they no longer impose a tax on inflation. That is good. However they count that as a tax cut. In other words, the government counts a non-increase as a cut. They tell Canadians they will not tax them on inflation and that Canadians should be grateful it will be counted as a tax cut. There are accountants in this place who would find that pretty specious. The government has declared $21 billion worth of specious, non-existent tax cuts which are merely non-increases.
When we add all that up, the real total net tax cut in the government's bill is $47 billion over five years. That is about half the tax relief proposed by the Canadian Alliance over five years based on comparable accounting. It is a fraction of the tax relief proposed by U.S. President Bush of $1.6 trillion to $2.3 trillion, depending on how we count it, over 10 years for a country with taxes that are already lower.
That would not be such a problem if Canada had its tax burden under control. However it does not. Revenues to the federal government last year were at their highest level in history. The government is bigger in terms of the money it hoovers out of people's wallets, purses and small business tills than any government in the history of the dominion. Personal income taxes in Canada consume a higher percentage of gross domestic product than in any other nation in the G-8. At 17.6% of GDP we have the highest personal income taxes.
According to a recent study by Price Waterhouse that was published in The Economist , Canada has the highest corporate income tax rates in the OECD, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the 23 principal industrialized countries in the world. Of those 23 countries, yes, we are number one when it comes to business tax rates.
When we look down the line, we see that none of this will change under the bill. When the tax cuts here have been fully implemented, and after the Bush tax changes have been implemented in the U.S., Canada will still have income taxes far higher than those of the United States and our other principal competitors. That is having an impact on our competitiveness and our standard of living. We know that.
We know that Canadians are working harder now than they ever have and are falling behind. We know we have an increase in the brain drain: the loss of talent and human capital to the United States and other jurisdictions, in large part because of the tax burden.
We know that Canada has fallen from second to 16th place in the OECD in terms of our standard of living over the past 15 years. We went from the second highest per capita GDP to the 16th, to the middle of the pack. Over the past 10 years, by comparison, Ireland leapfrogged over Canada in terms of its growth in per capita GDP, which is the best measure of increases in the standard of living, in large part because it provided huge tax incentives.
A member opposite said that it was because of something other than tax relief. My brother moved a company with 30 very well paying jobs to Dublin because of the tax cuts offered in Ireland and the huge advantage it offers over Canada.
This is not an agenda that would restore the competitiveness of the nation. It would continue to impose on Canadians an enormous burden of taxation into the future.
The bill would do a number of other things to which we object. First, there are a couple of elements which do step in the right direction. Reducing the inclusion rate on capital gains to 15% is something that should have happened a long time ago. We would like to see that inclusion rate go down to 33 1/3% so that we stop penalizing people who invest their whole lives in a business or in a property. This is a form of a death tax. We work hard our entire life, we invest in a business or property and we look forward to passing that on to the next generation. We, as individuals, may not take any benefit from it, but guess what? The moment we die, the Government of Canada comes in with deemed capital gains, which is really a form of estate tax or death tax, and grabs one-third of our lifetime earnings that were in that investment. That is wrong. We should not penalize people's lifetime investments. We should not diminish their abilities to pass on to the next generation their life's savings as we do through deemed capital gains.
There are a number of technical changes in the bill. One of the technical changes with which we have a great deal of trouble is the fact that the bill would continue the unfairness with which single income families with children are treated under the tax code.
The House will recall that this was a very hot issue at one point in the last parliament. The Secretary of State for International Financial Institutions, in response to a question I put to him about why the government discriminated against single income families with kids and why there was as much as an 80% tax penalty for those families versus their dual income counterparts, stood in his place and said that the government discriminated against single income families because they did not work as hard or have as many expenses as the double income families. That was pitting one kind of family against another.
As we said then and I say now, let me inform the secretary of state that moms and dads who stay home to raise small kids, to care for the elderly and the infirm, and to build families and homes, work just as hard, if not harder, as those of us in the paid workforce. They deserve and demand our respect and fairness in the tax code.
The current tax code's discrimination against those families must be eliminated and fairness must be brought in. The Canadian Alliance has proposed, among other things, equalizing the spousal or equivalent to spouse basic exemption with the basic personal exemption.
Under the bill we would have two classes of citizens: those who are primary income earners and their spouses. They have equal worth and that worth should be reflected in the tax code by a spousal exemption equal to the basic personal exemption. That would not done here. We would continue to penalize the stay at home parents.
We would raise that exemption from $8,000, which it will eventually get to pursuant to this bill after several years, to $10,000. That would lift hundreds of thousands of working families off the tax rolls so that instead of giving money to be misspent by the government they could invest it in their own priorities, their own children and their own homes.
We would bring in a child tax deduction. We would provide a deduction of $3,000 per child so that families with children would be able to keep more of what they earn to reflect the costs of raising kids.
What does the government do? Absolutely nothing of the sort. To the contrary, the bill before us raises the so-called child care expense deduction from $7,000 to $10,000. This is another piece of discrimination because only certain families would get to claim the child care expense deduction. Only those dual income families with receipted child care expenses could make use of it. Only 17% of tax filers could claim this deduction, and even a smaller fraction could claim it to the full amount.
If a mother with three children is the main income earner and the father decides to stay home until the kids are in school, the tax code says that the dad's work at home cannot be deducted. The tax code says that it has no value to society and therefore will not be recognized. However, if a parent decides instead to earn a second income and drops the kids off at a day care on the way to the second job, the federal government will give recognition for the third party costs of child care. The at home costs, the opportunity costs, the forgone income and the real financial costs of raising children at home are recognized nowhere.
It is intolerable that we should be increasing discrimination against single income parents. We will oppose the bill on that ground alone.
The bill includes an element which further erodes parliament's recognition of the unique and important role and status of the institution of marriage in our society and culture. It does so by bringing forward further amendments to change any reference from spouse to common law partner.
This is a change which was begun in a bill amending the Income Tax Act in the previous parliament, but in one of the many drafting errors to which I referred earlier the officials neglected to amend certain sections of the bill, saying that in various sections reference to spouse as part of the institution of marriage has been abolished for all intents and purposes from the Income Tax Act. It is an institution which in this and every other society I know of has been given certain privileges because it is the basis of the family, the basic institution of society.
We have said from time immemorial that the institution of marriage should be given certain preferences and privileges to protect the family. The bill would further erode the distinctiveness of that institution by saying common law partners, not spouses.
We as a parliament or as a country should not be ashamed of declaring that the spousal commitment in the covenant of marriage is a fundamental contractual relationship in the development of strong and healthy families and that they are necessary to having a strong and healthy society.
That is another reason we oppose the bill. It further undermines and weakens marriage as an institution.
There are a number of other provisions in the bill which the Alliance finds objectionable. It does include certain technical changes to which we do not object. Here is an interesting one: the foreign actors' tax credit. Most people may ask what that is all about. It turns out that we currently withhold 15% of the income of Hollywood actors who come to Canada to act in Hollywood movies. We then reserve the right to force them to file a tax return and tax them even more.
The Hollywood movie actors have been shedding crocodile tears about this unfair tax treatment by Canada. The same government which cannot find the fiscal room to help out single income families, has decided to give millionaire Hollywood movie actors a tax break in the bill. Lo and behold, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis will be at the front of the line when it comes to tax relief from the government. Single income moms and dads can stay at home without fairness.
The government would do this by raising the withholding tax from 15% to 23%, a very modest increase, but then it says that the actors would not have to file returns beyond that. These are people making millions of dollars at the highest possible marginal rates.
My office staff called the movie producers, the Hollywood actors, the actors' guilds and so on to hear what they thought of this move by the government. They were in favour of this because it would be a big tax cut for the millionaire Hollywood movie stars. They said that if we did not make this change, they might not keep coming back to work in Canada. I find it very odd when I look at the priorities that the government has for tax relief.
We in the Alliance have talked about raising the basic exemption for individuals and spouses, or equivalent to spouses, to $10,000. We talked about introducing a $3,000 deduction per child. Let us just figure out what that means. If we had a Canadian Alliance government, it would mean that a family with two parents and three kids would pay no taxes on their first $29,000 of income. It would mean that a single mom could give her first child the equivalent to spouse deduction of $10,000, so that a single mom with two kids would have $23,000 tax free.
These measures would lift 1.4 million low income Canadians off the tax roles altogether, giving them a hand up so they could get ahead. It would stop penalizing them for earning that small incremental income to try to get ahead economically. The government does nothing in the bill to lift Canadians off the tax roles.
When our party came out with its bold and powerful proposal to eventually get to a 17% single income tax rate and lift 1.4 million low income people off the tax roles and to restore and create family tax fairness, the government said that it looked popular. It said that it was testing well in the polls so it had better try to outflank the opposition. What did it do? It came up with a new basic rate of 16% in the bill and thought that Canadians would be fooled by that because, after all, 16% is lower than 17%.
Yes, it is. However, for the people, for whom it matters, those at the lowest income levels, there are no increases in the basic exemptions and deductions. Those are far more generous. What the Liberals want is for a single mom working as a waitress to pay 16% of her paltry income. Our plan would say that a low income individual would pay no taxes at all because we want that individual to get ahead through higher deductions and exemptions at the bottom end of the tax system.
In closing, I encourage the government to think about the enormous complexity of the Income Tax Act and the destructive effect it has on our economy and our society. It should think of the tens of thousands of bright, young Canadians, whose educations we subsidize, who leave the country every year to pursue their economic opportunities elsewhere in large part because of diminished opportunities and our tax system.
I want them to think about the low income working families, the single moms and the seniors on fixed incomes who are forced to pay taxes today. I want them to join us in dreaming about creating a tax system which is simple, fair and low, which rewards risk taking, investment and productivity and which rewards the virtues upon which a prosperous society is built.
I want to invite them to join us in the opposition in proposing a tax system that lifts the low income people off the tax rolls, that puts the family first and restores fairness to the tax system and that stops the beggar thy neighbour, class warfare politics of envy approach, which informs the so-called progressive tax system that penalizes people who succeed, work hard and get ahead.
I invite them to do all of those things by opposing Bill C-22, a bill that once more adds yet another destructive layer on to the tax act which was first passed in this place in 1917. I hope they will join us in doing that and working together to create an economic environment of opportunity which rewards risk taking, saving, investment and hard work. That is what Canadians are asking for and that is what we are fighting for by opposing the bill.
