Thank you.
The purpose of tax reductions is not simply to have people pay less tax and have more money in their pockets. The purpose is to create more economic activity, to create more investment, because people have more resources in their own hands to reinvest in their businesses, to start new businesses. We know that the small and medium-sized business sector is where job creation happens in Canada for the most part. So as a matter of principle, we believe in reducing the burden on Canadians and on Canadian families.
We also acknowledge that at the end of the day there is only one taxpayer, that there aren't three different people paying taxes to municipal, provincial, and federal governments, that there is one taxpayer who has one large burden in Canadian society. So we have reduced that burden substantially.
The other thing we're trying to do is to be clear, particularly with respect to how we budget, which is why most—not all but most—of the budgeting in the budget is on a two-year horizon, so that we're not doing what the previous government was wont to do, which was this kind of hockey-stick financing where they would say, “Oh, we'll have a 10-year program, or an 8-year program", and the funding is in the blade of the stick for the first couple of years. It's not very much, and then the funding goes up like this, like the handle of a hockey stick.
What we're trying to do is to be realistic and clear with Canadians about our budgeting and to avoid the kinds of so-called surprise surpluses the previous government was fond of creating. Those surprise surpluses are bad for several reasons. One, they distort funding, but also they put government in the position of avoiding Parliament with respect to substantial spending decisions at year-end with these surprise surpluses. So they're a good thing not to do for several reasons, and we're moving away from that.
We've also made a suggestion on the surplus issue in the fiscal balance paper that was issued with the budget about one alternative for distributing a surplus: in addition to paying down $3 billion of debt each year, perhaps taking the additional surplus or part of it and allocating it to CPP and QPP.