I think it is an important point to make, because my friend opposite is citing a fellow economist, I'm sure.
I would like to refer the committee to the briefing by the department about tax relief. In the briefing book we all received, there is a chart that shows that every single income group will be paying less tax under budget 2006. These numbers come from the department, and I think we all accept them. This isn't some economist, and I don't know what assumptions Mr. McCallum's friend made, but these are the department's own numbers.
Every single income group in this chart that we've all seen will be paying less tax under budget 2006 than was proposed but not actually implemented or legislated by the previous government. That's a very important point to make.
We can argue about how to get to that point. My friends opposite would like to play with the personal tax rate. We've chosen to put additional measures in place, such as the GST reduction, such as the Canada employment credit, such as a permanent reduction in the lowest personal income tax rate by increasing the basic personal amount. So that is how we've balanced this delivery of lower taxes for all Canadians, and we have done that.
We can have a discussion about whether our balance is better than another proposal, but the fact is that if we move any of these numbers, we lose some other measures. So maybe my friends opposite want to repeal the reduction in the GST in order to fund their proposal to further increase the personal rate. Maybe they want to cancel the employment tax credit. I don't know what they want to do. The fact of the matter is that if you play with one set of numbers, you lose a proposal on the other side.
I think Canadians are very happy with the tax reduction proposals we've put forward. They are not the same as the Liberals, but we're not the same government as the Liberals. At the end of the day, the important thing is that every single income group of Canadians, including those earning less than $15,000 a year, will pay less tax under this plan, the Conservative plan, than they would pay under the plan that the Liberals proposed before the last election. That is according to the department's own numbers, and we should not lose sight of that, because that's really the bottom line for Canadians.