If I may, I'd like to take that question, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for the question, Honourable Member.
I work for a non-partisan, non-profit public policy research shop, and accordingly we publish on a wide range of issues, sometimes publishing opposing views by scholars who write for us. Last week, for instance, we published a two-part report, one part of which said the Bank of Canada should publish its forecast of the interest rate, looking out a few years. The other part explained that the Bank of Canada should not publish its forecast interest rate, looking down a few years. There are valid views on both sides of that issue. There usually are on economic issues.
On the question of tax rates, though, the work published by the institute, including my own, has been pretty consistent, in that creating a low-tax environment—one that's favourable for investment, favourable for growth, favourable for attracting jobs—is necessarily going to produce a good outcome for Canadians of all incomes. That's what a low-rate tax system is all about: having the base as broad as you can have it, having it as simple as you can have it, and taxing different businesses across sectors in very similar ways.
Likewise, if you're looking at how one might treat personal income taxes, right now, because we income-test family benefits based on family income levels, families can face fairly high effective tax rates quite low on the income scale. In other words, they might have incomes that are between $40,000 and $70,000 a year as a family. If they have children, they're going to be losing their benefits over that range, and that can expose them to fairly high effective tax rates. Those are problems for households, and we think it's generally wrong that when families go out and earn an extra dollar of income, they're sharply penalized through loss of benefits for earning that income. That's a question of what's good for incomes, what's good for families, and likewise what's good for growth.
So we've been pretty consistent in saying that a low tax rate is something that's good for investment, good for businesses, and good for households.