Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I thank our witnesses for coming today and giving us some context for the poverty study we began last year and are getting back into.
Identifying measures for measuring poverty is important. What's more important to me is understanding what things we have done thus far that have an impact on reducing poverty and what we should be doing going forward.
For example, in the most recent budget--and it was referenced in your notes, Mr. Fedyk--there were some improvements made in budget 2009. I think those improvements are more fictional than they are real.
An analysis of the budget done by the Caledon Institute, by Ken Battle, Sherri Torjman and Michael Mendelson, said:
The 2009 Budget made much ado about its measures to reduce income taxes for low- and middle-income Canadians, as well as seniors. In reality, the amount of tax relief is modest, and upper-income taxpayers not only share in the tax savings but also enjoy the largest amount. (...) The Budget's claim of “tax cuts for low- and middle-income taxpayers” is deceptive.
I want to refer to a chart they have here that is very disturbing, indicating income tax savings from the budget for taxpayers under 65, so income tax savings from this budget would show that a two-earner couple with two children earning $20,000 a year will see no benefit. A two-earner couple with two kids making $150,000 a year, which is those of us on this end of the table, would see a $483 benefit.
We talk about low- and middle-income Canadians, but if we are really going to get at poverty, there are many people who don't benefit from tax measures because they don't make enough to pay tax. Those are the people for whom the child tax benefit can be helpful, the GST tax credit can be helpful.
I find it very disturbing that we build this up as supposedly being a measure for low- and middle-income Canadians, but I get $483, and if I made $20,000 a year I'd get nothing. I think it's unconscionable.
Having said that, we're not here to do politics. We're here to do policy. It may be too late, but that's a legitimate analysis done by the Caledon Institute.
Mr. Fedyk, how much analysis would the department have done in determining tax and fiscal policy, and how it would benefit people in poverty versus people who make a higher income?
Another chart in this wonderful piece, which I recommend for your consideration, indicates that if we had doubled the GST credit--this is an example of a single parent with one child, by income--then somebody making $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000 would have had a $1,000 benefit, whereas somebody making $150,000 would have had nothing, which seems a little bit more fair to me on the poverty side.
I appreciate the fact that the government wants to help the rich. That's fine. There's a constituency for that. But this committee is looking at poverty. Have you done any analysis, for example, on doubling the GST tax credit versus other tax measures?