But that's not part of your estimates, so I'll focus on things that I think will be of interest as we approach whenever our next election campaign is.
I think there are probably a couple of defining issues as we move forward, notwithstanding the stuff that gets talked about in question period. I think criminal justice issues, which I won't get into here, and the issue of taxation will probably be big issues whenever that next election campaign is.
We've seen that the two biggest parties in the House have very different approaches regarding the taxation issue. One of the things we see in the House on a fairly regular basis, no matter what we're funding or what program we're doing, is that the Liberals--well, the opposition parties in general--tend to ask for more. They want more programs being funded and more entities within those programs being funded on virtually every program that we have.
The spending of course has to be funded from somewhere and I think what we've seen is that the Liberal leadership has been pretty clear in terms of having to go down that road--“we will have to raise taxes” was one of their quotes--so I think it's going to be an important part as we move forward.
We've talked about things like GST hikes and, more recently, a specific proposal to raise corporate taxes, which is where I want to go with this question. We've set our corporate tax rate to go from 22% to 15%. I think right now we're at 18%, so we're more than halfway to that mark, and the Liberal Party has proposed a 20% increase in that 15%, to 18%, or three points.
Could you speak to two things?
What is the role that our approach to taxation has played in terms of Canada's leadership economically during this time of global economic slowdown? It's quite well known that Canada is regarded by most experts to have performed very strongly and to be in a very strong position right now.
Then, could you speak to the potential we have or what you think might occur if we were to reverse that trend in corporate tax rates? What are the experts saying? What are Canadian businesses saying in terms of the impact of that?