I did submit, and you do have at your disposal, “Budget 2008: What's In It for Women?” As an example, if you do have it in your packet, I just want to show you the tables on pages 14 and 15. The only reason I want to point this out is that you will see in these two tables how easy it would be to do the work that Finance did by simply showing the distribution of the population that benefited from the tax cut in each of these categories. You see the entire population, what portion of the taxable population is in these different income classes, and who benefits from these different tax measures.
You can see on the top of page 14 that 68% of women are in taxable income categories of less than $40,000. That is very close to--not coincident with, but very close to--the top of the first tax bracket, which is my point. If you've got tax cuts to give, are they primarily flowing to people at the bottom or not? That's where the majority of the population is.
This is not a technical point. It just does the incidence of tax expenditures by income class, which I think is a very important measure that allows you to actually say with justification that you did tax cuts and that most of those tax cuts went to people who are the majority of the population and who need the most help. If you're making the comment that the best thing a poor person can have is a good-paying job and that taxes are indeed a burden, can you make sure most of the tax cuts go to the people who need the most help? It would be a simplistic way of looking at the idea that tax cuts are good and therefore we should do it.
That's my fourth point: who's counted, and who counts? It just develops that line of thinking. For example, in the personal income tax changes that are pointed out in the gender budget analysis of 2006, you have the personal income amount, the employment credit, and the enhanced dividend tax credit, and there is an indication of how much money you're spending on these different measures. The next question would be, for the amount of money you're spending on these measures, who benefits? How many women benefit, how many men benefit, how many higher-income men benefit, how many lower-income men benefit? It's a very simple process that keeps your eyes on the prize. Are we helping the people who need the help the most in the measures we're introducing? We don't have unlimited resources. Are we helping those who need it the most?
This is just going to the question of how you know, when you do a tax cut, that you haven't actually helped people by creating a second-round effect of good jobs. It's a good question, but what's the first-round effect?
There is also, frankly, the question of whether our tax cuts created jobs. That is unanswerable from an economic point of view, because there are so many things going on in the global economy. Very much of our economic growth in Canada has been driven by commodity prices and the fact that we have become a resource contributor to the global supply chain. Was it tax cuts that created that? Arguably, it's the fact that India, China, Brazil, and Russia are growing, and they want our resources; it's not our own personal income taxes that did that. But you can never separate the two out. It's never possible to say categorically that tax cuts created those jobs.
The first order of impact, the question of who benefited, is a very important level of question. The question you raised about whether it created jobs is an important question, but fundamentally it is not clearly answerable. You can make an argument, but you're never going to get an answer, and that's the gospel on that one.
Finally--almost finally--what were the priorities of this budget, and how much did it cost? For example, with regard to this particular budget 2008, although it is nowhere in the budget plan, in the budget speech it was indicated that the priority of the current government is tax reduction, for the reasons you specified. That price tag is given in the budget speech, but there's no equivalent “and over the course of our administration we have spent this much”.
That can be done; it's easily done. I point out in budget 2003 a table wherein every initiative of every budget is rolled up together, and you see this plan that shows this is how we allocated our priorities. We had resources, we spent money, we did debt reduction, and we did tax cuts, and here's how they play out; this is how we prioritized how we were going to spend the surplus in the time we were in office.
I recommend that as a clarifying position for any government: we believe that spending is important; we believe that tax cuts are important; we believe that debt reduction is important. In what order of priority and how are public resources used to move along that trajectory?
I am not placing a value judgment on any of these things. I'm just saying that if you're going to measure something, measure it consistently. It clarifies to the population where an administration believes the priority should be placed, and that opens it up for public discourse in a somewhat clearer manner. You are using our resources; we are together sanctioning our elected representatives to take a decision, to take leadership, to move forward. It's helpful for having this clarity to say, we think this is the way we should be heading forward, but we're not going to just do this, we're going to do other things, and here's how we've prioritized them.
I hope I'm being clear on this.
My very last point is that this might be the last easy budget the federal government is going to see in a while. There's been a lot of discussion about whether the financial storm clouds from south of the border are going to blow into Canada, whether Ontario's decline in manufacturing is going to become a generalized recession, whether a surplus that was in double-digit billions of dollars is now so small that it is easier to tip over into a deficit. For that reason....
I also indicate that just as other governments have done in the last ten years, there's been program review or expenditure allocation review for about 12 years now, since 1995, on and off. Even in the context of a surplus budget you can have program cuts.
Since you're doing a budget analysis, you need to look at not just the impact of the new stuff you're doing, but the impact of the stuff you're taking away, and who's paying the cost of what you're taking away. If we had had a gender budget analysis in 1995, I think it would be exceedingly difficult to say that it was a neutral exercise. I think women paid the price of those program cuts in 1995 and are still paying it today, because those programs have not been restored. It's exceedingly important that both program cuts and tax cuts be looked at through the lens of gender budget analysis.
In the event that at some point in our history we need to raise taxes, which is a remote possibility today but may again some day occur, who bears the cost of the increase is incredibly important, by gender and by income class. We have gone from an extremely progressive system of taxation to a flatter system of taxation.
The OECD actually made a report about two weeks ago that said that of the 30 countries in the OECD, 15 nations raised personal income taxes in the last 10 years, and 13 of them lowered taxes. Canada was one of five nations, including the U.S., Australia, Germany, and I don't remember the other one, that, when they cut taxes, shifted the balance to most benefit the rich.
There are all sorts of tax cuts. You can benefit those who are already most affluent, and this is certainly not just your government I'm talking about, because it's over the last 10 years. There are different formulas for tax cutting. It is extremely important that when you raise or lower taxes you look at the incidence of who is paying the cost and who benefits.
And that's why you do gender budget analysis. That is the reason: so that you can say to your electorate, this is who benefits. And you can do it with clarity, so that we are all on the same page, seeing who is benefiting.
That's my presentation.