I think both things count. Real dollars count, but in terms of benefiting Canadians, the relative impact of an initiative is really perhaps even more important than the absolute amount.
In fact, we've published in our latest budget—which we will make available to the committee—a chart on page 91 that compares the overall impact of tax relief. Again, the reality is that for people who don't pay taxes, tax relief is not going to help them directly. For example, the decision to maintain the GST credit at its current level was a very important discrete initiative. Instead of reducing it proportional to the reduction in the GST from 7% to 5%, that provides an extra $1.1 billion a year, which is a very large initiative in our current circumstance, for people who don't pay taxes. There are some other programming changes and credits that apply regardless of tax.
But in terms of the tax relief, the lowest bracket of taxpayers pay 11% of the total tax take in Canada, and they have received 29% of the tax relief. So it's a very substantial tilt towards that lowest bracket. The second-lowest bracket pays 36% of the taxes collected by the government, and they have received cumulatively, to date, from the government, 47% of the overall tax reduction.
The highest two brackets have received substantially less than their contribution to it. So that's a relative measure, and what it says is that although there has been $200 billion in tax relief, about $140 billion of that for individual tax relief, the tax regime overall is more progressive than it was before. That's a very important policy outcome, and I think it's something we should keep tracking.
There's still a strong interest in some competitive means to ensure we have a broad-based set of tax relief, but the overall impact of tax relief is quite substantially to enhance the progressivity of the taxes.