Mr. Speaker, I listened with a great deal of interest to my colleague from Cape Breton Highlands-Canso.
In the last number of years he contributed a great deal on our side when we were in opposition. He ensured that there was a sense of realism in the debate we were having on economic matters specifically dealing with taxation reform, fundamental restructuring of the economy and things like unemployment insurance changes. He also ensured that when we led off that it was not just a lot of bravado coming from the opposition.
I am very pleased to see that he will be making a major contribution as we set out to restructure social benefit programs as outlined by the minister.
I want to pick him up on a point. It is very clear that there are two problems that face the government today. One of the problems is in expenditure. If one looks at the graphs over the past 20 years, one will see that the percentage of dollars spent overall by the government on programs is actually decreasing.
Contrary to what members of the Reform Party and others may think, government spending is not out of control. Government spending seems to be well in control. The problem appears to be the second problem, that is revenue generation.
Over the last number of years we watched as successive governments, even Liberal governments a few years ago, tinkered with the tax system. It seems that every single time that we try to make some modest changes to the tax system we end up by downloading on to the middle classes.
Many would believe that the recession is stubborn and that we are not coming out of it very quickly because the tax burden has been shifted too heavily on to the consuming classes. I would like to support what he said about the efforts of the member for Broadview-Greenwood to put forward at least a proposal that seems to go in the right direction with the single tax.
I would like to ask my colleague if he believes that type of program without any tax increases would lead to the federal government taking in the amount of taxes that it currently does with the economic activity that is going on. Does he believe the single tax system would lead to less tax evasion which we have now seen by witness with growth of the underground economy?