Madam Speaker, I listened attentively to the member's statements. As he well knows, when leading up to a budget there is always speculation and rumour. Indeed, what we have heard today from the member is a lot of speculation and a lot of rumour.
The member started off by talking substantially about somehow shifting the tax burden to low and middle income Canadians. The member knows that when the Minister of Finance addressed the finance committee on October 17 and 18 the very clear message was that the minister was not looking at increasing taxes as a primary vehicle for deficit reduction and meeting his target of 3 per cent of GDP.
As the debate and the work of the committee have gone on, there has been no question that the committee, of which the hon. member is a member, has concentrated on many items the member has raised. These include the elimination of overlap and duplication among different levels of government; the reduction of subsidies to businesses; and dealing with loopholes that are not illegal but were brought in to handle certain situations at a certain time which may no longer serve their purpose.
The member also spent quite a bit of time referring to the rich and making the rich pay. I thought it might be helpful to pass on to the member for his information some facts that were published by StatsCanada.
The top 10 per cent of taxpayers in Canada in 1992 started at some $50,000 a year. Those top 10 per cent of taxpayers paid 34 per cent of all taxes. In addition to that, that top 10 per cent of taxpayers also contributed 42 per cent of all charitable donations.
When we are talking about who is paying for what, it is clear we have to take into account the full dynamics of the financial affairs of those people who are successful. I think the member would agree that we want Canadians to aspire to do as well as they possibly can. If we have successful leaders in businesses and industry, we will also have successful people working within those businesses and industry.
I have a question I want the member to deal with. He talked about tax reform. I think most members will agree that tax reform is an important process of this House. He talked about it in the sense of reducing the complexity of our taxes and simplifying them.
The member then went on to talk about corporate taxation. He abandoned the arguments about complexity on a personal level and went on to tax havens and other exotic tax matters that do not have anything to do with the ordinary Canadian. Would the member care to comment on tax reform from the perspective of making it simpler or less complicated?
Would he not agree that changing the way in which income tax is calculated is not going to improve government revenues in itself? Would he not agree that in fact we need fundamental tax reform, not in the way we are doing things now but in the fundamental way in which we actually assess taxation on ordinary Canadians?