Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member's question. I can only assume that the answer is that the members of the Liberal government honestly believe, and I grant them that they believe this sincerely in their little red Liberal hearts, that they and their bureaucrats here in Ottawa know better how to spend an extra buck than a taxpayer in Fundy—Royal or Calgary Southeast. That is fundamentally what drives the philosophy of this throne speech and this government. It is a philosophy which has been abandoned by virtually every other government of the developed world.
Let us take again the case of Ireland. It had a subsidy drenched subsistence economy with the highest taxes in Europe, whose only major export was its young people. They could have kind of moped along and said “Oh, well, we politicians and bureaucrats are going to keep on subsidizing, raising taxes and intervening in the economy”, but they had the courage to do something different. They took a risk. They went out and cut corporate taxes from 40% to 10%. They cut income taxes. They cut their capital gains taxes. What they saw was a massive explosion in that economy, so that now 20% of the direct investment in Europe is going to a country with only 1% of Europe's population. They became the second largest software exporter in the world. Ireland's population is now growing for the first time in 150 years.
I cannot hesitate to remind my colleague from Fundy—Royal that, unfortunately, it was his party's government which oversaw the largest decrease in after tax disposable income in modern Canadian economic history because of its 72 tax increases, but I will not mention that.