Madam Speaker, the member referred in a number of instances to the effective tax rates in Canada. He was talking about someone making $30,000 a year as an example. I think he is mistaken and I would like to set the record straight.
If a taxpayer has $30,000 of taxable income they are just at the first, lowest effective rate federally, which is 17%. Provinces have a variety of rates but they are roughly equivalent to about 50% of the federal taxes. So that someone in Ontario, for instance on $30,000, would pay 50% of the federal rate overall. That means an effective rate of 25%.
What the member failed to include in his calculation was that all Canadians get a non-refundable basic personal amount of about $6,500 which reduces the taxes otherwise payable. Therefore the real tax out of pocket of a single person making $30,000 is only 19.6%, not the numbers the member was giving.
The second matter the member spent some time on was with regard to the comparative brackets between Canada and the U.S. Clearly there are some differences there. If all the member wants to do is have a comparable bracket for someone in the $250,000 range to be equivalent to the U.S., I suggest we establish a rate of 29.01% which is the highest federal rate plus .01% more and set it at $.5 million and then we will be better than them. It is really a frivolous argument.
The question I want to ask the member is on the CHST issue. As the member knows, there is a lot of misinformation concerning that. In Ontario the actual cuts in CHST were less than $1 billion and yet at the same time Ontario had tax cuts of $4.3 billion. It is clear that although there was an equitable reduction across the country with regard to the transfers related to health, the provincial governments themselves have to make decisions. One of the decisions the province of Ontario made was to reduce taxes and to cut health services at the same time. These choices are provincial choices. They are not federal choices.
I ask the member whether he had the same situation in his province.