Madam Speaker, it is an honour to stand in the House of Commons, this place of debate on the behalf of Canadian people, to debate this Progressive Conservative Party motion.
It is important to be aware of what that motion actually says. I will address a technical problem in it shortly. It states:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should take steps to alleviate the burden of poverty in Canada by encouraging self-sufficiency and self-reliance and, to that end, should increase the basic income tax credit to $10,000, index the tax brackets and index the child tax benefit.
It is interesting to me when the word poverty is used. We always characterize Canadians as caring. That is what we are in this country. That is one of the great benefits of being a Canadian. That is one of the things that makes me so grateful to be a Canadian, that we can help one another.
I suppose the first question is who is in need of this. Hence this statement. We want to address the problem of poverty. We want to alleviate poverty. Second, what is the method whereby one does that?
I would like to address the question of the definition of poverty. I believe I have stated this in this House before but it bears repetition. I think it is very important.
Our eldest son spent some time in different countries working with Christian relief organizations. I remember the time when he was in southern Sudan where there was a lot of poverty and famine. Brent communicated back to us “We are having great success where we now are. When we first came there were 150 children every day dying of starvation. We have reduced that number to 60”. He then put into brackets “of course, by Sherwood Park standards,” a town near where we live, “we have not yet reached the goal”.
I think it boggles our minds. It wrenches our hearts to think of moms and dads and family members burying their children because they have died from starvation. That is true poverty. I sometimes think maybe as a country we are very selfish because of the definition we use for poverty when there are children around the world who literally are starving to death because there is absolutely no food. I have seen these pictures. I am sure that all members have seen them, little children with the distended abdomens swelling from starvation. It is very sad.
I believe that not very many children in Canada actually die of starvation. There may be some but I believe it is very few. Of course, if there are any, that is not acceptable. Surely in our country, the richest country in terms of resources, an eager population willing to work, we can provide for every one of our citizens so that they do not live in poverty but rather have sufficient food, adequate clothing and adequate shelter.
I taught mathematics for 31 years. One thing I always resisted was a statistical application to marks in my classes. I always set out standards. I said to my students “When you graduate, I want you to have competence”. When I taught surveying students I said “You will not survive as a surveyor if you do not have a mark of 70%, 80% or 90% in trigonometry because that is the basic building block of your program. I expect you to get more than 70%. I will not fail one-fourth of you because you are in the bottom quarter of the class”.
Yet that is part of the statistical measure that we use in Canada to define poverty. I simply question the integrity of that measure.
One of the measures used is that any child living in a family whose income is less than one-half of the median income is living in poverty. If our median income in Canada for a family is $56,000, which I think is close to the number, that means anyone with a family income of less than $28,000 is living in abject poverty.
Yet I know many people who earn $18,000 a year who have families and children. They do not consider themselves living in poverty. They have adequate food, clothing and shelter. So I think we should be intellectually honest. We should exercise integrity in our definition of poverty, always remembering there are people who are having trouble making ends meet. There is no doubt about that.
It goes without saying, it is inevitable that living in a country where every penny earned is subject to taxation, where the governments confiscate 55% of everything earned, there is not enough left for us in order to alleviate poverty. We are causing the poverty. Think of how many millions of people who would not have a problem of poverty if we stopped taking that money.
There is a technical error in the bill. I am sure the PCs did not mean this, that they wanted to increase the basic income tax credit to $10,000 since that is about 10 times what it is now. I move:
Replace the words “increase the basic income tax credit to $10,000” with “increase the tax free threshold to $7,900”.
I have two reasons for this amendment. The income tax credit is an income tax term which basically relates to the amount of money returned to families based on their taxable income. There used to be a basic exemption, a certain amount of income on which we did not have to pay income tax. That amount is now nominally about $6,400 for an individual and a little less for a spouse.
The tax credit given on the income tax is actually $1,098. I am sure the PCs did not mean to increase the tax credit from $1,098 to $10,000. That is unreal. The amount I propose is a more realistic figure. Instead of having about $6,400 exempt from taxation, it is about $7,900. It is still an increase and the basic personal credit would be increased to $1,300. That is the wording of it and I am sure that the members of the party that proposed the motion today will agree with this amendment since it clarifies what they want. It brings it to a more realistic number and basically should settle the issue.