Madam Speaker, I appreciated a comment of the hon. member and I wanted to touch on a similar theme. He just alluded to the way the government announced the health care spending but did not mention very strongly that it was over five years.
I am concerned that Canadians are aware of the taxes they are paying. With GST and EI and CPP there is some way for the public to be very much aware of that. The one area I was hoping to see—and we actually discussed it in the prebudget debate in the House—was the fact that income tax brackets were not indexed to inflation.
I know the hon. member is a man of high integrity and when he speaks it is from his heart. The issue is that because they were not indexed Canadians are actually paying $10 billion more since they stopped indexing the personal income tax system or $692 per taxpayer. This is a hidden tax.
It is one thing when people know the taxes they are paying and can react, but when they are hidden and buried in bracket creep that is particularly offensive to me. It must be to Canadians when they find out about it. How could they believe anything when they find out there is a hidden tax that is not up front, that is a big revenue increase for the government which they hear nothing about?