My friend across the way says “health care”. No, I am not talking about health care. I am talking about regional development grants which the government uses year after year despite the fact that the auditor general and many of the pro-business groups in the country find them completely distortionary and completely wasteful. They actually do much more harm than they do good.
Once we freeze the level of spending at $104.5 billion and reallocate money within that envelope toward higher priority programs like health care, we argue the government would be able to run up some large surpluses and use those to start the process of giving Canadians tax relief.
The government will argue it gave tax relief. If we look at the numbers and calculate the tax relief the government gave against the tax increases it brought in, we find that over the next three years Canadians will be $2.2 billion worse off. That is no solution. We need to have dramatic net tax relief.
That is why we are advocating $26 billion in tax relief, which would amount to $4,600 for the average single income earner with a family of four. This would be a tremendous amount of money left in the pockets of Canadian taxpayers. That money could be used to spend on things they want to spend it on. That would help our productivity. We need $17 billion to pay down the record high levels of debt in Canada today of $580 billion. We need to start paying that down.
Instead of getting into the argument about a pan-American currency, instead of trying to hide behind the very feeble arguments that we found in the KPMG report which came out the other day, we urge the government to face the issue head on.
It is time to give Canadians a break. They are the ones who balance the budget. They are the ones who produce the wealth in the country. Let us give them a break. Let us not continue to find ways to waste this money like the government always does, without fail. No matter what government it is, Liberal or Tory, it seems to find a way to waste it. Let us give that money back to taxpayers. They are the ones who balance the budget. They are the ones that deserve to benefit from the money going to the government.