Mr. Speaker, I do not know how to match that enlightened exchange. I left my cowboy boots off but I will do my best to get into this pay more, get less budget.
I am shocked and appalled at some of my hon. friends opposite who purport to know what wealth creation is all about. They know how to balance a budget and to meet a payroll. One of my friends from Mississauga South claims to be an accountant. My condolences to him.
These people should know how to read a set of financial documents. They should be able to understand what a surplus is, what a deficit is, what a tax is and what a spending increase is. Apparently they do not.
I have spent the last several years of my life studying public finance. I may not be any great expert, but I can say that the budget document presented to this place by the finance minister three weeks ago was not a budget. When it comes to presenting in a transparent fashion the public finances of the country the budget was a joke. No serious financial analyst in the country would give the budget a unqualified grade in terms of the transparency of its reporting of public spending and government taxing.
That has to be the starting point of this debate. Even though most laymen do not want to spend much time sifting through the details and the numbers to come to the bottom line, the reality is that we as parliamentarians must be able to read that document and understand what the heck is going on in terms of spending, taxing, debt borrowing and debt.
We cannot do that because the finance minister has become the laughing stock of public accounting. He included spending in this year's budget that will happen two years from now. In some areas of this year's budget he included spending that happened two years ago. He called spending increases like the child tax credit entitlement a tax cut. There are some tax increases which he calls spending cuts. As a starting point, it is virtually impossible to get to the bottom of what the budget is all about.
We as the opposition do not have to make an argument about the fact that the budget will actually increase the taxes of Canadians and will result in fewer government services than was the case in 1993. We do not have to make that case because people know it intuitively. They know it through their experience.
People know they are paying more taxes now than they ever have before in their lives because of the irresponsible fiscal policies of the government. They know that the standard of health care which they receive is at a lower level than they can ever remember.
We do not have to make a political argument to the 186,000 Canadians who stand today on waiting lines for essential health care services. We do not have to make a political argument to the 1.2 million low income Canadians paying taxes today who were not paying taxes when the government came to power in 1993. We do not have to make a political argument about the effect of the budget and its predecessor budgets on middle class single income earner families that are paying more and more and more year after year, even though they are working harder and trying to play by the rules.
We do not have to make that argument because they see it on their paycheques. They see it when they go to the emergency rooms. They see the deterioration of public service as a result of the government's misplaced spending priorities. They see that they are struggling harder and harder just to get by. It really is not a question of making a political argument.
I heard the member for Mississauga South just now and earlier during question period the hon. Secretary of State for International Financial Institutions suggest that among other things the budget would somehow take 600,000 low income Canadians off the tax rolls by allegedly raising the basic personal exemption.
Again, as I pointed out in question period, with the new Liberal math they forget to tell us the whole story. Part of the story is that since 1993, 1.2 million low income Canadians, those who can least afford it, many of whom are under the poverty line, single mothers and single parents struggling to get by or seniors on fixed incomes, have seen themselves pushed on to the tax rolls by the government's pernicious back door tax grab called bracket creep, by the pernicious tax on inflation.
If these people get a cost of living adjustment in their pension cheques or their minimum wage income from working in the labour force, if they get an automatic COLA, a cost of living adjustment, they end up paying taxes not because they are making more in real terms—they are making the same in real terms—but because the government decides to generate more revenue to finance its insatiable appetite for spending in a way that is not transparent, in a way that Canadians cannot see it and in a way that parliament cannot approve it.
In a study released last week by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, an organization with which I have some familiarity, it was reported that since 1986, since the then Progressive Conservative government brought in bracket creep and deindexed the tax system with respect to any inflation under 3%, the government has generated an annual revenue haul of $12 billion. That is just as a result of bracket creep. Next year Canadians will end up paying $1,300 more than they did before as a result of the consequence of bracket creep.
The government has added 1.2 million people on to the tax rolls. It has pushed millions of modest income Canadians into higher tax brackets. Then it claims, lo and behold, that by some absolutely token adjustment in the basic personal exemption in the budget it will be lifting 600,000 Canadians off the tax rolls.
Government members forget to tell us that they have not indexed the tax system to inflation. They have not eliminated the pernicious tax grab called bracket creep. It continues its nasty work of increasing taxes on Canadians so that 300,000 more Canadians will be paying taxes two years from now as a result of the effects of bracket creep.
Let us just do some simple math here. Liberals may have to get out their calculators to follow it. If we take the 1.2 million people the Liberals have added to the tax rolls since 1993 and subtract their figure of the number of people who will be taken off the tax rolls as a result of the increase in the personal exemption, we end up with a net of 600,000. If we add to that 600,000 new taxpayers the 300,000 who will end up back on the tax rolls as a result of bracket creep, what is the net number? Maybe some of my friends opposite could not follow the math, but 900,000 low income Canadians will be paying taxes two years from now. These are the Canadians the government claims to speak for in terms of those who need the most help from society.
I do not need to make the argument because grassroots Canadians make it every day. As revenue critic I get flooded with letters from people who tell me about it. For example, a constituent of mine, James Mitchell, e-mailed me recently to say:
I just read about the federal Liberal budget. I am married, have two small children. My wife has chosen not to work but to stay at home and raise them. I make $80,000, which is sort of a middle class income, and therefore the government treats me as a cash cow. As an employee I have no deductions. My wife has been forced to dip into RRSPs. I don't get a tax credit for her or for our children. We are living from paycheque to paycheque and have no savings. I am appalled that the Liberal view is to spend instead of reduce taxes. While I was born and raised in Calgary I feel that there is no hope in this country for a family like ours. I am now making plans regrettably to move to the United States where I will be able to save for my future and provide for the education of my two children and at the same time maintain and improve my standard of living.
That is a tragedy, a tragedy that was reiterated by Arthur Friedrich who wrote to the National Post yesterday. He is a steelworker who indicates that at one point he was a campaign worker for the minister of heritage. He says that he will be moving to the United States as well. He started work as a steelworker. He goes through his family's fiscal situation and winds up by saying that he is being bludgeoned by the tax system and deeply wishes that things were different. “I like Canada and really wanted to stay, but I no longer see any future for my children in this land”. This is the tragedy of the Liberal government's pay more, get less approach to fiscal mismanagement, and it must end.