Madam Speaker, what I am about to say I say with all the respect possible.
I think that those who are calling for a tax cut as the only element of major tax reform are being a bit narrow in their thinking, to be fair. I would like to use a harsher term than that, but I will just say narrow.
I believe that what we require in this country is tax reform. If we have decent tax reform that is fair and just and honest in approach we would find that most middle income Canadians would get a tax break. The taxes would be lowered for the average middle income earner and those at the higher end would perhaps be paying slightly more.
The reality is that we have to close some of these loopholes. I know the government has closed a few little ones, but if we close more of the large tax loopholes that exist, have a complete tax reform as we saw during the Carter Commission period, then we would have a better tax system and a fairer distribution to those who pay the taxes of Canada.
For decades and decades the system has become so out of whack, so convoluted, so biased, so unfair, so unjust that it has caused most Canadians to enter the underground economy whenever they have an opportunity. I know that what happens underground is illegal, by and large, but we understand why people do it. They do it because they know that their taxes are not being wisely invested. They know that a lot of people are getting tax breaks that they do not get and cannot get. Therefore, they get whatever tax breaks they can by operating in the underground economy.
The auditor general did us a service in his last report by suggesting that it is in the range of about $40 billion worth of transactions. I would guess that is very conservative. He is a conservative individual. His methodology is always conservative. I suspect it is much larger than $40 billion.
We could imagine that if that $40 billion was on top of the table, the amount of debt reduction and program expenditures that exist in our economy that could be financed just from that would be quite substantial.
I think it behoves us to go beyond our rhetoric and our discussion of simple tax cuts to talk more about a decent overhaul of our whole tax system.