Madam Speaker, there he goes, the Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Finance making sense again. I must say he is right when he says that there have been some good changes and some appropriate changes. I acknowledge that the elimination of the 3% surtax was a good step. Next we have to work on bracket creep, which I think he would agree was overlooked in the budget.
I think he would also agree that I said there was an increase in funding for health care which would eventually bring the federal portion up to the 1995 level. If we could clap with one hand, I suspect that is what we should do for that. It is a step in the right direction, but taking it up to 1995 levels is hardly something we should get too excited about. However he is correct on that point.
I challenge my hon. friend when he says there are no net federal taxes for people living on social assistance. The one tax change we have been advocating is a reduction in the GST. My friend would know that people on social assistance certainly pay the GST. They probably buy stuff with every dollar they collect. They buy services and they buy goods and therefore pay the GST. I realize they get some returns on that, but we can debate these issues in terms of the need for more refundable tax credits and so on.
Let me go on to a point my friend makes in terms of families making under $30,000 and not paying net federal taxes. My dad asked me to raise a question the next time I was speaking in the House of Commons, which I guess is today. My dad is 94 years old and he is on a pension, an extremely modest pension. He gets by, to be fair. He had to fill out his income tax forms. He could not see very well so he got my ex-brother-in-law to fill them out for them. He ended up paying a few hundred dollars in income tax.
He asked me to ask a question of the Minister of Finance who unfortunately is not here at the moment but will be here later. Why should a 94 year old man who worked hard all his life, paid taxes all his life and was never out of work, have to pay income tax on a very modest pension income? He was frustrated. I guess I am asking it rhetorically, but perhaps the parliamentary secretary could respond in place of the Minister of Finance in case my father is listening at the moment.