Mr. Speaker, first, I must say that the Liberal member who followed my speech delivered his speech in a very patronizing and arrogant manner. I know he referred to the basic personal amount which I referred to as a deduction. However, everybody knows we have casual discussions in coffee shops and along hallways. In fact one of the members of another party referred to it as the basic personal exemption or the basic personal amount. He was just playing word games and semantics and avoiding the issue. Not only was he avoiding the issue, he completely missed my point and referred to the Canadian Alliance plan for a single rate tax as a flat tax.
The member was sitting there when I gave my speech. I do not know whether he was daydreaming but I gave a clear example of a family of four. I explained that under the Canadian Alliance plan, a family of four earning $26,000 a year would pay an effective rate of zero per cent. If they earned $30,000 they would pay 2%. If they earned $100,000 they would pay 13%. That of course would continue to escalate up to 17% the higher their income went.
The member talked about progressivity versus regressivity and which is which. It is really interesting to note that the Liberals have a tax system in place that penalizes hard work and overtime. The more money a worker makes the more tax he or she pays, not on a graduated scale, as the Canadian Alliance is proposing, but on a percentage basis. That is regressive but the Liberals say that is progressive. Talk about word games.
Another thing the member said was that in order to do what we are proposing we would be shifting the tax burden from high income earners and putting it on middle income earners. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our plan would remove 1.4 million low income Canadians right off the tax rolls and would lower taxes for everybody.
The hon. member hypothesizes that it would not be possible to provide tax cuts to one income bracket group without burdening another, but the fact of the matter is that we will do this by simply cutting government waste and ending wasteful programs.
I could sit here all day and give examples of those programs: the regional economic development program, the job creation program, the grants and giveaways, the subsidization of crown corporations, and the list goes on. Perhaps the most prominent example is the fiasco and scandalous loss of a billion dollars by the human resources development minister.
Nonetheless, the point of my motion was to draw attention to the fact that the tax system as it exists is very convoluted and unfair. It is regressive. The Canadian Alliance plan would not only make the tax system progressive, it would make the tax system much more simple and much more fair.