Mr. Speaker, the member for Waterloo—Wellington says rubbish, but the Minister of Industry says this, and I will quote it directly for him and send him the article:
Essentially the brain drain is a job drain.
What studies are turning up is not that personal taxes are such a big deal, but that opportunity is leading people to the United States. If it is opportunity, then we have to look at the policies that are going to increase opportunity in Canada.
He goes on to state that corporate taxes are high on his list of wishes. That was the Minister of Industry. I hope he has a chance to sit down and talk to the Minister of Finance in the next couple of days because the Prime Minister already leaked that the budget would be announced on February 28. We hope there are going to be substantial reductions in taxation, not only for small businesses, but for hard working Canadians as well. We really hope that will be the case. We somehow doubt it, but we hope that will be the case.
I am going to anticipate part of what the answer of my colleague will be: that we have low taxes, the minister has reduced taxes, everything is going fine, just wait until February 28 and we will see what kind of great things the government is going to do. I would state that this is the government that has increased taxes year after year in a shell game approach of saying that it has reduced taxes when, in effect, it has increased them.
The government does not see that reducing personal income taxes and taxes for business will stimulate the economy. The Reform Party has a proposal which has been endorsed by WEFA, a highly regarded independent organization which the Minister of Finance uses himself for his own numbers that he runs for his budget projections, which says that this is a very good program in which we will be able to substantially reduce taxation to stimulate the economy.
It is my wish and my hope that the government will take such an approach to stimulate the economy and to substantially reduce taxes for businesses and for all Canadians. However, I do not think it is actually going to be delivered by the Liberals because of their actions of increasing taxes over and over again. We will wait to see.
I urge Canadians to wait to see what kind of new spending the government is going to announce when the budget is brought forward. I wait with bated breath to hear my colleague's, hopefully unscripted, response.