Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his remarks, but I have to address something that really is not immediately pertinent to the budget because he raised it. That is his view that abject poverty and people in refugee camps are the root causes of terrorism.
Would my hon. friend not recognize, for instance, that of the 19 hijackers who inflicted such horrific violence on our American friends on September 11, not one of them came from an impoverished background, not one of them had ever lived in or, as far as I know, set foot in a refugee camp and that in fact every single one of them came from reasonably privileged backgrounds in some of the wealthiest countries in the world, many of them having had the benefit of western education and having lived in the developed world for many years and having been financed by millionaires and billionaires?
I keep hearing this remark from Liberal MPs, which is really a reflection of what ethicists would refer to as environmental determinism, the notion that people's conduct is explained not by categories such as moral and evil but rather by the circumstances in which they were raised. Is this notion not completely vitiated by the facts before us about the backgrounds of those terrorists?
Second, he talked about the $100 billion tax cut. Does he not recognize that the ostensible $100 billion tax cut does not take into account the $26 billion in increases for CPP premiums over the same period? The government also claims as a tax cut the indexation of the tax threshold rates. In other words, the government has decided not to continue a tax increase and is counting that as a tax cut. Would he not join me in understanding that to be, shall we say, creative accounting in the government's scoring of its tax cut?