Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to an issue that is undoubtedly of great importance to Canadians.
The one thing we were well aware of even before September 11 was that the economy was in a decline. That did not really surprise anyone. The timing may have surprised some, but one of the facts of life is that economies are cyclical and the frequency of the cycle, as the economy goes up and down, varies from time to time based on certain factors. However it is certainly not expected that we would have a continued period of growth in our economy. There will be times of reduced rates of growth and in some cases even a shrinking in the actual size of the economy.
One of the things the budget should have done was assure Canadians and investors from outside the country that things were in good financial shape and that they could have confidence in investing, in working in this country, in hiring people and basically making the economy continue to roll. However, the government failed to do that.
For many months before the last election we were calling for a budget. I was very upset when the government brought down its budget just days before the election was called. It was called a mini budget or a fiscal update. The only reason we got the kind of tax cuts we did get was because of what I would call electoral fear. The Liberals were afraid that because my party had shown a fiscally balanced approach to putting more money in the pockets of taxpayers, that they were going to lose big time. Therefore the finance minister brought in a financial update in October last year, just prior to the budget, in order to steal our thunder, which they did. Canadians for some reason trusted them. I suggested to the people in my riding that, based on the record of the Liberals when they promised to cut the GST, I would not vote for them based on the fact that they were promising to cut taxes. A few people in my riding did vote Liberal despite my advice but, thankfully, not too many of them.
I would like to focus on the fact that tax cuts taxes are very important. It is not sufficient to merely talk about them. Mr. Speaker, I do not know if you have ever had an occasion in your life where you have been deprived of water. The one time when I was very dehydrated it did not help a bit that my friends talked to me about water. What I needed was water, not talk about it.
The government does a lot of talking about tax reductions but it does not deliver them. If we look at the pay stub of the average Canadian, by the time the increases in the CPP are factored in, the actual deductions in their pay cheques are nowhere near what the government is claiming. Furthermore, and I emphasize this, all this talk about $100 billion in tax cuts is pure garbage. I know members over there like to use this big number. If they talked about a tax cut of $20 billion per year it would not cut it. In order to make the number bigger they multiplied it by five, just arbitrarily. I do not know why they did not pick six, eight or ten years. If they would have multiplied it by 10 they could have called it a $200 billion tax break. Instead they just picked the number five.
We are talking here about annual budgets. It is not the talk that will put money into the pockets of investors and wage earners, it is the actual delivery of those tax cuts.
One of the things that has been mentioned by a number of my colleagues, and I want to repeat because it is so important, is that the $100 billion is a hugely inflated number. It really is in actual fact.
Let us say, for example, that civil servants, some of whom will perhaps listen to this speech and say that the member for Elk Island is right on this point, wanted a raise. Let us say they are civil servants who are making $50,000 a year. If we told the civil servants that we would give them $250,000, the civil servants would say that is great and they would take it, and then in very small print we would say that it would be over the next five years.
Do members see how meaningless that is? If we are talking about annual budgets, we need to give an annual number. To put into an annual budget a projection of a total over five years is just as useless as when the Liberals put in a five year projection of total money that is to be put into health care or when they talk about the infusion of money into our military. It is totally less than what they say in terms of an annual budget, but of course they like to put out this big message.
How about the actual magnitude of that rate? What would happen if we were to say to those same civil servants that we were going to cut their salaries by $10,000? The civil servants would then say that they were going on strike. We would then compromise and give them $5,000 on top of that after the cut. Quite clearly there is a huge debate now. The Liberals would argue that the civil servants got a $5,000 raise because their salaries went from $40,000 to $45,000. As a matter of fact they had a $5,000 cut because their salaries were at $50,000.
I say the same thing about these tax cuts. The fact that the Liberals are using $100,000 is just inaccurate and they ought not to be able to get away with it. There were tax increases planned. With inflation and the lack of indexation, the tax rates were to go up. The Liberals said that they would re-introduce indexation, which we in our party were really pushing for. They did it, which means that now they will not be taxing so much. The fact of the matter is that we did not get a tax cut. To use actual numbers, if the tax bill was to be $500 and now it is to be $450, as they did not collect the $500, how can they call it a tax break? It is just not accurate.
I urge all Liberal members to vote against the budget because it does not communicate a true, positive, economic outlook for Canadians.